Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ukraine covers 603,628 square kilometres in Eastern Europe, making it the second-largest country on the continent after Russia. It borders Russia to the east and northeast, Belarus to the north, Poland and Slovakia to the west, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south.
The Holodomor was a human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians. It was caused by Stalin's collectivisation policy, which forced peasants onto collective farms and set unrealistic grain quotas, sometimes barring farm workers from receiving any grain until those quotas were met. Some countries have recognised it as an act of genocide perpetrated by Joseph Stalin.
Ukraine declared independence on the 24th of August 1991, following a failed coup by Communist leaders in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev. The declaration was approved by 92% of the Ukrainian electorate in a referendum held on the 1st of December 1991. Ukraine's president Leonid Kravchuk then signed the Belavezha Accords, which formally dissolved the Soviet Union.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the third-largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world. Under the Lisbon Protocol of 1992, Ukraine agreed to transfer all nuclear weapons to Russia for disposal and to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state. By 1996 the country had become free of nuclear weapons.
Kievan Rus was a medieval state centred on Kyiv that became the largest and most powerful realm in Europe during the 10th and 11th centuries. Founded when Prince Oleg conquered Kyiv in 882, it reached its peak under Vladimir the Great (980-1015) and Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054). The state disintegrated into rival principalities and was destroyed by the Mongols, whose siege of Kyiv in 1240 left the city in ruins.
Before the 2022 invasion, Ukraine had a population of over 41 million; by 2026, that figure had fallen to an estimated 32.3 million. Over 4.1 million people fled the country after the invasion began. Ukraine's GDP was expected to shrink by 35% in 2022 according to the IMF, and one estimate placed post-war reconstruction costs at potentially half a trillion dollars. Ukraine's grain exports, which once accounted for roughly nine percent of world wheat trade, declined after 2022 and have endangered global food security.