After centuries of bloody fighting for its independence, Ukraine’s liberation had originally arrived in 1991, almost by accident. With the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, a stunned Ukrainian parliament voted to become a sovereign nation, with only the far eastern region of Donetsk, the most ethnically Russian slice of the country, opposing the decision. But for the decades that followed, Moscow maintained a powerful influence over Ukraine, and the two countries transitioned in tandem from communism to kleptocracy. Ukraine’s prime minister and then president for its first fourteen years of independence,
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