Try finding the land of The Unified Team on an old map, circa 1992. Or the Commonwealth of Independent States. It’s a challenge that relates to the sudden discovery by many people of just where Ukraine is.

Here’s a big hint: Thirty years ago, the UT and the CIS represented an ad-hoc “nation” that had just evolved from what Ronald Reagan previously labeled “the evil empire” and that the soulless despot Vladimir Putin now wants to revive—the Soviet Union.

As the USSR fell apart in the early ‘90s, though, there came to be an apparently benign one-for-all and all-for-one arrangement, with all former Soviets staying temporarily on the same team. Just the opposite of how Putin is acting on his claim that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” by having his Russian military murder Ukrainians.

This is a sports story, of sorts. But one which reminds how sports—like the arts and business worlds—are tangled up in government actions. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor already has gotten athletes from Russia (and Belarus, because of that nation’s aid in the Russian attack) banned from the Paralympic Games, the upcoming World Games and events in international figure skating, ice hockey, swimming, skiing, badminton, canoeing, equestrian, gymnastics, rowing, rugby, shooting—even chess. Russia has been thrown out of soccer’s World Cup qualifying tournament while tennis has declared that Russian and Belarussian athletes only are welcome as “neutral” participants, minus their national affiliations.

But about the comparison from three decades ago. Following closely on the declaration of independence by the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuanian—the USSR’s dissolution in late 1991 meant that the globe’s biggest sports stage, the Olympics, was scrambling to accommodate Russia and 12 former Soviet republics for the 1992 Albertville Winter Games.

The solution was to have athletes from those republics continue to participate on the Russian side (which didn’t stray far from an old and widespread assumption that all Soviets were Russian). Thus the one-time-only Olympic squad known as The Unified Team, representing the Commonwealth of Independent States. (Some of us wise-guy Westerners, having come from the other side in the Cold War, referred to them in shorthand as “The Commies.”)

The revealing aspect was how non-Russian Unified Teamers expressed a feeling of lost identity. All marched and received medals under the Olympic flag and with the Olympic anthem, and among the gold medalists who found the situation wanting was pairs skating champion Natalia Mishkutienok, a Belarussian who teamed with Ukrainian Artur Dmitriev.

The situation was “not good,” she said. “I like the Russian anthem and I like the Russian flag.” (Of course she meant the Soviet song and the red hammer-and-sickle USSR flag.) Viktor Petrenko, a Ukrainian who won the ’92 men’s skating title, said after his victory ceremony, “I want to see some flag. The Ukraine flag or Russian flag, that would be better.”

There were bad jokes about The Unidentified Team and how it had no fight song, no team pennant.

Petrenko wore warmups emblazoned with CCCP, the Cyrillic abbreviation for USSR. His official Olympic “identity record” listed his age as 22, his birth date as 6/17/69, his town of birth as “Odessa,” his country of birth as “Unified Team” and his nationality as “Unified Team.”

“We are still a team,” Petrenko said then. “We are still teammates. Everything’s the same like that. We just represent different republics. I really don’t know what’s going on in my country. But we’re still a team.”

All Unified Teamers had held aloft tiny flags representing their respective republics in the Opening Ceremonies and wore their individual country’s flag patches during the Games. Outside the Olympic skating hall, a sign soon appeared offering “for sale: Soviet training suits. All stock must go.” CCCP warmups were selling for $150 apiece.

Some Unifieds meanwhile found humor in the no-longer applicable words to the Soviet anthem…

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics

Great Russia has welded forever to stand.

Created in struggle by will of the people.

United and mighty, our Soviet land!

The “unbreakable union” was broken. And Putin’s attempts to put it back together by force after 30 years don’t appear to be going so well, in the one-team sense. A recent report noted that, among the Ukrainian citizens trapped in their native land by the Russian bombardment is Viktor Petrenko, the old skating champion from The Unified Team.

He was said to be in Kyiv, the capital. It’s on the map. And it was Mark Twain’s unsettling observation that “God created war so Americans would learn geography.”