Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, continues his lecture course on Ukrainian history by examining the collapse of empires and the emergence of competing republics in the revolutionary period. He asks what it means for a nation to exist as structure, action, or both, and traces how Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding are bound up with experiences in Ukraine. Snyder connects the class to the present, arguing that Ukraine's resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion presupposes a prior national existence worth explaining. He considers how modern nations form generally, why some succeed and others fail, and whether national identity can be a matter of deliberate choice. The lecture situates Ukraine's twentieth century amid Soviet and Nazi terror and closes by weighing whether its post-colonial, multilingual character is a relic or a model. Part of a Yale course available with Ukrainian and Russian subtitles.