CLEVELAND, Ohio — One chilly day this month, as Russian troops continued their buildup on Ukraine’s borders and Russian warships headed to the Black Sea off Ukraine’s coast, Andy Fedynsky sat in a windowless office in Cleveland, paging through a folder of yellowing papers on his lap.

Fedynsky is the director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, one of America’s largest collections of Ukraine-related literature and cultural artifacts stretching back centuries. On this particular Tuesday, he had dug out materials from the 1938 crisis in Eastern Europe — when the Munich Agreement offered up a piece of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, and Neville Chamberlain vowed peace in our time. “I mean, this has been sitting here for decades, and I’m looking at it,” Fedynsky mused, glancing back down at a page from an information service of the era called the Press Bureau of Ukraine.