About five years ago, I found myself on the second floor of a rural school in northern Ukraine, about an hour from the Russian border. It was May 2014, and I was serving as an accredited election observer with the International Republican Institute, tasked with monitoring the Ukrainian presidential election.

It was a difficult time in Ukraine. The country had just been convulsed by the Revolution of Dignity, in which the Ukrainian people reclaimed their democracy from the corrupt, undemocratic Russian puppet, Viktor Yanukovych. They were repaid with the invasion of their sovereign territory by Russia.