Word: sovietized
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...baton and traveled to Ukraine, another country deeply worried about Moscow's expansionist ambitions. Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, inhabited mostly by ethnic Russians and home to the Russian Black Sea fleet, is one of several areas with allure for Russian irredentists. (It was only in 1954 that Ukrainian-born Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shifted administrative control over the Crimea from Moscow to Kiev...
...gets a partial withdrawal and is the only body which can solve the situation and is able to help Georgia?" asked Sarkozy, who chaired the Brussels proceedings because France currently holds the presidency of the European Council. "We did not see the Berlin Wall fall, the end of the Soviet dictatorship and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact to open another Cold War. I say we should keep our sangfroid...
...After the Soviet Union collapsed, recall, NATO membership was extended to the East European satellite states of the Soviet Union and to the three former Soviet republics on the Baltic. In 1999, NATO, ignoring Russian objections, went to war with Russia's ally Serbia over Kosovo. Just this year, most Western powers recognized Kosovo's independence, and - while the issue remains unresolved - at the very least considered eventual NATO membership for another two former Soviet republics, Georgia and Ukraine. So the question becomes: Has the West needlessly provoked Russia for more than a decade? Is it somehow to blame...
...taken to heart by the extraordinarily skillful foreign-policy team around President George H.W. Bush, which was convinced that it was dangerous to rub Moscow's nose in its own failure. As Western policy shifted in the Clinton years toward doing more to protect those who had suffered Soviet domination, there was no shortage of those who argued that Washington was playing with fire. I remember those debates very well. They were vigorous and impassioned. For all those who warned that it was unwise to poke the Russian bear in the eye, there were those (myself included) who believed that...
...There were no good, costless choices over NATO expansion, much less over Kosovo. A decision to withhold NATO membership from Eastern Europe, and to leave the Kosovars to their fate, would have exposed as hypocrites those who had spent the Cold War taking the high moral ground against the Soviet Union. But sometimes, we have just been reminded, good intentions are not enough to ward off tragedy. That's one reason why it's always worth keeping a volume of Yeats' poetry close at hand...