Instead, the independent, Russia friendly Donbas republics are a model for what may be the division of Ukraine into several different states, among which the westernmost based in Lviv will be the homeland of the dyed-in-the-wool radical nationalists. It will be land-locked and sufficiently far from Russian borders not to pose a greater threat to Russia when it joins NATO and the EU than do Slovakia or Poland. In the middle of what is today still Ukraine the Russians may oversee the formation of a country with its capital in Kiev and with genuinely mixed ethnic Russian and ethnic Ukrainian populations that is tolerant of minorities and freed of all radical nationalists and neo-Nazis. I am not saying that this endgame solution is already set, but it does exist as a possible denouement.
