Ukraine aside... I believe it is a teaching moment to those in America who say they value multiculturalism as good in itself. NOT NECESSARILY !!
Note what is happening in Ukraine where one part of the “country” speaks Russian and consider themselves loyal to mother Russia instead of Ukraine.
LANGUAGE and VALUES are what unites a country. The moment you start splitting a country up into multiple groups who value their own language and values above the founding principles of this country, you have a formula for balkanization. It happened in the former Yugoslavia, is happening in Belgium and we are seeing it up close now in Ukraine ( with other places like Lithuania and Latvia, God forbid, soon to follow ).
That is why the Chinese Emperors long ago understood that you need a COMMON LANGUAGE and WRITING SYSTEM to unite the disparate ethnic groups of that one big land mass into ONE country.
That is why I am extremely troubled when I see Hispanics in Los Angeles watching a soccer game CHEERING for their “Home Team” Mexico and booing the US team. Some people say this is not a big deal.... I call it a portent of things to come.
Funny thing... The television set and the internet have totally killed the Southern accent in Texas and they will do the same thing to most of the world's languages in the next 20 years. The world needs fewer than 12 languages; figure:
Two Germanic languages, English and German.
Two Romance languages, French and Spanish.
One Slavic language, Russian.
Hebrew and Arabic.
One subcontinent language, Hindi.
One Chinese language, Mandarin.
Japanese and Korean.
That's it. I assume Ukrainians will all speak Russian (they pretty much all do anyhow), and Baltic people will speak English or German. English will remain an international language of commerce IF we can come up with a decent alphabet and system of spelling for it.
The world is shrinking at an accelerating rate.