title: Russian preservation syndrome
abstract: Russia has been planning to annex Ukraine since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. For thirty years, proposals to Ukraine to join various Russian unification projects aimed at creating international organisations hastily “glued together” from the members of the former Soviet Union have been floated in the political space. Among these structures, Russia, with the active participation of Ukraine and Belarus, created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) on 8 December 1991, the Customs Union 
journal: FOREIGN AFFAIRS