Between the World Wars, portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland,Romania, andCzechoslovakia. Development here lagged behind Russian-ruled Ukraine and was one of the poorest regions in Europe. That July, the U.S., E.U., Canada, and other allies imposed sanctions on Russia. Then, the opposition and government reached a truce, and Yanukovych fled, reappearing a few days later in Russia. Two major candidates emerged in the 2004 presidential election. The period immediately following the creation of the Commonwealth saw a huge revitalisation in colonisation efforts. Articles with the HISTORY.com Editors byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan and Matt Mullen. There were diplomatic attempts to reach a cease-fire, but those never held. During the Great Northern War, Hetman Ivan Mazepa allied with Charles XII of Sweden in 1708. After the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Ukrainian SSR's territory expanded westward. In 2004, seven Eastern European countries joined the alliance, and in 2008, President George W. Bush pushed NATO to issue a declaration that Ukraine and The partially-recognised Ukrainian People's Republic emerged from its own civil war of 19171921. [113], Many historians in recent years have sought alternatives to national histories, and Ukrainian history invited approaches that looked beyond a national paradigm. Ukraine will become like Poland, which you can take over, but never hold. When did Ukraine become independent from Russia? Lenoe:One of the stories youll hear is that when the German troops came, Ukrainian peasants were waving swastika flags, giving them bread and flowers. In an analysis for the publicationsMade by History section, Matthew Lenoe explains the dangers of mistakenly blaming Putins invasion onthe Third Romeconcept. A successor state to the Kievan Rus' on part of the territory of today's Ukraine was the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. 07:05:01 Ukraine did not experience the restorationist paradigm typical of some other post-Soviet nations, for example the three Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, although the multifaceted history of independence, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Soviet-era repressions, mass famine, and World War II collaboration were used to provide a different constitutive frame for developing Ukrainian nationhood. Putin also writes that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians share a common heritagethe heritage of a realm known as Kievan Rus (8621242), which was a loose medieval political federation located in modern-day Belarus, Ukraine, and part of Russia. Religious boundaries were equally fuzzy between the Orthodox Christian Church and the Catholic Christian Church, with Islam thrown in.