Well, howdy there internet people, let's bow again. So today we are going to talk about how Ukraine

is more like West Virginia than Texas. That'll make sense later.

There is a very common misconception about the dynamics over there.

And we're going to clear it up because I saw this misconception at play and after looking to see how widespread it was I also realized it was kind of the fault of people like me.

So we're going to clear it up today.

I saw somebody trying to explain the situation over there by saying that it was like Texas,

broke away from the United States, and then got armed by China. These analogies are never perfect but that one has a

fundamental flaw. Okay, the Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, okay. It often got described as Russia because of people like me.

People who were providing political commentary or foreign policy takes, they often said the Russians,

rather than the Soviets.

And there's a reason for that, we'll get to that. But understand the Soviet Union

was not Russia. The Soviet Union wass, just like the name says.

You have to look at it more like the Soviet Union was the federal government and the republics were the states even though they were, and this is important, national level administrative units.

The Ukrainian Republic under the Soviet Union existed for a really long time.

Ukraine is, I don't know, a hundred years old, in just going back to the beginning of the

Soviet Union to when that process started. It didn't break away from Russia. It had been separate

separate. So why did people like me conflate Soviet and Russian? Because

the Soviet capital was in Moscow, which is in Russia.

It's in that Soviet republic.

So most of the people who worked for

the Soviet government, meaning the the overall

government, particularly those who would be engaged in discussing stuff with

...