<human>:  Why did the Russians invade the Ukraine?
<bot>: The Russians invaded the Ukraine because they wanted to annex the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was a communist state that had been formed after World War II. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the USSR broke up into 15 independent countries. The Soviet Union had invaded the Ukraine in the early 1990s. The Ukrainian government wanted to join the European Union, and they feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a Russian invasion.