Ukraine couldn't possibly be allowed to join both - just look at the customs nightmare going on with Northern Ireland as the UK actively tries to be in two economic customs regimes at the same time.

There are many countries caught between two powers that manage ok (see Taiwan and South Korea as examples) -- Northern Ireland is different because it's not its own country and was brought along with the rest of the UK out of the EU with zero preparation despite one of its main trading partners being Ireland, which still is in the EU.

Russia didn't want its biggest trading partner integrating with the EU, which it opposes because it's capitalists are "removed atheists" or whatever.

Russia says reactionary things about western Europe, but you are just kind of asserting that it refused to let Ukraine be involved with trade relations.

It's not like Russia is China, Cuba, or Vietnam in being controlled by Communist Parties and having some level of socialist policy. Western Capitalists expected to subordinate all the baby Russian capitalists of the 90s by now.

This is true, but it seems to me that the west pushed too hard on this from a strategic standpoint by refusing to let Russia join NATO back when it tried. I'm glad that they made this mistake -- it's better for multipolarity -- but for them it was surely a mistake.

China is playing the game quite well, so I don't believe it was because they weren't allowed to win.

China's situation can hardly be compared, or else must be compared from a much earlier state. While there are criticisms to be made of Deng's policies, he did not allow for the wholesale gutting of domestic industries the way that most of Eastern Europe did. He allowed foreign capitalists to take ownership but kept the manufacturing power where it was, allowing it to be used for development of the country rather than selling it off. It should be unsurprising that traitors like Yeltsin had no interest in preserving long-term national sovereignty in this way.

Perhaps China, too, will one day be hijacked by compradores and turned back into a backwater like the former USSR states and Yugoslavia were, but that's not how things are now.