Ukraine

• 1. Introduction

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  Ukraine covers 603,628 square kilometres of Eastern Europe, making it the second-largest country on the continent after Russia. It holds a population estimated at 32.3 million in 2026, a figure that has fallen dramatically from a peak of roughly 52 million in 1993. Humans have walked this land since 32,000 BC. The horse may have been domesticated here. The linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lay in the Volga-Dnieper region that straddles southern Ukraine and Russia. This is a country whose soil holds the memory of half the world's languages.

  What made Ukraine the place that every empire wanted? Why did the largest state in medieval Europe rise here, only to be destroyed? How did millions of Ukrainians die of hunger in peacetime, and what transformed a Soviet republic into an independent nation fighting for its existence? Those questions run through every chapter of Ukraine's story, from the river-crossed steppes of the Iron Age to the drone fleets of the 21st century.

• 2. Before Nations Existed

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  A 1.4 million-year-old stone tool found at Korolevo in western Ukraine is the earliest securely dated evidence of a hominin presence anywhere in Europe. Long before the first cities rose in Mesopotamia, the Neolithic Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was flourishing across wide areas of modern Ukraine, including the Dnieper-Dniester region, by 4,500 BC.

  By the Iron Age, the land was inhabited by Iranian-speaking Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. The Scythian kingdom held sway between 700 BC and 200 BC. From the 6th century BC, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine colonies took root on the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea at places including Tyras, Olbia, and Chersonesus, and those settlements thrived into the 6th century AD.

  In the 7th century, the territory of eastern Ukraine formed the centre of Old Great Bulgaria. The Khazars then took over much of the land. In the 5th and 6th centuries the Antes, considered an early Slavic people, lived in Ukraine, and migrations from these territories established many South Slavic nations across the Balkans. Early Indo-European migrations from the Pontic steppes in the 3rd millennium BC had already spread ancestry and language across large parts of Europe. The steppes were never an empty stage; they were a highway.

• 3. The Golden Age of Kyiv

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  In 882, a pagan prince named Oleg conquered Kyiv and proclaimed it the capital of the Rus', establishing the state that would become the largest and most powerful realm in Europe during the 10th and 11th centuries. The reign of Vladimir the Great, from 980 to 1015, brought Christianity to Kievan Rus'. His son Yaroslav the Wise, who ruled from 1019 to 1054, presided over the zenith of its cultural and military power.

  The Rurikid dynasty produced princes who fought each other constantly for possession of Kyiv, and that internal rivalry was the state's chronic weakness. A final resurgence came under Vladimir II Monomakh, who reigned from 1113 to 1125, and his son Mstislav, who ruled until 1132. After Mstislav's death, Kievan Rus' fragmented into separate principalities, though ownership of Kyiv itself still carried enormous prestige.

  In the western territories, the principalities of Halych and Volhynia merged into the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. Daniel of Galicia, son of Roman the Great, re-united much of south-western Rus' and was crowned its first king by a papal envoy in 1253. That moment of crowned dignity would prove brief. The Mongol siege of Kyiv in 1240 destroyed the city and shattered the structure of East Slavic political life. The most powerful state in Europe had ceased to exist.

• 4. Six Hundred Years of Division

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  In 1349, after the Galicia-Volhynia Wars, the region was partitioned between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1441, a Genghisid prince named Haci I Giray founded the Crimean Khanate on the peninsula and surrounding steppes. Over the following three centuries, the Crimean slave trade enslaved an estimated two million people in the region.

  The Union of Lublin in 1569 created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and transferred most Ukrainian lands from Lithuania to the Crown of Poland. Under the pressure of Polonisation, many Ruthenian nobles converted to Catholicism. Those who remained Orthodox found their church suppressed. Deprived of native protectors, the peasants and townspeople turned to the Zaporozhian Cossacks.

  In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky led the largest Cossack uprising against the Commonwealth and the Polish king. He founded the Cossack Hetmanate, which lasted until 1764, or by some accounts until 1782. After a crushing defeat at the Battle of Berestechko in 1651, Khmelnytsky turned to the Russian tsar for help, and the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 bound the Hetmanate to Russia. After his death, the 30-year conflict known as The Ruin, from 1657 to 1686, tore the Hetmanate apart among Russia, Poland, the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, and the Cossacks themselves.

  Hetman Ivan Mazepa, born in 1639 and died in 1709, attempted to reverse the decline by allying with Sweden in the Great Northern War. The Hetmanate's capital city Baturyn was sacked in 1708, and the allies were crushed at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. Catherine the Great then incorporated much of central Ukraine into the Russian Empire between 1764 and 1781, abolishing both the Cossack Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich. After Russia annexed Crimea in 1783, the tsarist autocracy launched a deliberate policy of Russification, suppressing the Ukrainian language and national identity.

• 5. Nationalism, Revolution, and Famine

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  The serf-turned-poet Taras Shevchenko, born in 1814 and died in 1861, and political theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov, born in 1841 and died in 1895, led the 19th-century nationalist movement that gave modern Ukrainian identity its cultural backbone. In the Russian-controlled territories, this movement faced severe repression, including a ban on virtually all books published in Ukrainian in 1876.

  With the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed, but a coup led by Pavlo Skoropadskyi produced the short-lived Ukrainian State under German protection. The broader conflict, part of the Russian Civil War, left over 1.5 million people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. When the Bolsheviks ultimately prevailed, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union in 1922.

  During the 1920s, under the Ukrainisation policy of Mykola Skrypnyk, Soviet leadership initially encouraged a national renaissance in Ukrainian culture and language. The New Economic Policy introduced by Vladimir Lenin allowed limited market activity and restored the country to pre-war production levels by the mid-1920s. That experiment ended when Joseph Stalin became the Soviet leader. Collectivisation was imposed by regular troops and the secret police. Members of collective farms were sometimes barred from receiving any grain until unrealistic quotas were met. The famine that resulted, known as the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s and has been recognised by some countries as an act of genocide. Stalin's Great Purge then wiped out a new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals, a loss remembered as the Executed Renaissance.

• 6. World War and Its Reckoning

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  German armies invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. Ukraine became the site of some of the war's most devastating fighting; in the battle of Kyiv, which received the title "Hero City", more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers were killed or captured. Most of the Ukrainian SSR was then organised within the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, intended for German exploitation and eventual colonisation.

  In western Ukraine an independent armed movement, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, was established in 1942 as the armed wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. From mid-1943 until the war's end, the UPA carried out massacres of ethnic Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, killing around 100,000 Polish civilians. After the war, the UPA continued to fight the Soviet Union into the 1950s.

  The ethnic Ukrainian presence on both sides of the conflict was enormous. Between 4.5 million and 7 million ethnic Ukrainians served in the Soviet Army, and up to 500,000 troops in pro-Soviet partisan units in 1944 were also Ukrainian. Total losses inflicted upon the Ukrainian population during the war are estimated at 6 million, including roughly one and a half million Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen. Of 8.6 million Soviet troop losses, 1.4 million were ethnic Ukrainians.

  After the war, more than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages had been destroyed. A famine in 1946-1947, caused by drought and destroyed infrastructure, killed at least tens of thousands more. In 1945, the Ukrainian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations under a special arrangement reached at Yalta, giving it voting rights even while it remained part of the Soviet Union. On the 26th of April 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, producing the worst nuclear reactor accident in history.

• 7. Independence and Its Price

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  On the 24th of August 1991, Ukraine proclaimed outright independence, approved by 92% of the electorate in a referendum on the 1st of December of that year. The country inherited a 780,000-man military and the third-largest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world. By 1996, under the Lisbon Protocol of 1992, it had transferred all nuclear weapons to Russia for disposal and declared itself a non-nuclear state.

  The economic transition was brutal. Between 1991 and 1999, Ukraine lost 60% of its GDP. Hyperinflation peaked at 10,000% in 1993. The legacy of those years was a class of extraordinarily powerful oligarchs created through mass privatisation of state property.

  The Orange Revolution of 2004 brought tens of thousands into the streets to protest election rigging in favour of Viktor Yanukovych. Viktor Yushchenko was eventually elected president. A decade later, the Euromaidan protests in the winter of 2013-2014 opposed Yanukovych's refusal to sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement. By the 21st of February 2014 he had fled Ukraine. Russia refused to recognise the interim government and annexed Crimea in late February and early March 2014 using naval forces in Sevastopol and unmarked troops. It then launched a proxy war in the Donbas through the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk republics.

  Despite the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine had surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, Russia launched a full-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022. A year into that invasion, Russian forces controlled about 17% of Ukraine's internationally recognised territory. Ukraine was granted European Union candidate status on the 23rd of June 2022, and in January 2019 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine had been recognised as independent of Moscow, reversing the decision the Patriarch of Constantinople had made in 1686. Ukraine's military, now the sixth largest in the world, operates one of the world's largest and most diverse drone fleets.