Who cares? Well, if someone is trying to reply to you, you can make their reply look like a lie or off topic (whether deliberately or not).

This gives you a problem if you decide that you overstated your case, or that you were too harsh. Do you edit in a way that removes what you said that was too harsh or too strong, or do you leave it, thereby leaving what is going to trigger hostile responses? The best way to do it might be to remove it, and add "[Edit: Removed inflammatory language.]" or something similar.

"The Ukraine" is incorrect both grammatically and politically, says Oksana Kyzyma of the Embassy of Ukraine in London.

"Ukraine is both the conventional short and long name of the country," she says. "This name is stated in the Ukrainian Declaration of Independence and Constitution."

The use of the article relates to the time before independence in 1991, when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union known as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, she says. Since then, it should be merely Ukraine.

There is no definite article in the Ukrainian or Russian languages and there is another theory why it crept into the English language.

Those who called it "the Ukraine" in English must have known that the word meant "borderland", says Anatoly Liberman, a professor at the University of Minnesota with a specialism in etymology. So they referred to it as "the borderland".

"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians probably decided that the article denigrated their country [by identifying it as a part of Russia] and abolished 'the' while speaking English, so now it is simply Ukraine.

"That's why the Ukraine suddenly lost its article in the last 20 years, it's a sort of linguistic independence in Europe, it's hugely symbolic."

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