“When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” African proverb.
You don't think that the North was justified to force the South back into the union,
so why are you arguing that Russia is justified to force Ukraine back into the union?
The American Civil War was fundamentally a conflict over whether the Southern states could leave the United States and form their own country. The Union fought to preserve the United States as a single state, while the Confederacy fought for independence. The Southern states did attempt to find a political solution before the war: there were several proposed compromises, most notably the Crittenden Compromise of December 1860, which sought to resolve the dispute over slavery and prevent secession. These efforts failed, and Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Slavery was central to the secession crisis, so the Civil War was not simply a war about “keeping everyone under one flag.” The key point is that the Confederate states were already legally part
of the United States and were attempting to secede from an existing political union.
Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union on August 24, 1991, and its independence was confirmed by referendum on December 1, 1991. Russia recognized Ukraine as a sovereign and independent state, and the two countries subsequently entered agreements explicitly recognizing each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the 1997 Russia–Ukraine Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership. This creates an important distinction from the American Civil War: Ukraine was not a state attempting to secede from a country that Russia still legally regarded as its own; Russia had formally recognized Ukraine as an independent country. Therefore, although both conflicts can broadly be described as involving a powerful state fighting over territorial unity, their legal, political, and historical circumstances are fundamentally different.


