April 25, 1986. A temperate spring afternoon in southern Sweden. A butterfly flaps its wings, and a cold north wind begins to blow.
Eleven hours later. April 26, 1986. You know the story - a late night, a routine test, a human failure, a regime all too eager to sweep accidents under the rug. The consequences - within hours, people across Kyiv, the Union's third-largest city, begin to die. Resistance from above delays the evacuation another day; by the time it does start, millions have been exposed and tens of thousands have become fated to die - some within days, others within years.
The Union, already tottering, could not bear the economic or political consequences. Within two years, the Ukrainian government - re-situated in the southern city of Dnepropetrovsk - declared its response a failure, and begged for aid from the West to contain the site and alleviate the strain on the collapsing health care industry. A year after that, the Union was gone, and soon with it came the rest of the Eastern bloc.
The new Ukrainian state was immediately saddled with overwhelming burdens - a crumbling and inefficient economy, the overwhelming burden of resettling and caring for evacuees, ethnic and linguistic tensions, omnipresent corruption and grift, and spillovers from armed conflict on two of its borders. No political system could have handled it - and under the circumstances, it is remarkable that the weak Ukrainian political institutions lasted as long as they did.
Civil war came in 2004, complemented by secession and foreign invasion. Any hope for recovery in the years that followed was ended by the collapse of the never-really-completed Soviet-era sarcophagus, requiring a heroic effort with too little international support to build a new one. No sooner was this completed than civil war again reared its head, this time as the spearhead of a Russian invasion. At great cost, the country's independence was preserved - but it can be hard to see to what end. Nearly-surrounded by vultures, and carrying the heavy financial burden of protecting all of Europe from its Soviet past, Ukraine still has far to go before it can claim to see light at the end of the tunnel...
Another world. Another April 26. A crisis averted at the last possible instant.
A couple dozen still die protecting their country - but nothing the government has not papered over before with a few medals. The facade remains in place. The Union and its reformist party is given a stay of execution. A few more years until the great forces of history bring it down - enough to give it a broader legacy.
The Union of Sovereign States, was worth its name for maybe half a decade until autocrats regained control in the first few years of the twenty-first century. By 2005 the new flags had been put back into their boxes, while the old methods came back out. After a single breath of freedom, Ukraine again became little more than a tool of Moscow - and Moscow proved it with repeated bloody crackdowns on the streets of Kyiv and Lviv.
Ukraine became the launching point of the Union's attempts to restore its influence in Central Europe. Activists drummed up ethnic tensions on the borders with Poland, Slovakia, and Moldova, ultimately leading to a brief 2011 war where the undersupplied and undertrained Ukrainian army performed embarrassingly poorly against a NATO-backed Moldova before poorly-disguised Russian special forces were inserted to turn the tide.
A new election has recently brought out a new wave of protests and a new wave of brutal repression. Stability has achieved as promised - only activists and students would deny the average Ukrainian is financially better off than they were in 1997 or 2004, and for most people this is enough. But this has come at the cost of civil liberty, national culture, and a chance at real connection with the outside world. Constrained as it has been for centuries by foreign domination and a corrupt and ossified political system, Ukraine still has far to go before it can claim to see light at the end of the tunnel...
