Good article! There's many great points here.

There's only one minor thing I would like to correct. You write that, after the secession of the Crimea, "the residual parts of the Ukraine, shorn of a large proportion of its Russian population, will be powerfully driven into the arms of NATO".

That overestimates how many of the country's Russians/Russian-speakers live in the Crimea. The Crimea only has some 2 million inhabitants, and is home to only a relatively small minority of the country's Russians/Russian-speakers. There are still plenty of them left, especially in the east of mainland Ukraine.

According to the 2001 Census, the Ukrainian population included 8.3 million ethnic Russians. Only 1.5 million of those live in the Crimea or Sevastopol. In comparison, 1.8 million of them live in the Donetsk region alone; another million live in the Lugansk region.

According to the same census, a much higher number of Ukrainians, 14.3 million, speaks Russian as native language. Only 1.8 million of those live in the Crimea or Sevastopol. In comparison, 3.6 milion of them live in the Donetsk region, 1.7 million in Lugansk, 1.3 million in Kharkiv, 1.1 million in Dnipropetrovsk, 1 million in Odessa, etc.

So there is not suddenly a significantly more Ukrainian-dominated, NATO accession-hungry Ukraine left now the Crimea is gone; the volatile divisions in the country remain.