Listening to portions of Congressional testimony this past week, I realized how little most of us know about Ukraine. It’s important because of its strategic economic and geopolitical position in Europe, its exit from the Soviet Union, and its struggle to emerge from corruption and build democracy.

With a group of North American regional scientists, I spent most of a week in Ukraine in 1991, when it still belonged to the Soviet Union. We traveled by bus to Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, where for decades, the USSR built huge military industrial factories and imported and resettled hundreds...