On Friday, on American soil, President Donald Trump will entertain a brutal war criminal whose critics are poisoned, imprisoned or dropped from high-story windows. As Russian President Vladimir Putin continues reducing Ukraine to rubble, Trump will generate international headlines with no grasp of the underlying history at issue.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the formation of 15 newly independent post-Soviet states, including Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In the process, Ukraine was left with an outsize stockpile of nuclear weapons, including 1,700 nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 44 strategic bombers, which put the nation in possession of the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Three years later, in exchange for Ukraine’s agreemen

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