From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is the Daily.

Today, at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, was a threat to withhold US military assistance

from Ukraine. Why that assistance had been so important to Ukraine and to the United States

in the first place. It's Monday, November 11th.

The word Ukraine means frontier or borderland. This was a frontier between two competing

empires. It's been a country torn between East and West, between Western Europe and Russia.

For most of the 20th century, Russia had won out, and Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

The declaration of independence is on as of today, until August 24th, 1991, when Ukraine took

a step toward the West. It was a culmination of a long struggle for independence,

and after years of hardship under Soviet rule, Ukraine was now an independent state.

So once Ukraine becomes an independent country, and it can have its own international relations

with the rest of the world, what do those relationships start to look like?

The key issue for Ukraine, the defined both its foreign and its domestic policy in the

post-Soviet period, was the geopolitical struggle for Ukraine's allegiance.

I reached Andrew Kramer, a foreign correspondent for the Times, in Kiev.

On the one hand, you had Ukraine very closely tied to Russia by industrial supply chains,

by energy pipelines, and indeed by culture and by history, but the European Union was pulling

Ukraine in the Western direction, the European Union in the United States, trying to conceive of

Ukraine as integrated into the Western European world. And as Europe pulled in one direction, Russia

started to pull back. And what was it about Ukraine that interested the US and the European Union?

The idea was to encourage development of a democratic system and to prevent the reemergence

of a Russian empire. There was the axiom that Russia, without Ukraine, is just a country and Russia

...