Explainer: What Was the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav?
After Ukraine voted for independence in 1991, Gennady Burbulis, then deputy prime minister and a close adviser to Boris Yeltsin, remarked that it was inconceivable, for our brains, for our minds, that [Ukraines independence] would be an irrevocable fact. But the Russian government at the time resisted calls from senior military officials and politicians like