I visited the USSR back in the late '80s with my grandmother's peace group - and we were supposed to visit Kiev, but Chernobyl happened, so we visited Tbilisi, the capital of then-Soviet Georgia, instead. And it was quite different than Russia, the culture and the language. They were also a Russian occupied country. And there was no love for their occupiers there. There were quite a few statues of Stalin, who I understood to be "out of favor" at the time, so I asked. And I was told that Stalin was Georgian, not Russian, and the Georgians honored him since "he killed so many Russians."
KGB-trained Putin saw occupation of Ukraine as one step in his attempted recreation of the former USSR. We must never let that happen, I'm sure that he saw Ukraine as only the beginning. 
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