From the very dawning of its independence, Ukraine had to grapple with a multitude of very serious problems. One of them was the staffing of the institutions of a nascent sovereign state. While the Soviet Union existed, the cultural proximity and the absence of a major language barrier resulted in the fact, that Moscow drained Kiev of its best brains. Except for the few, who deliberately spurned big careers in the central political or economic institutions to work for the benefit of Ukraine, the others who had stayed behind represented, as it were, a “second quality”. On the other hand, those who went to Russia rapidly gave in to processes of cultural and political assimilation. All the others remaining in Ukraine’s government, even those within the Ukrainian Ministry for Foreign Affairs or in various foreign missions, had 110 experience of independent actions, because all decisions had been strictly centralized at the federal, Moscow level. Thus, Ukraine had a personnel with only some provincial capabilities allowed under the umbrella of a huge empire, and no staff that would be capable of autonomous management of economic, administrative and political structures of an independent state in its own right. (Beginnings of the road, fragment)