The Berlin Wall has been dismantled. East and West Germany are united. Yugoslavia is now the independent republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Czechoslovakia is now the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The communist dictator of Romania was overthrown and executed along with his wife. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved.

Yet, after listening to what is being said about Ukraine, it seems as though some Democratic and Republican politicians, pundits, and think tanks want to return to the dark days before any of these things took place.

The country of Ukraine was dominated by foreign powers for hundreds of years. After World War I, the eastern part of Ukraine was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. All of Ukraine was united in 1939, only to remain under the control of the Soviet Union after World War II behind the "Iron Curtain." In 1954, the Soviet Union transferred Crimea to Ukraine, which regained its independence in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Crimea is a peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea to the south of Ukraine. It was here at Yalta that a conference was held during World War II between President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin of the USSR. After being controlled by the Mongols and the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, Crimea was conquered by Russia in 1783 under Catherine the Great. The Crimean War (1853–1856) was fought between Russia and an alliance consisting of Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire.