Russia and Ukraine weren't sovereign states when it happened. It's not relevant to the international principle I'm talking about. It's true that the majority o

Russia and Ukraine weren't sovereign states when it happened. It's not relevant to the international principle I'm talking about. It's true that the majority of Crimeans are Russian, but the majority of people in Sudetenland were Germans, too. The whole point of territorial integrity is that state boundaries are frozen to prevent territorial wars, even if they don't happen to coincide exactly with ethnic boundaries (they never do). If there's no threat of territorial land-grabs, there's no motivation for the sovereign power to do ethnic cleansing. In Crimea, for example, Russians were and remained the majority since Ukraine declared independence in 1991. Ukraine never tried to settle a huge mass of Ukrainians in Crimea, or induce Crimean Russians to move out. In the bright new world we've now arrived at, states will be very motivated to "smooth out" their populations by ethnicity, so that neighboring powers don't invade and annex lands with "their people". The 19th and 20th centuries were rife with such ethnic cleansings and mass resettlements; ever since the fallout of WWII we had very few. Not anymore.