That is a very insightful piece HopefulGoat.
The winner takes all attitude within Ukraine has resulted in economic ruin and the intense inter-ethnic hostility that now runs rampant. The idea of federation would far better reflect reality in Ukraine than a unitary state would.
I see echoes of the situation in that of Ireland and in my own Irish family's history in the twentieth century - one (Irish Catholic) grandfather an officer in the Indian army, invalided out in 1916 after action in Mesopotamia, returned to Ireland and joined wholeheartedly with Sinn Fein, setting up alternative courts in the south east, hiding Republican fugitives from the Free State forces during the Civil War, contributing financially to widows and dependents of executed Republicans after the end of that conflict; his brother an editor of An Phoblacht, later a government minister under DeValera from 1933 to 1948, my father and one of his brothers officers in the British armed forces while Ireland was ostentatiously neutral during WW2 and their uncle was at the time a government minister.
On the other hand, another grandfather in the IRA throughout the War of Independence and the Civil War, captured by Free State forces and condemned to death, escaped, hid out for a while, settled down to farm. Years later, one of dad's younger brothers married a daughter of the man who signed mum's father's death warrant, and eventually my mother was an aunt to nieces and nephews whose grandfather would have been responsible for the death of her father if all had gone according to plan. My farming grandfather's brother emigrated to Liverpool and joined the British submarine service where he lasted the entire war. His children were sent to my grandfather's farm in preference to evacuation to the British countryside.
Many, many years later, after decades of civil strife and then outright warfare in Northern Ireland (a state brought into existence in 1922 as a result of local intransigence and lack of political backbone on the part of Britain), the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, and a huge and a very costly impact on political life and political culture in the Republic, leaders of the Republic and Britain spoke of the 'totality of relationships' between the two islands. In other words, time to look to the future together, and bury the hatchet. Back in 1922 a federal solution might have created a viable, stable and prosperous all-island state, whose political culture might have had the chance to develop beyond the issues of independence and sectarianism that dominated south and north respectively for 70 years.
Just musing here on how all-or-nothing has serious limitations as a political goal.