In the early Middle Ages, the banks of the Dnieper were the axis of a great trade route linking the Baltic with Constantinople, “from the Varangians to the Greeks”. Along that route, Scandinavian merchants and warriors (the Varangians, or Rus) mixed with the East Slavic tribes and, towards the end of the 9th century, shaped a state centred on Kyiv: Kievan Rus' (Kyivska Rus), the first great civilisation of the East Slavs and the common cradle from which Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians descend. Tradition credits the founding of Kyiv to the legendary prince Kyi and his brothers, and the moving of the capital there to Prince Oleg around 882.
The decisive moment came in 988, when Grand Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr the Great) was baptised and ordered the mass baptism of the people of Kyiv in the waters of the Dnieper, adopting the Byzantine-rite Christianity that came from Constantinople. His grandmother, Princess Olga, had already converted decades earlier, but it was the baptism of 988 that bound the Rus to Orthodox Christianity for good, with its liturgy in Church Slavonic, its alphabet and its art of icons and domes. That choice turned these lands towards Byzantium rather than Latin Rome, a fork in the road whose cultural consequences would last a thousand years.
The golden age came under Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054), who made Kyiv one of the largest cities in Europe, issued the first Slavic law code (the Ruska Pravda), founded libraries and married his family into the royal courts of the continent. From his time date the two great monuments that still crown Kyiv: Saint Sophia's Cathedral, with its Byzantine mosaics, and the Monastery of the Caves (Kyivo-Pecherska Lavra), founded around 1051, the cradle of monasticism and of the first chronicles. The legacy of Kievan Rus' is today the subject of an old dispute between Ukrainian and Russian historiography, both of which claim it; what is not in dispute is that the civilisation they all come from was born on those banks of the Dnieper.
Kievan Rus', split since the 12th century into rival principalities, could not withstand the blow that came from the steppe. In the winter of 1240, the Mongol armies of Batu Khan besieged and razed Kyiv: between 28 November and 6 December, the city was taken, burned and emptied. The chronicles, surely exaggerating, say that of tens of thousands of inhabitants only a few thousand survived, and that barely a handful of the great buildings were left standing. The fall of Kyiv broke the city's centrality for good and placed the Rus lands under the rule of the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate that for generations demanded tribute and submission from the princes.
While the north-east (the future Muscovite Russia) remained for a long time under the Tatar yoke, in the south-west a successor state of the Rus survived and flourished: the principality —later kingdom— of Galicia-Volhynia (Halych-Volyn), which brought together the lands of western Ukraine today. Its most notable ruler, Daniel of Galicia (Danylo Romanovych), rebuilt the towns, negotiated with both the Mongols and the West, and in 1253 was crowned King of Rus (rex Rusiae) with the Pope's recognition. He is credited with founding Lviv, which he named in honour of his son Leo (Lev).
For almost a century, Galicia-Volhynia kept alive the political, cultural and religious tradition of the Rus in the west, looking both to Byzantium and to Central Europe. But once its dynasty died out in the mid-14th century, the kingdom was fought over and carved up by its neighbours: Poland took Galicia, and the remaining Rus lands fell into the orbit of a new power rising in the north, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. So ended the direct political legacy of Kievan Rus', and so began the centuries in which Ukrainians would live under foreign rule.
Over the 14th century, most of the lands of the former Rus —including Kyiv itself, taken around 1362 after the Battle of Blue Waters (Syni Vody)— became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a huge state stretching from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. The Lithuanian grand dukes, pagan at first, ruled over a majority of Slavic and Orthodox subjects, adopted their administrative language (Old Ruthenian, ancestor of Ukrainian and Belarusian) and largely respected their customs and faith. It was a time when the legacy of the Rus lived on under a relatively tolerant foreign sceptre.
Everything changed with the union of Lithuania and Poland. Begun with the dynastic marriage of 1385-1386, the union culminated in 1569 with the Union of Lublin, which merged both states into the Rzeczpospolita, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Under that agreement, the Ukrainian lands were transferred from the Grand Duchy to the Crown of Poland, with profound consequences: the Polish Catholic nobility was imposed on the Orthodox Ruthenian peasants, serfdom spread, and strong cultural and religious pressure followed. The Union of Brest of 1596 also created the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, which kept the Byzantine rite but recognised the Pope's authority, and which split Ukrainians into Uniates and Orthodox, a religious divide that endures.
Under Polish rule, Ukrainian society was stratified in a tense way: an aristocracy and towns that were increasingly Polonised and Catholic at the top; an Orthodox, Ruthenian mass of peasants bound to serfdom at the bottom. In that world of great estates, magnates and serfs, on the wild frontier of the southern steppe where the state's power barely reached, a new and explosive phenomenon was about to emerge, made up of free, armed men who accepted neither the lord's yoke nor the king's law: the Cossacks.
In the ownerless lands of the steppe, beyond the rapids (the porohy) of the lower Dnieper, runaway peasants, adventurers and free men gathered from the 15th century onwards, living from hunting, fishing and war against the Tatars and the Turks. They were the Zaporozhian Cossacks (from za porohy, “beyond the rapids”), organised in a self-governing military community, the Zaporozhian Sich, which elected its leaders and ran itself through its own assemblies. Over time they became a formidable military force and the symbol of a Ukrainian freedom that defied both the Polish king and the neighbouring empires.
The great explosion came in 1648, when the Cossack hetman (leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a mass uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Backed by the Ruthenian peasants and allied at first with the Crimean Khanate, Khmelnytsky dealt the Polish armies a series of defeats and freed much of the Ukrainian lands, giving rise to a Cossack state of its own: the Hetmanate (the Zaporozhian Host), in what is now central Ukraine. The uprising also had a terrible side: it was accompanied by mass killings of the Jewish and Polish population, one of the largest pogroms in pre-modern European history.
Cornered between Poland, Crimea and the Ottoman Empire, Khmelnytsky looked for a powerful protector and found one in the Tsar of Muscovy: in 1654, the Pereiaslav Agreement placed the Hetmanate under the Tsar's protection, a pact whose meaning is fiercely disputed —the Cossacks saw it as an alliance between equals; Moscow, as submission— and which marked the beginning of Ukraine's long absorption by Russia. The following decades, known as “the Ruin”, brought devastating wars that split the Ukrainian lands between Poland, Russia and the Ottomans. The last great bid for emancipation was that of Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who in 1708 sided with Sweden against Tsar Peter the Great; his defeat at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 sealed the Hetmanate's fate, and Catherine the Great finally abolished it in 1764, also razing the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775.
At the end of the 18th century, the partitions of Poland and Russian expansion left Ukrainians divided between two great empires, a situation that would last more than a hundred years. The vast majority —the centre, east and south, including Kyiv— came under the Russian Empire, which called these lands “Little Russia” (Malorossiya) and denied the very existence of a Ukrainian nation distinct from the Russian one. The western minority —Galicia, with its capital in Lviv (Lemberg), and further south Bukovina— came under the Habsburg monarchy in 1772, which organised it as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.
The two experiences were very different, and they explain many of the differences that still run through the country today. In Russian-ruled Ukraine, the tsarist regime pursued a policy of Russification and repression of Ukrainian language and culture: the language was dismissed as a mere “dialect” and its public use was even banned by decree (the Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876). Serfdom, which tied peasants to the land, was not abolished until 1861. In Austrian Galicia, by contrast, especially after the liberal reforms of the 1860s, Ukrainians (called Ruthenians there) had their own schools, press, members of parliament and associations, and the Greek Catholic Church acted as a pillar of national identity.
That is why Galicia became the “Ukrainian Piedmont”, the refuge where the national movement persecuted in the east could develop freely. A modern Ukrainian political and intellectual life flourished there, while Lviv grew into a great multicultural city of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In the Russian east, despite the repression, the nation was also waking up: in the first half of the 19th century, the poet Taras Shevchenko —a former serf whose freedom was bought, later exiled by the Tsar— gave Ukrainians, with his Kobzar, a literary language and a national consciousness that no ban could ever erase. Shevchenko is today the foremost symbol of the Ukrainian nation.
The simultaneous collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires at the end of the First World War opened up, for the first time in centuries, the possibility of a Ukrainian state. In March 1917, after the fall of the Tsar, a national assembly was formed in Kyiv, the Central Rada, which proclaimed autonomy and then, in January 1918, the full independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In the west, on the ruins of Austria-Hungary, the West Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed in 1918, centred on Lviv, and the two announced their union on 22 January 1919 (the “Act of Union”, which Ukraine commemorates every year).
But independence sank into the chaos of a war of all against all. Between 1917 and 1921, the Ukrainian lands were a battlefield for the Bolshevik Red Army, the White Armies, Polish troops, the Germans, Nestor Makhno's anarchists and several rival Ukrainian governments. It was a period of extreme violence, with famines and a wave of pogroms that cost tens of thousands of Jews their lives. In the west, the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-1919 ended in defeat for the Ukrainians, and Galicia was incorporated into the new Poland; Bukovina went to Romania and Transcarpathia to Czechoslovakia.
In the centre and east the Bolsheviks finally prevailed, and in 1922 they brought Ukraine in as one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In its early years, the Soviet policy of “indigenisation” (korenizatsiya) actually favoured Ukrainian language and culture, and a brilliant generation of writers, artists and filmmakers flourished. That cultural spring ended brutally in the early 1930s, when Stalin wiped it out in the purges Ukrainian memory calls “the Executed Renaissance”, and unleashed an even greater catastrophe on the Ukrainian countryside.
Between 1932 and 1933, Ukraine suffered one of the greatest catastrophes in its history: a mass famine caused by the policies of Stalin's Soviet regime, known in Ukrainian as Holodomor, “killing by starvation”. It was not a natural famine. It was the result of the forced collectivisation of agriculture, of grain quotas that were impossible to meet and of the relentless requisitions with which the state confiscated the peasants' very last food reserves, while sealing the republic's borders to stop people fleeing in search of food.
The death toll is the subject of ongoing research and historiographical debate. The most rigorous demographic estimates put the number of famine deaths in Ukraine at around 3.5 to 5 million people in little more than a year, within a wider Soviet famine that killed several million more in other regions. Specialists agree that the exact figure will never be known for certain. Intent is also debated: many historians and several states describe it as a deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian nation, while other researchers see it as the atrocious —though foreseeable and largely avoidable— consequence of a criminal collectivisation applied with particular harshness in Ukraine. What is not in dispute is the scale of the horror, nor the responsibility of the regime that caused it and then denied and concealed it for decades.
For the rest of the Soviet era, even mentioning the famine was forbidden, and the world was slow to learn of it. Only with independence could Ukraine openly honour its dead: today the Holodomor is officially recognised as genocide by the Ukrainian Parliament and by dozens of countries, it is remembered every fourth Saturday of November, and it has a national memorial in Kyiv. The wound of 1933 —entire villages emptied, the destruction of much of the peasantry that was the heart of the nation— was etched into Ukrainian memory as the ultimate symbol of what Moscow's rule meant for the country.
No region of Europe suffered the Second World War more devastatingly than Ukraine, which became the main battlefield of the Eastern Front and the scene of some of the century's worst crimes. After the German-Soviet pact of 1939, the Soviet Union annexed eastern Galicia, western Volhynia and northern Bukovina, subjecting their inhabitants to NKVD deportations and executions. Then, in June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and occupied all of Ukraine, treating it as a space for colonisation and plunder within its plans of extermination.
The German occupation was extremely brutal. A huge part of the Holocaust was carried out on Ukrainian soil: around one and a half million Ukrainian Jews were murdered, many of them shot on the outskirts of their own towns by mobile SS killing squads. The symbol of that slaughter is the ravine of Babi Yar, on the edge of Kyiv, where over two days in September 1941 the Germans murdered almost 34,000 Jews, and where they went on to execute tens of thousands more people. Millions of Ukrainian civilians died from reprisals, hunger and forced labour, and more than two million were deported to Germany as slave labour.
In Ukraine, the war was also a conflict of tragic complexity. While millions of Ukrainians fought and died in the ranks of the Red Army, in the west an armed nationalist movement emerged —the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), linked to Stepan Bandera's faction of the OUN— which fought the Soviets in the hope of an independent Ukraine, collaborated with the Germans at various points and, in 1943-44, carried out the ethnic cleansing and massacre of tens of thousands of Poles in Volhynia, an episode that still poisons memory between the two countries. When the Red Army retook Ukraine in 1943-1944, the human and material losses were colossal: an estimated five to seven million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died, and entire cities lay in ruins.
Once the war was over, Ukraine was rebuilt and reintegrated into the Soviet Union, now with almost complete borders: in 1945 Transcarpathia was finally added, and in 1954, to mark the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Agreement, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev —who had himself come of age politically in Ukraine— transferred the Crimean peninsula from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one, an internal administrative handover whose consequences would erupt half a century later. The armed nationalist resistance in the west was crushed in the early 1950s, with mass deportations to Siberia.
The post-war Soviet decades brought heavy industrialisation, urbanisation and relative stability, but also cultural Russification and harsh repression of any national dissent: in the 1960s and 1970s, a generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and activists (the shistdesiatnyky, “the Sixtiers”) was persecuted and imprisoned for defending the country's language and rights. Ukraine was nonetheless one of the richest and most populous republics of the USSR, its breadbasket and one of its great industrial and military bases.
The blow that began to crack that façade came on 26 April 1986, when reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in the north of the country, exploded during a badly executed safety test on a reactor of flawed design. It was the worst nuclear accident in history: a radioactive cloud spread over much of Europe, the nearby town of Pripyat and tens of thousands of people were evacuated for good, and a thirty-kilometre exclusion zone was set up that remains in place today. The response mobilised hundreds of thousands of “liquidators”. The regime's initial attempt to hide the disaster, and the slowness and secrecy with which it acted, badly undermined trust in Moscow and gave an enormous boost to the civic and national awakening that, five years later, would lead to independence.
Gorbachev's perestroika opened up a space of freedom in the second half of the 1980s, and Ukraine was quick to seize it: civic movements such as Rukh emerged, the memory of the Holodomor and Chernobyl was reclaimed, and the republics began to demand sovereignty. When the coup attempted by hardline communists in Moscow failed in August 1991, the Ukrainian Parliament declared independence on 24 August. On 1 December 1991, a referendum ratified it overwhelmingly: more than 90% of voters backed independence, with a majority in every region, including Crimea. The Soviet Union was dissolved a few weeks later.
The first years of the new Ukraine were hard: a chaotic economic transition, hyperinflation, corruption and the weight of a ruling class inherited from the Soviet apparatus. In 1994 the country took a momentous step by giving up the huge nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the USSR — the third largest in the world — in exchange for security guarantees set out in the Budapest Memorandum, signed by Russia among others. Moscow would violate those guarantees twenty years later.
Independent Ukraine soon showed a remarkable capacity for civic mobilisation. In the winter of 2004, the electoral fraud that handed victory to the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych brought millions of people onto the streets in the Orange Revolution, a peaceful protest that forced a rerun of the vote and the victory of the reformist Viktor Yushchenko. Ten years later, in the winter of 2013-2014, the decision by Yanukovych — by then president — to back out of the association agreement with the European Union sparked the Euromaidan, or Revolution of Dignity: months of protests on Kyiv's Independence Square that culminated in February 2014 with the deaths of around a hundred protesters at the hands of the security forces, Yanukovych's flight to Russia and the installation of a government determined to bring the country closer to Europe.
Russia's response to the Euromaidan was immediate and military. In February and March 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia — the so-called “little green men” — took control of the Crimean peninsula, and after a referendum held under military occupation and considered illegal by the overwhelming majority of the international community, Russia annexed Crimea on 18 March 2014. Shortly afterwards, the UN General Assembly voted not to recognise the annexation. At almost the same time, Moscow encouraged and armed a separatist uprising in the eastern regions of the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk), which turned into a low-intensity war that dragged on for eight years and cost tens of thousands of lives.
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian columns attacked simultaneously from the north (through Belarus towards Kyiv), from the east and from the south (through Crimea), with the Kremlin's stated aim of decapitating the Ukrainian state within days. The plan failed: under the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who refused to leave the capital, the Ukrainian army and Ukrainian society held out, stopped the advance on Kyiv and forced Russian forces to withdraw from the north of the country in the spring of 2022. The war then became a long war of attrition, with a front line stretching across the east and south of the country.
The 2022 invasion triggered the largest war in Europe since 1945 and a humanitarian tragedy on an enormous scale: cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut and Kharkiv were devastated, war crimes such as the killings of civilians in Bucha were documented, and millions of Ukrainians became refugees or were displaced. Military casualties on both sides run into the hundreds of thousands. At the same time, the war sealed Ukrainian national identity like few things could and sped up the country's turn to the West: in 2022 Ukraine was granted candidate status for the European Union. At the time of writing, the war continues with no resolution in sight, and its outcome will shape not only Ukraine's future but the security order of the whole of Europe. This is a story still being written, and Ukraine faces it with a determination forged over a thousand years on the frontier of empires.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnieper, is one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe and one of the most steeped in history. Tradition places its founding in legendary times, the work of Prince Kyi and his brothers, and by the 9th century it was already the hub of the trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” and the capital of Kievan Rus', the first great state of the Eastern Slavs. Medieval chronicles called it “the mother of the cities of Rus'”, and after the baptism of 988 it was from here that Orthodox Christianity spread, the faith that would define the whole region.
Under Yaroslav the Wise, in the 11th century, Kyiv reached its peak as one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, with hundreds of churches, a lively cultural life and dynastic ties to courts across the continent. Its two most famous monuments, now World Heritage Sites, survive from that golden age: St Sophia's Cathedral and the Monastery of the Caves, described below. The Mongol destruction of 1240 sank the city for centuries, and Kyiv then passed through Lithuanian, Polish and Russian hands before it rose again.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Kyiv grew once more as a major city of the Russian Empire, then as capital of Soviet Ukraine (from 1934) and of independent Ukraine (from 1991). It was the scene of the Holocaust at Babi Yar, of the civic revolutions of 2004 and 2014 — whose central square, the Maidan, became a symbol worldwide — and, since 2022, of the siege that failed to take it. Its skyline of golden domes above the hills of the Dnieper sums up Ukraine's thousand years of history better than any other.
Kyiv's most revered monument is St Sophia's Cathedral (Sofiivskyi sobor), commissioned by Yaroslav the Wise in the 11th century in imitation of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, as a sign that Rus' was joining the great Christian civilisation of Byzantium. Beneath its baroque exterior, added centuries later, it keeps the original 11th-century structure, frescoes and splendid Byzantine mosaics, including the famous image of the Virgin Orans. It was the seat of the metropolitan, a burial place for princes — Yaroslav himself lies here — and the great spiritual and intellectual centre of Rus'.
The other great complex is the Lavra of the Caves (Kyievo-Pecherska Lavra), the Monastery of the Caves, founded around 1051 by monks who withdrew to live in tunnels dug into the hills above the Dnieper. It became the most important monastery in the Eastern Slavic world: the cradle of Orthodox monasticism, a workshop of icons and chronicles — the Chronicle of Nestor, a key source for the history of Rus', came from here — and a place of pilgrimage. Its catacombs hold the mummified relics of monks venerated for centuries.
Together, St Sophia's and the Lavra make up one of the sites inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List, a unique testimony to the splendour of Kievan Rus' and to Byzantine art on Slavic soil. Their golden domes, gleaming above the river, are the very image of Kyiv and one of the great artistic and religious treasures of all Eastern Europe.
Kyiv also holds the memory of the two great tragedies of Ukraine's 20th century. On the outskirts of the city, the Babi Yar ravine was the scene of one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust: on 29 and 30 September 1941, shortly after the German occupation began, the Nazis murdered almost 34,000 of Kyiv's Jews there in just two days, and over the following months they went on shooting tens of thousands more people at the same spot: Jews, Soviet prisoners, Roma and others. In the Soviet era the crime was hushed up and the site all but erased; today Babi Yar is a memorial to the victims.
In the city centre, Independence Square — Maidan Nezalezhnosti, known simply as the Maidan — became the stage for Ukraine's recent history. The Orange Revolution gathered here in 2004, and above all, in the winter of 2013-2014, the Euromaidan or Revolution of Dignity rose up here, when for months hundreds of thousands of people occupied the square to demand a European course for the country and the fall of Yanukovych's government.
The Maidan had its tragedy too: in February 2014 the security forces opened fire on the protesters and killed around a hundred people, whom Ukraine remembers as the “Heavenly Hundred”. Those deaths hastened the president's flight and the country's political turnaround. Since then, the Maidan has been a sacred place for Ukrainians, a place of democracy and of the struggle for independence, and around the world its name has become a byword for a people's will to decide its own destiny.
Just over a hundred kilometres north of Kyiv, near the border with Belarus, the Chernobyl (Chornobyl) nuclear power plant was the scene of the worst nuclear accident in history. In the early hours of 26 April 1986, during a badly planned safety test on a reactor of inherently dangerous design, reactor number 4 suffered a sudden power surge and exploded, releasing a huge quantity of radioactive material into the atmosphere that spread across much of Europe.
The consequences were immense. The first firefighters and workers on the scene received lethal doses of radiation; the nearby town of Pripyat, built for the plant's workers, was evacuated completely and abandoned for good, and is now a famous ghost town. An exclusion zone with a radius of about thirty kilometres was set up; tens of thousands of people were moved out of it, and it remains closed to this day. Cleaning up and containing the reactor mobilised hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” from all over the Soviet Union, many of whom paid for their work with their health.
The Soviet regime's attempt to hide the scale of the disaster, and its slow, secretive response, undermined Ukrainians' trust in Moscow and fed the independence movement. Over the years, and paradoxically, the exclusion zone — today a UNESCO site for its commemorative value — also became an accidental wildlife sanctuary and a destination for historical tourism, where visitors see the reactor's sarcophagus and the ruins of Pripyat as a sober testimony to what happened. During the 2022 invasion the zone was back in the news when Russian troops temporarily occupied it on their advance towards Kyiv.
In the centre of the country, the city of Uman holds two very different and fascinating stories. The first is that of its landscape gem: Sofiyivka Park, one of the most beautiful romantic gardens in Eastern Europe, created at the end of the 18th century (around 1796) by the Polish count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki as a gift for his wife Sofia, after whom it is named. With its lakes, grottoes, artificial waterfalls and statues on mythological themes, it is a masterpiece of the garden art of its time and one of the most visited places in the region.
The second story is a religious one, and it gives Uman worldwide fame. The city is the burial place of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism and creator of one of its most influential branches, Breslov Hasidism. From the year after his death, his followers have come to pray at his grave, and over time the visit grew into a major annual pilgrimage.
Every year at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), tens of thousands of Hasidic pilgrims — more than thirty thousand in the busiest years, from Israel, the United States and all over the world — travel to Uman to spend the holiday by Rabbi Nachman's tomb, in one of the largest Jewish pilgrimages on the planet. Not even the war that began in 2022 has fully interrupted this tradition. In a single city, then, Uman sums up two layers of Ukraine's rich multicultural history: that of the old Polish nobility and that of the Hasidic Jewish world that flourished in these lands.
The city of Poltava, in central-eastern Ukraine, gave its name to one of the most decisive battles in European history. During the Great Northern War, King Charles XII of Sweden, then the great military power of the north, invaded Russia intending to defeat Tsar Peter the Great. He had a powerful Ukrainian ally in the venture: Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack hetman, who broke with Moscow in 1708 and joined the Swedes in the hope of freeing Ukraine from Russian control.
On 8 July 1709 (27 June in the old calendar), near Poltava, Peter the Great's army crushed the Swedish and Cossack forces. The defeat was catastrophic for Sweden: it ended its status as a great power and marked the start of Russian dominance in Eastern Europe. For Ukraine, the disaster meant the end of Mazepa's hopes — he fled with Charles XII to the Ottoman Empire, where he died — and sealed the final subjection of the Cossack Hetmanate to Russia, which over the following decades stripped it of its autonomy until abolishing it altogether.
Beyond the battle, Poltava holds a special place in Ukrainian culture. It was the Cossack heartland par excellence and the birthplace of key figures in the national literature: Ivan Kotliarevsky was born and wrote here, and his Aeneid (Eneïda), published in 1798, is considered the first work of modern Ukrainian literature, written in the everyday language of the people rather than in Church Slavonic. So the name of Poltava recalls both the great political defeat of Cossack Ukraine and the literary birth of modern Ukraine.
North-eastern Ukraine forms a historic region known as Slobozhanshchyna (Sloboda Ukraine), centred on the city of Kharkiv. The name comes from the slobody, the free settlements that in the 16th and 17th centuries populated this empty, dangerous frontier, then exposed to raids by the Crimean Tatars. The settlers, mostly Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants fleeing Polish serfdom, received land and certain freedoms in exchange for defending the southern border of the Russian state.
Kharkiv was founded around the middle of the 17th century as one of those frontier fortresses. Over time, as the defensive line moved south and the Tatar threat faded, the area became a prosperous farming and trading region. In 1805 one of the first universities of the Russian Empire on Ukrainian soil was founded in Kharkiv, making the city an early hub of cultural and intellectual life and, later, a centre of the Ukrainian national awakening.
Throughout the 19th century, Kharkiv grew as a railway junction and as one of the great industrial centres of the southern Russian Empire, with factories, banks and a lively urban life. That industrial and academic vocation would shape its destiny in the 20th century, when the city, the largest in eastern Ukraine, became for a few years the capital of the new Soviet Ukraine and the setting for some of the most brilliant and most tragic chapters in the country's cultural history.
Between December 1919 and January 1934, Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Bolsheviks chose it for its strong working-class, industrial character and its closeness to Russia, at a time when they did not yet fully control the more nationalist Kyiv. During those years Kharkiv went through a frantic expansion: it filled with bold Constructivist buildings, among them the gigantic Derzhprom complex, one of the masterpieces of 1920s avant-garde architecture, and its population soared.
Those were also the years of the Soviet policy of “Ukrainisation”, which in the 1920s promoted the Ukrainian language and culture and drew an extraordinary generation of writers, poets, playwrights and artists to the capital. It was a true cultural renaissance, one of the most creative moments in all of Ukrainian history, with figures such as Mykola Khvylovy and the theatre director Les Kurbas breaking new ground in literature and the arts.
That springtime ended in the most brutal way. In the early 1930s, while the Holodomor ravaged the Ukrainian countryside, Stalin unleashed terror against that cultural elite: most of those writers and artists were arrested, deported or shot in the purges, and many others took their own lives. Ukrainian memory calls that annihilated generation the “Executed Renaissance” (Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia). In 1934 Stalin moved the capital back to Kyiv, and Kharkiv remained the great second city, a huge industrial and scientific centre. In the war that began in 2022, being so close to the border, it has been one of the cities hit hardest by Russian bombing, and its resistance has become a national symbol.
On the banks of the great river that gives it its name, Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk) is Ukraine's fourth-largest city and one of its great industrial centres. It was founded by the Russian Empire in the late 18th century, as part of the colonisation of newly conquered New Russia, and named Yekaterinoslav, “the glory of Catherine”, in honour of Empress Catherine II. In 1787, during her famous journey through the south, she symbolically laid the first stone of its cathedral. Prince Grigory Potemkin, the empress's favourite, conceived the city as a great imperial capital of the south.
During the 19th century, and above all once the railway arrived and the iron and coal deposits of the Dnieper basin and the Donbas began to be mined, Yekaterinoslav became an industrial powerhouse. Steel, metallurgy and chemicals made it one of the fastest-growing cities in the Russian Empire. In 1926, by then in the Soviet era, it was renamed Dnipropetrovsk, combining the name of the Dnieper River with that of the communist leader Grigory Petrovsky. Only in 2016, under the “decommunisation” laws, did it get back a neutral name, Dnipro.
In the Soviet era, Dnipro was a “closed city”, off limits to foreigners because it housed the country's most secret military industry. Here, in the huge Yuzhmash plant, ballistic missiles and space rockets were designed and built, which made the city one of the hearts of the Soviet missile programme. Today Dnipro is a thriving industrial, financial and tech centre. During the war that began in 2022, it has played a key logistical and humanitarian role as the large rear city behind the eastern front.
Kharkiv and Dnipro are the big cities of eastern Ukraine. It's a vast region of steppe and heavy industry that also takes in the Donbas coal basin (Donetsk and Luhansk), further to the south-east. From the late 19th century, the discovery and mining of its enormous coal and iron reserves made the whole east one of the great industrial hubs, first of the Russian Empire and then of the Soviet Union. Mines, blast furnaces, steelworks and arms factories made this land the country's economic engine.
For generations that industrialisation drew workers from all over the Soviet Union, especially Russians. As a result the east, and the Donbas in particular, had a largely Russian-speaking population and very close economic and human ties with Russia. At the same time, the east is historically and mostly Ukrainian, and cities like Kharkiv and Dnipro have been centres of Ukrainian culture and science. Reducing the region to a simple border between “Russian” and “Ukrainian” would therefore be an oversimplification: its identity has always been mixed and complex.
That complexity turned tragic from 2014, when Russia exploited and fuelled discontent in the Donbas to stir up an armed separatist uprising. Backed by Russian military support, it set off a war in Donetsk and Luhansk. That conflict dragged on for eight years, killed thousands of people and was the prelude to the full-scale invasion of 2022, in which the east became the main battlefield. Whole cities such as Mariupol and Bakhmut were razed. Kharkiv and Dnipro, just behind that front, have held out under constant bombardment. Today they embody eastern Ukraine's determination to defend its land.
Eastern and central Ukraine are joined by the Dnieper (Dnipro), Europe's third-longest river and the country's great historical artery. It crosses Ukraine from north to south for more than a thousand kilometres before flowing into the Black Sea. Kievan Rus was born on its banks, and for centuries its course shaped trade routes and borders. That included the fearsome rapids below present-day Dnipro, and the very territory of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who settled “beyond the rapids”.
In the Soviet era, the Dnieper was tamed by a chain of large dams and hydroelectric plants that flooded the old rapids and created huge reservoirs. The most famous was the Dniprohes power station, next to Zaporizhzhia. It opened in 1932 as a monumental symbol of Stalinist industrialisation and of the country's electrification. Its construction came at a very high human cost, yet it was held up as one of the Soviet Union's great achievements. The river thus became the backbone of Ukraine's energy and industry.
Today the Dnieper is still the country's geographical, economic and symbolic axis. Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson all stand on it, and much of Ukraine depends on its waters for energy, irrigation and transport. The war that began in 2022 made the river a front-line strategic line once again. In 2023 the destruction of the Kakhovka dam caused a humanitarian and ecological disaster along its lower course. From Kievan Rus to the present day, Ukraine's history has been written again and again on the banks of the Dnieper.
Odesa (Odessa) is a young city compared with Kyiv or Lviv, and its history is that of the Russian conquest of the Black Sea coast. For centuries these southern steppes — known as New Russia or Novorossiya — were under the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, with a small Turkish-Tatar stronghold called Khadjibey on the site of today's city. After defeating the Ottomans, Empress Catherine II the Great ordered a port and a new city to be founded there in 1794, which soon received the name Odesa.
The city's growth owes a great deal to the foreigners who governed it in its first decades, above all the Duc de Richelieu, an émigré French nobleman who was its governor from 1803 to 1814 and is considered the main architect of its rise: he boosted trade, attracted settlers and investors and gave Odesa modern infrastructure. His statue now crowns the city. Made a free port, Odesa grew at a dizzying pace thanks to the export of Ukrainian wheat, until by the late 19th century it had become the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire.
Odesa was thus born as a city open to the sea and the world, planned with broad avenues and elegant 19th-century architecture, and populated by an extraordinary mix of peoples: Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Greeks, Italians, French and Armenians. From that mix came an urban character all its own — mercantile, cosmopolitan, ironic and rebellious — that made Odesa unlike any other city and left a deep mark on the literature, humour and music of the whole region.
Few places in the world had a Jewish life as intense and creative as Odesa in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawn by the prosperity of the free port and a relatively tolerant climate, Jews came to make up nearly a third of the city's population, and Odesa became one of the great centres of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, both religious and, above all, modern and secular.
Odesa was the birthplace or home of a brilliant generation of Jewish writers and thinkers: figures of the revival of Hebrew and Yiddish literature wrote here, and it produced the great short-story writer Isaac Babel, whose Odessa Stories immortalised the colourful world of the Jewish gangsters of the Moldavanka district. The city was also an important hub in the birth of political Zionism. That splendour, however, had a bloody flip side: Odesa suffered some of the worst pogroms in the Russian Empire, with waves of anti-Jewish violence that were especially severe in 1905.
Odesa's Jewish community was almost entirely wiped out during the Second World War. The city was occupied by Romanian troops allied with Nazi Germany, who in the autumn of 1941 massacred and deported tens of thousands of Odesa's Jews in one of the most atrocious episodes of the Holocaust in the region. Even so, the memory of Jewish “old Odesa” — its humour, its songs, its way of speaking — survived as an essential part of the city's identity and myth, and the city is still famous for its irony and its unique spirit.
Odesa's most famous monument is the great staircase that runs down from the city centre to the port: the Potemkin Stairs (Potiomkinski), built between 1837 and 1841 as a monumental approach to the sea. Designed with a clever optical illusion — seen from the top, only the steps are visible; seen from the bottom, only the landings — it is the symbolic gateway to the city and one of its most recognisable images.
The stairs owe their worldwide fame to cinema. In 1905, amid the revolution shaking the Russian Empire, the crew of the battleship Potemkin, anchored off Odesa, mutinied against their officers, in an episode that became a symbol of workers' and military rebellion against tsarism. Two decades later, the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein brought the mutiny to the screen in his film Battleship Potemkin (1925), one of the most influential works in the history of cinema.
The Odesa Steps scene in that film — in which the tsar's soldiers fire on a defenceless crowd fleeing down the steps, with the famous shot of the runaway pram — is one of the most quoted and imitated sequences in world cinema, even though the massacre as Eisenstein shows it is a dramatic recreation rather than a literal event. Thanks to it, the Odesa stairs are etched into the universal imagination, and today visitors walk up and down them following, sometimes unknowingly, in the footsteps of one of the founding images of film.
In the 20th century Odesa remained the great port of the south and a city with a strong personality within the Soviet Union. During the Second World War it held out against a long siege in 1941 before falling to the Axis forces, and for its defence it later received the Soviet title of “Hero City”. Under Romanian-German occupation it suffered, as mentioned, the extermination of its large Jewish community. Rebuilt after the war, it kept its reputation as a cheerful, seafaring and somewhat unruly city, with its mix of languages and its trademark humour.
With independence in 1991, Odesa became part of Ukraine as its main outlet to the sea and one of the country's great ports, essential for exporting Ukrainian grain to the world. A city with a mostly Russian-speaking population but strong Ukrainian roots, it embodies the cultural complexity of the country's south. In May 2014, amid the conflict that broke out after the Euromaidan, a violent clash between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian demonstrators ended in a fire at the Trade Unions House that killed dozens of people, one of the most tragic episodes of that year.
Since the Russian invasion of 2022, Odesa has once again been on the front line. A top strategic target because of its port and its position on the Black Sea, it has suffered numerous missile and drone attacks that have damaged port infrastructure and even its historic centre, protected by UNESCO, which in 2023 inscribed the centre of Odesa on the World Heritage List and, at the same time, on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Despite the bombing, the city stands as a symbol of resistance and of the unmistakable spirit of southern Ukraine.
Odesa is the capital of a wider region, southern Ukraine on the Black Sea: a land of fertile steppes, salt flats, lagoons and coastline that for centuries was a shifting frontier between the settled world and the nomadic one. Before the Russian conquest, these plains were the domain of the Crimean Tatars and the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and earlier still they were crossed by Scythians, Greeks and other peoples of antiquity: colonies of classical Greece flourished on the northern Black Sea coast, and their remains are still being studied.
Under the Russian Empire, after the annexation in the late 18th century, the whole region was colonised and resettled as “New Russia” (Novorossiya), with waves of Ukrainian, Russian, German, Bulgarian, Greek and other settlers who turned the steppe into a breadbasket and a land of new cities. That relatively recent history of settlement explains the mixed, multicultural character of the south, distinct from both western Ukraine and the Cossack heartland.
Today the south is one of Ukraine's great agricultural and industrial regions and its maritime front. Its ports — led by Odesa — are the key to exporting Ukrainian wheat and sunflower, on which much of the food supply of countries in Africa and Asia depends; that is why the blockade of and attacks on these ports during the war that began in 2022 had global repercussions. Between Black Sea beaches, estuaries, vineyards and a vast steppe, the south keeps its own identity within the Ukrainian mosaic: that of a land open to the sea and to all the peoples who settled it.
Lviv (Lvov in Russian, Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German) is the great city of western Ukraine and one of the country's cities with the richest, most multicultural history. It was founded around the middle of the 13th century by King Daniel of Galicia, who named it after his son Leo (Lev). After the fall of the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, the city passed to the Kingdom of Poland in the 14th century, and over the following centuries it prospered as a major trading centre on the routes between the Black Sea, the Baltic and Central Europe, with Polish, Ruthenian (Ukrainian), Armenian and Jewish communities living side by side within its walls.
That past left Lviv with one of the most beautiful and best-preserved historic centres in Eastern Europe, a mix of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Art Nouveau styles that earned it a place on UNESCO's World Heritage List. Churches of three different rites — Latin, Greek Catholic and Armenian — the great Market Square (Rynok), cobbled lanes and a deep-rooted café culture give the city an unmistakably Central European feel, very different from the cities of the centre and east of the country.
From 1772, with the First Partition of Poland, Lviv came under the Habsburg Empire as capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and that Austrian period, which lasted until 1918, left a deep mark on its character. After the First World War it was fought over by Ukrainians and Poles and ended up in Poland; only in 1939-1945, with the Soviet annexations and the tragedy of the war, did it become a city with a Ukrainian majority. Today Lviv is the great stronghold of Ukrainian identity and language and the cultural heart of the west of the country.
While the national language and culture were persecuted, and even banned by decree, in the part of Ukraine under the Russian Empire, Galicia under the Habsburgs became the refuge where the Ukrainian national movement could develop freely. That is why historians call Galicia the “Ukrainian Piedmont”, comparing it with the region that served as the base for the unification of Italy: it was the territory from which national consciousness spread to the rest of the country.
After the liberal reforms of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, especially from the 1860s onwards, the Ukrainians of Galicia (known there as Ruthenians) gained political rights, schools, a press, cultural societies such as Prosvita, and deputies in the parliaments of Lviv and Vienna. Although the administration and the aristocracy were dominated by Poles, and although tensions between Poles and Ukrainians over control of the province never let up, the empire's framework of freedoms allowed a Ukrainian national life that was impossible on the other side of the Russian border.
A central role in that survival was played by the Greek Catholic Church, born of the Union of Brest in 1596, which combined the Byzantine rite with allegiance to Rome and became the national church of western Ukrainians and the guardian of their language and traditions. Its greatest figure, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was for decades the great moral patriarch of Ukrainian Galicia. Suppressed and banned in the Soviet era, the Greek Catholic Church re-emerged with independence and is still one of the features that set the west apart from the rest of Ukraine.
Further south, at the foot of the Carpathians, the city of Chernivtsi is the historic capital of Bukovina, a borderland whose history reflects the complexity of Eastern Europe like few others. First mentioned around 1408 as a town of the Principality of Moldavia, Chernivtsi later passed to the Ottomans and, in 1774, to the Habsburg Empire, which made Bukovina a province of its own and turned its capital into an elegant Central European city.
Under Austrian rule, Chernivtsi flourished as an exceptional melting pot: Ukrainians, Romanians, Germans, Jews, Poles and Armenians lived side by side, and it came to be nicknamed “Little Vienna” or “the Jerusalem on the Prut” for its vibrant Jewish and cultural life. Its most admired monument dates from that golden age: the former residence of the Metropolitans of Bukovina and Dalmatia, a splendid 19th-century architectural ensemble that now houses the university and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Bukovina was also one of the first places where the Ukrainian national movement grew strong, alongside Galicia, with its own network of schools and associations. After the fall of Austria-Hungary in 1918, the region was annexed by Romania; only in 1940, and definitively after the Second World War, did its northern half — including Chernivtsi — pass to Soviet Ukraine, while the south remained in Romania, a division that still stands. From all that past, Chernivtsi keeps a mixed, cosmopolitan character that makes it unique among Ukrainian cities.
The far south-west of Ukraine is dominated by the green wall of the Carpathians, the country's only major mountain range, covered in beech and fir forests — some protected as UNESCO Natural Heritage — and dotted with villages, high pastures and mountain rivers. It is a region of spectacular nature and remarkably rich folk culture, very different from that of the plains.
The high Carpathian valleys are home to one of the most distinctive groups of the Ukrainian people: the Hutsuls, highlanders of the uplands of Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia. Shepherds and craftspeople, the Hutsuls preserved for centuries, thanks to the isolation of their mountains, their own way of life, dialect, music, dress and traditions, which made them a symbol of Ukrainian folklore. Their art — weaving, woodcarving, ceramics, the famous decorated Easter eggs (pysanky) — is celebrated throughout the country.
The Hutsul world and the Carpathian landscape inspired some of the great works of Ukrainian culture, such as the novel Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, brought to the screen in 1965 by Sergei Parajanov in a film that is a classic of Soviet and Ukrainian art. Today the Carpathians are also the country's top destination for nature and mountains: hiking and skiing around peaks such as Hoverla — the highest in Ukraine — spas, wooden villages and a highland hospitality that draws travellers from Ukraine and abroad.
On the other side of the range, on the south-western slopes of the Carpathians, lies Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia), a strip of land that for almost a thousand years had a history entirely different from the rest of Ukraine. Geographically cut off by the mountains, from the early 11th century it came under the Kingdom of Hungary, of which it was part for nearly a millennium. This left a distinctive cultural, architectural and religious mark, with Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Jewish influences alongside the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) majority.
Its capital, Uzhhorod, is a quiet border town on the banks of the Uzh River, crowned by a medieval castle and with a Central European feel of tree-lined streets and cafés. It was here, with the Union of Uzhhorod in 1646, that the Ruthenians of the region joined the Greek Catholic Church, a milestone in their religious history. The city is also home to one of the country's great open-air museums of folk architecture, with wooden churches moved from villages in the area.
After the fall of Austria-Hungary, Transcarpathia became part of the new Czechoslovakia in 1919, and in 1938-1939 it lived through a brief and remarkable episode: the proclamation of a short-lived autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine, immediately crushed by Hungary. Only in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, was the region incorporated into Soviet Ukraine, completing the country's map. With its mix of peoples and its crossroads of borders — today it borders Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Poland — Transcarpathia remains the most diverse and most Central European of Ukraine's regions.
Western Ukraine holds two of the country's most spectacular fortresses, witnesses to centuries of border wars between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire. The first is Kamianets-Podilskyi, in the historic region of Podolia: an old town perched on a rocky island that a bend of the Smotrych River encircles like a natural moat, linked to the mainland by a bridge leading to an imposing stone castle. This extraordinary setting made Kamianets one of the key strongholds of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against the Turks and Tatars; it was in Ottoman hands between 1672 and 1699, and its castle, expanded over the centuries, is one of Ukraine's great postcard views.
A few kilometres away, on the banks of the Dniester, stands Khotyn Fortress, another medieval mass of towers and walls overlooking the river crossing. Begun in stone in the late 14th century, when these lands belonged to the Principality of Moldavia, and enlarged by the Moldavian princes, it was the scene of great battles: here the army of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth defeated the Ottomans on two famous occasions, in 1621 and in 1673, the latter under the command of the future King John III Sobieski.
Both fortresses, now much-visited monuments and candidates for international recognition, sum up the region's historic role as a frontier contested between empires. For centuries, Podolia and the banks of the Dniester were the edge where Poland, the Ottoman Empire, Moldavia and, later, Russia collided; and those wars left these stone silhouettes above the rivers on the Ukrainian landscape, among the most impressive in all of Eastern Europe.
Hardly anything that happened to Ukraine happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
