Ukraine had the most technologically advanced rocket industry in late USSR and a pretty good aviation industry. Alumni of Ukrainian aerospace schools are showing up in Europe and Americas. We all witnessing the work of current technological pace in Ukrainian defence capabilities.
If California were to secede I guess by that logic you could claim the future independent Californistan had always had advanced rocket industry. After all, look at all the Lockheed Martin and NASA facilities. This statement would of course completely ignore who funded this work, when, and why.
Why ignored? Just like in USSR Ukraine was generating a lot of produce - and share in the USSR economy - the California also generates a lot of money it spends on rockets. So - I don't see ignoring.
But that's the point. You are trying to deny that Ukraine's aerospace industry was a component of the larger USSR constellation of design bureaus. The Ukrainian bureaus were important, yes. But not the most important. By and large they were the B team. Still highly skilled, mind you.
In the 1990s and 2000s the funding dried up and they mostly fell apart. They were sold to China for parts.
Why do you think so? Moscow was a good magnet for educated and active people, and Leningrad too, but Kiev was next, and there were other big cities in Ukraine with institutes and factories which were modern at the time as well. In USSR there were a distribution of expertise, and in some areas Ukrainian organizations were best in USSR. Ukraine was also quite big in terms of territory and population. So why they wouldn't have their proportional share in at least the mentioned areas?
> They were sold to China for parts.
Mostly, but not quite. A lot of people went to the West - we still see them appearing in aerospace companies. A lot of expertise in theoretical sciences also went global, as it's easier. Mriya was supported until 2022 - and rocket industry kept making Zenith and then Antares well into 2010-th. So clearly working industry remained - even though it have suffered quite a few years of problems.
These were not "colonial possessions". For example, Britain had colonies.
And in the USSR, national republics were financed at the expense of the core of the country, where Russians lived. You can look up (which you certainly won't do) data on the standard of living and level of freedom in different republics of the USSR. For example, in Georgia, small business was allowed, in the RSFSR they put people in jail for it, but in Georgia, for example, you could grow tangerines, transport them on subsidized planes to the north, to all sorts of Norilsk, sell them, and receive in two weeks approximately the annual salary of a Soviet engineer who developed those very missiles, planes, etc. Of course, when the lights went out in the Union in 1991, all this Caucasian prosperity reached a civil war within a year.
By the way, I think that something similar exists in the modern USA, but the locals are blind, just like the Soviet citizens of Russian ethnicity were blind (you may not be aware, but not every successful person of smoked appearance from Russia is Russian), and do not see what is happening. When your Red-Haired Atlas completes his "perestroika and acceleration" in the USA, there will also be changes there, and perhaps people will also begin to see what they did not notice before. Well, that is, if there will be someone to do so.
> These were not "colonial possessions". For example, Britain had colonies.
Would you define Ireland as a colony? It preceded all other British colonies and they used very similar methods to those that the USSR did in its “colonies”, confiscation of land, population replacement, (indirect or direct ) genocide etc. etc.
> which you certainly won't do
If you actually did that would you mind sharing that data?
Of course there is very little accurate data available (due to obvious reasons) and we have to use proxy indicators but still.. can you actually provide any meaningful statistics besides anecdotal claims about a single Soviet state?
> you may not be aware
A lot of projection going on here..
Also I really can’t understand at all what are you trying to say in your last paragraph.
Yeah. Initially funded by DARPA, grown by near-zero interest rates. I doubt it would be anything close to what it is today without being connected to the rest of the US economy and its global dominance.
