The Ukraine historically also was the heartland of Russia in different incarnations of the latter, not a liberated colony Ukrainian sympathizers might now want it to look like. Suffice to say, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the Soviet rulers at the times of peak USSR, were Ukrainians by ethnicity; meanwhile as soon as Russian (Gorbachev) came to claim the Imperial throne for the first time in 60+ years, USSR had begun to crumble ever faster.