What to Know About Ukraine's History

Ukrainians desperately trying to board trains at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Central Station.

Photo Credit: Pete Kiehart/The Guardian/BuzzFeed

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Over a week into Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, turmoil and bloodshed remains, with residents of Kyiv rushing to the train station in order to escape Russia’s wrath.

More than one million Ukrainians have been displaced, adding to the humanitarian crisis.

Russian troops, according to a Human Rights Watch report, have fired cluster munitions into at least three residential neighborhoods.

More threatening still, Russia has captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe after shelling part of the complex, raising fears of a nuclear disaster; others equate it to a “war crime.” For now, the power plant’s six reactors reportedly remain intact and undamaged.

The Associated Press reported that the head of Ukraine’s security council called on Russia to create humanitarian corridors to allow children, women and the elderly to escape the fighting. The United Nations has reported 752 civilian casualties across Ukraine, with 227 killed and 525 injured. Since February 24, 28 children have been killed.

In February 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered three thousand U.S. troops to position near Poland and Romania—NATO countries that border Ukraine—to counter Russian troops stationed near its border.

A Russian air strike on a rural residential area in Kyiv region killed at least seven people on Friday, including two children.

Photo Credit: Twitter/@rustem_umerov)

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Since the Ukraine conflict continues to grow more ominous by the hour, I compiled some historical facts about the Eastern European country.

• Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was founded about 1,500 years ago by proto-Ukrainian Slavic tribes.
• Historically, in December 1922, Ukraine together with Russia and Belarus, and Trans-Caucasian Federation were the founding members of the Soviet Union.
• Ukraine is home to more than 100 different national or ethnic groups.
• Ukraine's population is overwhelmingly Christian; the vast majority - up to two thirds - identify themselves as Orthodox.
• Since the 17^th century, Ukraine was divided among three Empires - by Austrians in the West, by Turks in the South, and by Russians in the East.
• The Ukrainian national anthem is called ‘Shche ne vmerla Ukraina’ which translates in English to ‘Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished’
• Ukraine’s name derives from the Old East Slavic word "ukraina" meaning "borderland or march (militarized border region)" and began to be used extensively in the 19th century; originally Ukrainians referred to themselves as Rusyny (Rusyns, Ruthenians, or Ruthenes), an endonym derived from the medieval Rus state (Kyivan Rus)
• At the end of the World War I, Ukraine was divided into two: Western Ukraine became part of Poland and Eastern Ukraine, the larger part was absorbed by into the Soviet Union and renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both governments imposed their own language and government.
• The Second World War claimed the lives of 5.5 million Ukrainians, including at least one million Ukrainian Jews.
• Most Ukrainians live in cities (67.2 %). The largest metropolitan area in Ukraine is Kiev (3.2 million), Kharkiv (1.7 million), Donetsk (1.7 million), Dnipropetrovsk (1.5 million), and Odessa (1.1 million). The largest ethnic group are ethnic Ukrainians (78%) and ethnic Russians (17 %).
• The state language is Ukrainian, an east Slavic language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, composed of a mixture of Latin, Greek, and Slavic letters.
• The famous Carol of the Bells Christmas carol is based on a Ukrainian folk tune.
• In the 8th-10th centuries, parts of what is now Ukraine were ruled by the Khazars, a Turkic tribe which converted to Judaism.
• The territory of Ukraine became the site of almost constant warfare between Poles, Muscovites, Ottomans, Tatars, and Ukrainian Cossacks in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. According to Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark, “the subsequent incorporation of most Ukrainian territories into the Muscovite State and its successor, the Russian Empire, cut off Ukraine from its roots in Europe and had ruinous consequences for Ukrainian religion, language, and culture, which were progressively Russified or banned.”
• During the 16^th and 17^th centuries, tens of thousands of Ukrainians were captured annually and shipped to and sold in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire, as slaves.
• Ukraine experienced a major cultural, political, and economic revival in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, when the charismatic Ivan Mazepa served as leader of an autonomous Cossack polity known as the Hetmanate—until his defeat by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.
• Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was born a serf in 1814 in a small village south of Kyiv
• Ukraine was the birthplace of many prominent Jews—among many others the writers Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, Bruno Schulz, Sholom Aleichem, Vasily Grossman, Isaac Babel, and Shmuel Agnon. Zionist leader Vladimir Zhabotinsky and former Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir were also born in Ukraine, as was the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer.
• Twentieth-century Ukraine was the site of two genocides—the Holodomor of 1932-1933, during which millions of Ukrainians were mercilessly killed in an artificial famine engineered by Joseph Stalin and his henchmen, and the Holocaust, which took the lives of millions of Jews. Ukraine suffered 15 million “excess” deaths between 1914 and 1948, due to wars, genocides, and Stalin’s repressive policies.
• Ukrainians formed the majority of Soviet political prisoners; they staged revolts in the concentration camps of the Soviet Gulag; they fought bravely against Stalin and Hitler; they resisted Muscovite and Russian imperialism for centuries.
• The Ukrainian diaspora in the United States consists of about 1.25 million people, who, while concentrated in the formerly industrial Northeast and Midwest, are found in all 50 states.
• Prominent Americans of Ukrainian descent include astronaut Heide Marie Stefanyshyn-Piper, actors Jack Palance, Natalie Wood, Vera Farmiga, and Liev Schreiber, policymaker Paula Dobriansky, Metropolitan Opera singer Paul Plishka, football great Bronko Nagurski, economist Greg Mankiw, inventor Igor Sikorsky, journalist Mike Royko, and writer Chuck Palahniuk. 
• The first literary tradition of the Ukrainian language was created by Ivan Kotliarevskyi at the end of 18^th century and developed at the beginning of the 19^th century by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevechnko. According to Sergei Zhuk, Professor of History at Ball State University, since a publication of Shevchnko's collection of poetry Kobzar in 1940, Ukraine witnessed a rise of nationalist movement which eventually untied Western part (Austrian) and Eastern (Russian) part of Ukrainians in one large patriotic movement, resulting in an independent state in 1991.
• A peaceful mass protest, the "Orange Revolution" in 2004 forced the authorities to overturn a rigged presidential election and to allow a new internationally monitored vote that swept into power a reformist slate under Viktor YUSHCHENKO. 
• Ukraine celebrated its 30^th anniversary of independence in 2021.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

March 4, 2022

Source:  Congressional Research Service (CRS); Sergei Zhuk, professor of History at Ball State University; Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark; Monica White, Associate Professor of Russian & Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham; Robert W. Orttung Research Director, Sustainable George Washington University Research Professor of International Affairs (IERES); “A History of Ukraine: It’s Land and Peoples” by Paul R. Magocsi