section_path: Independence movements/After 1945/Decolonization in Europe
section_name: Decolonization in Europe
paragraph_text: Decolonization in Europe
  
  Italy had occupied the Dodecanese islands in 1912, but Italian occupation ended after World War II, and the islands were integrated into Greece. British rule ended in Cyprus in 1960, and Malta in 1964, and both islands became independent republics.
  
  Soviet control of its non-Russian member republics weakened as movements for democratization and self-government gained strength during the late 1980s, and four republics declared independence in 1990 and 1991. The Soviet coup d'état attempt in August 1991 accelerated the breakup of the USSR, which formally ended on 26 December 1991. The Republics of the Soviet Union became sovereign states— Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus (formerly called Byelorussia,) Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Historian Robert Daniels says, "A special dimension that the anti-Communist revolutions shared with some of their predecessors was decolonization." Moscow's policy had long been to settle ethnic Russians in the non-Russian republics. After independence, minority rights have been an issue for Russian-speakers in some republics and for non-Russian-speakers in Russia; see Russians in the Baltic states. Meanwhile, the Russian Federation continues to apply political, economic, and military pressure on former Soviet colonies. In 2014, it annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, the first such action in Europe since the end of the Second World War. In March 2023, following the 2022 Russian invasion and subsequent Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine, Ukraine passed a law that did forbid to have toponymy with names associated with Russian ("the occupying state"). This law in particular has been described by Ukrainian media as providing "a legitimate framework and effective mechanisms" for the decolonization of Ukraine.
  
  After the 2022 Russian invasion, scholars of Eastern Europe and Central Asia Studies (" Russian studies ") have renewed awareness of Russian colonialism and interest in decolonizing scholarship in their field, with academic conferences organized on the theme by the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) in Stockholm in December 2022, the British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES) in April 2023, the Aleksanteri Institute in October, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in Philadelphia in November–December.