In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovych’s flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of … - Anna Reid

The 'real' Ukraine, the Ukraine that has outlived armies and ideologies, lies in the countryside. Half an hour's drive out of the city one enters a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights. The people here live off their own pigs and cows, fruit-trees and hives; they drink themselves to death on home-brewed vodka, roll cigarettes out of old newspapers, and curse 'American spaceships' for dropping Colorado beetles on the potato-plants.

The two hinge moments of Ukraine’s post–Cold War history were two highly effective and genuinely inspirational displays of people power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into the Ukrainian presidency, an effort that seems to have included having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived the attack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantly falsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets in protest and stayed there until the electoral commission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution, were a plot orchestrated by the West.

For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis..No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too.