🇪🇺🇺🇦 European government officials are working on a new, comprehensive package to increase defense spending and support Kyiv, - Berliner Zeitung
🇩🇪 Baerbock hinted that it could be ~€700 billion: “We will launch a large package that has never been seen on this scale before.”
Also Russian in its legitimate borders makes up almost half of the European continent. There is multiple different “geographic midpoints of Europe” based on calculation methods. Most of them are in the Baltic states, Belarus or Ukraine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_midpoint_of_Europe
When we are past this whole mess we need to stop thinking of the EU as “Europe” and the other half of the European continent as “not Europe”.
Also ethnically speaking Slavs are the largest ethnic group in Europe with about 300 Million people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe
Not sure if land mass is exactly prevalent in this, as most of Russia is just colonized portions of Asia.
It takes two to tango… A lot of the modern ideas separating Russia from Europe was done as a way to validate Russian imperialism. This idea is being continued by people like Putin for the same reasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasianism
Yeah… But thinking of Slavs as a monoculture is really dated, and kinda goes against the way we classify ethnicities all together. East, West and Southern Slavs are separated by distinct cultural groups, religions, languages, and about 1500 years of history.
Well, the Area of the Russian Federation in Europe is 39% of the European landmass. This has nothing to do with the Asian part of Russia. The Russian Federation is about 1.7-1.8x the landmass of the European continent.
And with a hundred million Russians living in the European part, that makes the largest ethnical group, considering the differences between the slavic ethnicities. You are right about there being more than just a slavic “monoculture”. Still until the fall of the Soviet Union, public perception in the Western European side mostly lumped them together as “The Russians”. And Ukraine and Belarus were part of that lump, well past that. Seeing Ukraine as part of “Europe” in that Western European sense only became more commonplace over the past decade. And of course there have been incidents in Western European countries like Germany, where Ukrainian refugees were assaulted in public, because their attackers thought them to be Russians…
Either way it shows that Ethnical, Cultural and Historical divides are a poor and often arbitrary metric to justify modern Nations borders, both in joining or separating areas.
Still… I don’t really know how mostly empty tundra is really prevalent to the discussion.
This is true, and I do wish there wasn’t an artificial constructed delineation between Russia and the rest of Europe. However, I don’t really know how western Europe is really meant to overcome this considering Russian cultural ideology is still being haunted by the specter of the Russian empire.
As someone who’s ethnically East asian, its always funny when I hear Russians consider themselves “The East”, when the only historical ties they have to the actual East is European styled imperialism.
100% agree.
We should think as United States of Europe / Not United States of Europe… Being between to power hungry “president” should push EU to move toward federalism but only after Ukraine and Moldova joined (and I’m sorry for Switzerland that will be stucked in the middle of one country: your fault for that 😛 )
Don’t worry for us, we will be happy to see a united Europe, that might even convince the old swiss-german to vote “ja” this time. We’ll stay open for you guys, specially if you buy our chocolate, watches and some weapons parts.
In my vision for our future (call it science fiction), Europe as a continent is a federal block, including Russia. One big colour on the map, from Atlantic to Pacific (a friendly and peaceful colour, one that prefer having orgies and eat good food but that will wreck you if you annoy it).
I am also for more European integration. There needs to be a vision though that Russia is part of Europe and when we are past Putin, we need to be able to integrate Russia, if they want to, rather than going for the next confrontation.
there are 2 problems with that:
Trust between russia and all others european countries are really heavily damaged. The east part of the EU will needs decades before they can decide not to veto anything positive to russia. Poland is the new gravity center of EU and still has yet to forget WW2 invasion and the split of it’s country.