🇪🇺🇺🇦 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.”
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.