Direct link to the maps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_parliamentary_election,_2007

First of all, Belgium already has a federal structure that divides into Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels. There is no equivalent for Ukraine, except in the case of Crimea, which is a special case we will deal with below.

Secondly, there is a strong national feeling in Belgium, where people assert their regional identities – people say they are Flemish or Walloon. This is more developed for the Flemish, but still exists. There is no comparable feeling in Ukraine. Even in the east, the majority of people say that they are Ukrainian. They may speak Russian day to day, but their national orientation is Ukrainian, and they increasingly send their kids to Ukrainian-language schools. There are more people who call themselves Russians in the south-east, but they don’t make up a majority anywhere but Crimea.

The national identification is important, but so are the trendlines. Everywhere in the country, knowledge and competence in Ukrainian is increasing, and since the majority identify as Ukrainian – they tend not to have a problem with it. The cities tend to be more Russophone than the surrounding area, but as people move to the city and the urban dwellers send their kids to Ukrainian schools this is already changing, most notably in Kiev.

Crimea is an autonomous area of Ukraine attached there by Khruschev. It’s majority Russian and overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. The authorities there pursue a distinct policy of Russification in education and civic life. The reason it is majority Russian is because the original inhabitants (Crimean Tatars) were completely ethnically cleansed by Stalin and sent to Central Asia. As more and more of them return and since they have a significantly higher birth rate than the Ukrainians and especially the Russians, they make up a greater and greater percentage of the population – now 13%. Half of them still haven’t come back. Even with 200,000 of them returning after the fall of the Soviet Union, Crimea is still cratering demographically, losing 16% of its population since 1989. If we just wait ten years and the Russian fleet leaves, the area won’t be majority Russian anymore and will likely integrate much more greatly with the rest of Ukraine. This problem will solve itself.

So your equivalence with Belgium is wrong and harmful.

You seem to think splits of this nature are cost-free. No one outside of Belgium is really calling for a breakup of Belgium. It’s an internal political issue. That is not the case in Ukraine. There is no mass movement in Ukraine for splitting the country in the way you suggest. You are trying to impose a solution that no one in the country desires. The only people who would be in favor of this seem to be people in the Russian Federation who would wish to annex this part of Ukraine. So it is an essentially hostile act of annexation by a neighboring power. These actions are never cost-free.

Here’s a direct problem with your divide of the country. Kherson is the oblast directly north of Crimea. You would put it in the secessionist Russophone country. It’s 82% Ukrainian by nationality, and only 25% Russophone. Only 17% of students are in Russian-language schools. Why should 25% of the population get to decide what country it is in?

If internal political forces want to divide a country, that’s one thing. But siding with hostile external powers and claiming that there is no harm to splitting a country when the desire and push for it is external to the country itself is harmful.

But still. As you know, I’m not much of a fan of the nation state, but do believe in subsidiarity. The Ukrainian nation may well end up more of a diaspora of the country splits in two, but is that such a bad thing if, by doing so, the two parts can break out of their current political deadlock and pursue their rather different aspirations? Split Ukraine. Split Belgium. Split the UK. Split the US. Why not? Why is territorial integrity so important when historical territories (like those above) are so easily forgotten?

Even briefly surveying the .ua internet forums or going to “Russian-speaking” regions in Ukraine, one will discover that Russian speakers can be some of the most Ukrainian Ukrainians as it gets. This is not surprising, because often times these are ethnically Ukrainian, who use Russian in the day-to-day life, but are comfortable in communicating in Ukrainian if necessary.

The assertion that only former Kievan Rus/Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth areas were always “Ukrainian” and that the southeast part of Ukraine was never such is mistaken. I have no time to devote to debunking this at the moment, but a reading of history of the region and its population shifts will show the weakness of this claim.

Props, however, for bringing this issue for a discussion.

- in Ukraine, a majority in the north-west backed Yushchenko, and a majority in the south-east backed Yanukovich. But there was a significant minority backing the other side in each case. Also, most Ukrainians identify as ‘Ukrainian’ rather than ‘Russian’, even in the East (exception: Crimea, which was tacked on by Krushchev), though among Russophones I suspect there is a spectrum of identities in between. If you divided up England into large regions in a suitable way, I’m sure you’d be able to come up with a similar map for the 2005 election where the North is coloured red and the South blue. But would this mean Labour is the Northern party and the Tories the Southern party?

- in Belgium, there are *no* nationwide parties of any significance, even strongly Belgicist parties. (I think the largest is the Workers’ Party of Belgium, a communist party which won 0.84% of the vote in the last elections.) If you live in Wallonia, you can *only* vote for Francophone parties, and in Flanders you can *only* vote for Dutch-speaking parties. Individual voters no longer have any choice in this, because collectively their political landscapes have separated so completely. Belgium at the moment really is like two countries, which just happen to overlap over a small proportion of the total territory, namely Brussels and its environs, and so can’t formally separate because they’d lose their claim to some of the overlap.