that's true, but i'm really only talking about bite-sized pieces like crimea, kharkov, donetsk, heck maybe all the way to dnepropetrovsk and odessa - all predominantly russian-speaking...

there's still a fairly significant ukrainian/russian divide in ukraine. if russia should view crimea like it views abkhazia or south ossetia, and a significant portion of the crimea population feels about russia the way south ossetians feels about russia, then we could see similar situations with ukraine as well.

remember their favored candidates already lost the orange revolution. russia withheld gas from ukraine back in winter 2006 - it's already somewhat pissy - not hot war level, but if russia is a dick to georgia, no reason to think they couldn't be to ukraine...

and drop "the"...