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Comment by adwf | Hacker News Reader

I think because the large majority of the wealth is in the south-eastern Russian-speaking section. From the article, it sounds like that is where all the coal and iron mines are. Not to mention the most productive farmland.

The Russian-speaking section also encompasses the major ports of Odessa and Sevastopol.

So a split down language lines would leave the Ukrainian segment landlocked and with a vastly weakened economy.

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That was true about ten years ago and before. Now East has a very inefficient, power-hungry, noncompetitive economy that starts to eat more money for social subsidies than it produces (Yanukovych himself decided recently to make the "pride" of Donetsk regions, state-owned coal mines private because of their unprofitableness). Crimea has been always unprofitable even with its lucrative tourism industry. East views its post-soviet industry as asset whereas West often sees its as liability and drag to the burning need of industry modernization.

>starts to eat more money for social subsidies than it produces

>Crimea has been always unprofitable even with its lucrative tourism industry

Not a marker of anything, there are only a few oblasts in Ukraine that are profitable (taxes - government spending), until very recently none of them were in the Western part of the country. This may be not the best way to judge contribution of different parts of the country into the economy. If you give a look at exports structure (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Ukraine_E...), you can clearly see that it is dominated by products of exclusively Eastern industries.

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