The emergence in 1991, between Central Europe and Russia, of a country with an area equivalent to that of France, with a population of some 52 million, undermined international balances in the centre of Europe. The independence of the Republic, after the most populous and important Russia of the USSR, brought a fatal blow to an already moribund Soviet Union. Some 350 years after the Pereiaslav Treaty, she reduced the former Russian empire from her most beautiful fleuron. Throughout the 90s, the new state had a delicate policy of balance between the east and the west, which had profoundly marked developments in this part of the world, Ukraine had held back plans to integrate the former Soviet area of its major Russian neighbour, contributed to the failure of the Community of Independent States, encouraged the penetration of this area of the United States, facilitated the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance to the east, etc. Most ten years after independence, it was still faced with a number of uncertainties affecting its foreign policy. Will it succeed in completing the transition process to which it has been struggling? Does it intend to integrate the European Union as it wishes? Will it become a regional power, a source of stability and security? Or is it sentenced to a kind of finlandisation?