The Ukrainian president Yanukovich tried initially to strengthen the links between Ukraine and the West and suggested that Ukraine should join NATO and enter into an association agreement with the European Union as a first step towards EU membership.

I felt that I was scratching the surface, but at least I have some awareness of that surface now for further reading around the subjects. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe. As I see it, A good history of Ukraine aknowledges the following 3 things that Ukraine is, 3 things that Ukraine is not and 3 things as not important. It is worth remembering that this quote from Anna Reid is from the middle of 1990s long before any Azov regiments. If you want to more about the Maidan movement and their background, I recommend you Andrey Kurkov’s Ukraine Diaries – Dispatches from Kiev.Though the protests grew substantially over the next few days …, what turned them into a mass movement was the government’s clumsy use of violence. All used books might have various degrees of writing, highliting and wear and tear and possibly be an ex-library with the usual stickers and stamps.

And then - in each city - she describes the breath of the Ukrainian people and the depth of their soul. I find myself reviewing the developing situation in Ukraine (after one month) in general rather than this book particularly. Anna Reid’s book and other books like hers show how much there is to know about the history of Ukraine and I hope this book will find also now, so many years after it was initially published, new readers. It’s true that the book is pro-Ukrainian, but for me that is makes these parts of the book harder to accept. Many older Ukrainians greeted Poland’s demise with relief, while comedians who had recently specialized in Polish jokes felt verklempt.

More recent history features Victor Yanukovich, favoured by Russia; Viktor Yushchenko, favoured by the West with the photogenic Yuliya Tymoshenko commanding significant international attention. The earliest sections make for sometimes eerie and often queasily ironic reading in light of recent events. The people in Kyiv and then in Ukraine generally were deeply disappointed and started to use social media, in particular Facebook to encourage each other to join demonstrations on the Maidan in Kyiv.

Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. The first part was published in 1997, where she seems disparaging and condescending towards Ukrainians. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Balts all knew they were rejoining Europe; Ukrainians were not sure where they belonged or even where they wanted to belong.She adds that the Russian parliament had twice condemned the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine and passed in 1993 a resolution declaring Sevastopol as Russian territory. This book takes the reader on a fascinating and often violent odyssey, spanning more than 1,000 years of conflict and culture. Reid captures this time and its people so well – the peasant women in the covered market, the old men playing chess in I ndependent S quare. Nevertheless, I had to think of this quote recently and I was wondering whether this did not also happen for many in the West with Ukraine, because they did not pay attention to the country before the full scale invasion and that for them, or maybe I should say for us, the country was in a sense “fallen out of history”.