Page 10 - The Inprovoked War: Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

The Russian Empire ended in 1917 with the abdication of the
last of the Russian czars and was replaced by a Communist gov-
ernment. In 1922, Ukraine was one of four independent Socialist
republics that formed the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union. After Russia,
Ukraine was the second-largest nation in the Soviet sphere.
The totalitarian leaders of the Soviet Union sought to spread
the Communist ideology across eastern Europe and in other
parts of the world. After World War II, it would confront the United
States and its democratic allies in a decades-long political and
military stalemate.

East Versus West
The years after the war witnessed two great world powers—the
United States and the Soviet Union—heading alliances of nations in
a global political struggle known as the Cold War. Led by the United
States, the Western European powers were committed to limiting
the Soviet Union’s spread of communism in Eastern Europe.

This map shows the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics—also called the Soviet
Union, or USSR, for short—as it looked early
in 1991, only months before it collapsed,
leaving Ukraine an independent nation.