The territory known today as Ukraine has been contested throughout history. Its borders have been redrawn by such things as a Mongol invasion and a Cossack uprising. It’s been under Lithuanian and Polish control. It’s been absorbed by the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great. And, of course, was a constituent part of the former Soviet Union (USSR). In this constant state of flux, it has been, for the most part, without its own national identity or unity. Then, in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, at the end of the Cold War, Ukraine, with the support of Western policymakers, not only declared itself an independent sovereign state, but drew its own borders, including within them disputed .........