U.S. President Donald Trump | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images Ukrainian Embassy begs public to stop saying ‘the Ukraine’ after Trump flub ‘Be smart and avoid Soviet style clichés,’ says embassy in Washington.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Monday cheekily implored the public to stop using "the Ukraine," a request that came after U.S. President Donald Trump frequently used the outdated construction.

“Let us kindly help you to use the words related to #Ukraine correctly,” Ukraine’s U.S. Embassy wrote on Twitter, noting that the country goes by “Ukraine, not ‘the’ Ukraine” and that its capital city should be referred to as “Kyiv, not Kiev.”

As the maelstrom surrounding Trump’s recent phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has grown over the last week and a half, resulting in the start of impeachment proceedings, “the Ukraine” has found itself back in the news. While Trump is guilty of using the construction, he is far from the only public figure to have appended the definite article.

The construction of Ukraine’s name has been politically fraught for a number of years, as evidenced by the cheeky tone of the embassy’s tweet.

"These are the only politically correct terms that express respect to the country and its nation," it continued, advising readers to "be smart and avoid Soviet style clichés." The tweet closed with an skeptical-looking emoji wearing a monocle.

That construction has also cropped up in media reports surrounding the allegations that Trump inappropriately pressured Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, though The Associated Press, whose style guidelines have been adopted by a number of news outlets, dropped the definite article in 1991, in accordance with Ukraine's independence referendum that same year. Critics of the "the" argue it belittles Ukraine's status as a sovereign state, reducing back to its status as a former Soviet territory.

Some news outlets use “the Ukraine” frequently, as did then-President Barack Obama occasionally in the aftermath of the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

In the midst of sparring with reporters during his trip last week to the United Nations, Trump also parroted unsubstantiated claims about the Bidens and their work in “the Ukraine.”

But Monday's reminder from the Ukrainian Embassy came shortly after a morning tweet from the man whose presidency has been dealt a major blow by his relations with Ukraine.

Trump, who frequently deletes and re-posts messages on his favorite social media platform, deleted a declaration that “Again, the President of the Ukraine said THERE WAS NO (ZERO) PRESSURE PUT ON HIM BY ME,” re-posting it minutes later without the “the.”