I never knew much about my maternal grandmother. She was a quiet and reserved woman, and our conversations rarely strayed from how I was doing in school or what I wanted to do with my life. After she passed away I began looking into her family history, perhaps in the hopes that it would somehow help me cope with my grief. I already knew she was Ukrainian, since I was dragged to the local Ukrainian festival as a kid. But what I didn’t know was that she was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, who were originally from the village of Kariv. As a history buff I had always been interested in the lives of my ancestors, but up until that point I only really cared about those on the Irish side of my family. But it seemed that soon as I became personally interested in Ukrainian history, the country was faced with an unprecedented crisis.

Back in November of 2013, Ukraine suddenly suspended preparations for an association agreement with the European Union. Ukraine’s President at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, claimed that the agreement would jeopardize Ukraine’s relationship with Russia. Many Ukrainians had hoped that the agreement would help their country break free from Russia’s influence, and they promptly took to the street in protest. Only a couple of weeks after the protests began, Yanukovych further angered Pro-EU Ukrainians (by accepting Russia’s offer of reduced gas prices and purchase of $15 billion in Ukrainian government bonds.

In the next couple of months, the situation in Ukraine only worsened. On February 20^th, 2014, several dozen people were killed as protesters and government forces clashed in Kiev. Two days later, Yanukovych fled from the capital after the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from office. While this was a victory for protesters, it was a short-lived one. Less than a week after Yanukovych fled the capital, armed men stormed government buildings in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, located in the Kherson Oblast (a Ukrainian province). Shortly following this, Crimea held a referendum to join Russia, which passed despite international condemnation. Russia, on the other hand, accepted the results of the referendum and promptly annexed Crimea. While this annexation was obviously devastating for Ukraine, the country still managed to elect a new President, Petro Poroshenko, in May of 2014. One of Poroshenko’s first acts as President was to sign an association agreement with the EU, the same one that Yanukovych refused to sign less than a year earlier.

So what has changed after nearly three years? Well as of this moment, Crimea is still under Russian control. And according to a recent article by “Russia Beyond the Headlines,” Crimeans couldn’t be happier. This is to be expected, since “Russia Beyond the Headlines” is owned by the Russian government, and is widely considered little more than a thinly veiled propaganda outlet. Freedom House’s report about Crimea, in contrast, tells a very different story. It should be noted that while Freedom House describes itself as “an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world,” they are seen as having an American right-wing bias.

As for the rest of Ukraine, the government’s primary concern is the conflict currently raging in the Ukrainian region of Donbass. Since April of 2014, the Ukrainian military has been fighting the Donestk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). These two rebel groups continue to receive both military and humanitarian support from Russia, much to Ukraine’s chagrin. Despite the fact that approximately 10,000 people have been killed and nearly 2 million have been displaced, there is no end to the conflict in sight.