New borders in Europe if Ukraine falls?

Europe’s borders have been miraculously stable since World War II. With the threat of nuclear war and the complete eradication of our civilization, the appetite for war and conquest has not been very high. We have seen glimpses of a different order in the Yugoslavian conflict, and more recently in Ukraine. Where parts of Donbass and the Crimean peninsula have joined the Russian community and participated in a long and bloody war against the Kiev regime that has tried to keep the country together.

You can think what you like about secession, i.e. withdrawal from a state formation, and I have written about it before. But this is the reality today, parts of Ukraine will become part of Russia, and the longer the war goes on, the more likely it is that more territory will be captured, as the Russian special operations force turns into an occupying army.

Now, however, there is a certain saturation of the Russian bear as well; they are unlikely to occupy western Ukraine, where there are few Russian speakers, and hostility towards Russia is compact. On the other hand, incorporating large parts of the southeast into Russia is not an impossible scenario.

However, these conquests could destabilize the European geopolitical order. We can already see that the Poles are yearning for their old lost territories in the east… Continue reading.