LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Ukraine: Western Ukraine
built 236 days ago
At 603,700 km² (233,074 mi²) and with a coastline of 2,782 km [6], Ukraine is the world’s 44th-largest country (after the Central African Republic, before Madagascar). It is the second largest country in Europe (after European part of Russia, before metropolitan France). There is ongoing debate on where the geographical centre of Europe is, for instance, some claim the center is near the small town of Rakhiv, in western Ukraine. The Ukrainian landscape consists mostly of fertile plains, or steppes, and plateaus, crossed by rivers such as the Dnieper, Seversky Donets, Dniester and the Southern Buh as they flow south into the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov. To the southwest the delta of the Danube forms the border with Romania. The country’s only mountains are the Carpathian Mountains in the west, of which the highest is the Hora Hoverla at 2,061 metres (6,762 ft), and those in the Crimean peninsula, in the extreme south along the coast.
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By 1921, the battles ended with a Soviet victory while the western part of the Ukraine was divided-up among Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. The Soviets immediately began shipping out huge amounts of grain to feed the hungry people of Moscow and other big Russian cities. Coincidentally, a drought occurred in the Ukraine, resulting in widespread starvation and a surge of popular resentment against Lenin and the Soviets.
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The Western oblasts of Ukraine have food-processing, consumer goods, wood working facilities as well as productions of building materials and chemicals. The region's machine-building produces oil equipment, buses for public transportation, electronic equipment, automobiles and agricultural machinery.
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The theater in Ukraine began with the folk show vertep and baroque intermedia performed at academies. The baroque style with its florid language and stock allegories lasted longer in Ukraine than in Western Europe. The eighteenth-century classicism featured sentimentalist plays presented by public, private, and serf theaters. Kotliarevs'ky's ballad opera Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava) and the comedy Moskal'-Charivnyk (The Sorcerer Soldier) premiered in 1819 and began an ethnographically oriented Ukrainian theater. In 1864 the Rus'ka Besida (Ruthenian Club) in Lviv under Austria established a permanent Ukrainian theater, while in the Russian Empire Ukrainian plays were staged by amateurs until banned by the Ems Ukase. Despite this prohibition, Marko Kropyvnyts'kyi (1840–1910) staged Ukrainian plays in 1881 along with Mykhailo Staryts'kyi (1840–1904) and the Tobilevych brothers.
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Ukraine encourages foreign trade and investment. The foreign investment law allows Westerners to purchase businesses and property, to repatriate revenue and profits, and to receive compensation in the event that property were to be nationalized by a future government. However, complex laws and regulations, poor corporate governance, weak enforcement of contract law by courts and particularly corruption have discouraged broad foreign direct investment in Ukraine. While there is a functioning stock market, the lack of protection for minority shareholder rights severely restricts portfolio investment activities. Total foreign direct investment in Ukraine was approximately $21.2 billion as of January 1, 2007. At $447 per capita, this was one of the lowest figures in the region.
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The trilateral agreement signed in Moscow on 14 January 1994 by the United States, Russia, and Ukraine was seen as a significant Western success in disarming Ukraine of nuclear weapons. Under the agreement, the Russian Federation undertook to send 100 tons of fuel to Ukraine for its nuclear-power plants. The United States agreed to pay $60 million to the Russian Federation in support of that process. For its part, Ukraine agreed to transfer 200 nuclear warheads over a 10-month period.
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Western Ukraine