Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah.

Isgur joined by Steve Hayes.

And this week we are talking to Natalie Jerezco.

She is American-born and served as Ukraine's Minister of Finance

from December 2014 until April 2016.

She spent 25 years in Ukraine and is here to talk to us about the history of Ukraine

and the Ukrainian people and what the last two weeks have meant for that country.

Let's dive right in.

Natalie, thank you so much for joining us.

I want to start with some history about how we get to this place after the fall of

the Soviet Union.

So can you walk us through what happens with the relationship between Ukraine and Russia

as the Soviet Union falls?

First of all, there were three leaders that met in a forest in Belarus, the Beled-Bezda

agreement that really led to what was a peaceful, nonviolent end of an empire that had long

ago ceased the function in terms of delivering value to the people of that country.

So the Soviet Union falls because the president of the Russian Republic, the Ukrainian Republic

and the Belarus Republic meet and agree this just doesn't work.

So from there in Ukraine, we have a referendum.

And the referendum was in December of 1991.

And in that referendum, every single of us, like a state, including the autonomous republic

of Crimea, which was a different legal status in the Constitution, but part of the Soviet

...