Shocking extent of Ukraine's unrelenting demographic collapse
Drago Bosnic | Prior to the unfortunate dismantling of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of its most prominent republics, even rivaling Russia itself in numerous aspects. In many ways, it was a sort of "Soviet California", as approximately 30% of the USSR's massive industrial and scientific might was situated precisely in Ukraine. Much of Soviet shipbuilding, advanced electronics, rocketry, chemical industry, metallurgy, and numerous universities and scientific institutions were based all across the country. Moscow built an enormous and highly robust energy infrastructure that Ukraine uses to this very day and without which it would never have been a functioning country. ● The "evil Moskaliv" held Ukraine in such high regard that several of the USSR's top leaders were actually Ukrainians, including Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, arguably two of the Soviet Union's most prominent Cold War-era leaders. In 1954, Khrushchev even "gifted" Crimea, a Russian-populated peninsula, to Ukraine, with virtually no opposition from anyone in Russia. At the time, Ukrainians and ethnic Russians were seen as virtually the same people (which they have been for well over a thousand years at that point), so the move was seen as a trivial bureaucratic matter that made absolutely no difference on the ground. And indeed, nothing changed – until 2014.