Besides not being a native speaker, I never thought about using an article with Ukraine. Now that you mention it, in German we always use an article with Ukrain

Besides not being a native speaker, I never thought about using an article with Ukraine. Now that you mention it, in German we always use an article with Ukraine, I never noticed it. But this is true for some other countries. Countries like USA, UK, Netherlands, Switzerland or Turkey are also always used with an article, I don't know what is the pattern behind it. All of those are certainly sovereign nations. So nothing was implied by using an article with Ukraine.