A Brief History of Ukraine: Borderland, Cossack Freedom, and the Fight to Exist

On 30 September 2026 the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine closed its books on another month of war. In September alone it had recorded 328 civilians killed and 2,105 injured, the worst September since Russia's full-scale invasion began. Since 24 February 2022 the mission had verified 17,605 civilian deaths, and it warned that the true number was likely considerably higher, because places like occupied Mariupol could not be counted. A few weeks later, UN investigators concluded that Russia's attacks on Ukraine's power grid amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ukrainians spent another autumn charging phones in the hours the electricity was on, and sending sons, husbands and, increasingly, daughters to a front that, in the words of the UN human rights chief, "barely moves".

To understand why this is happening, and why Ukrainians have kept fighting, you have to go back a very long way: to Greek colonies and Scythian gold, to the baptism of Kyiv in 988, to Cossacks who elected their own leaders, to poets who wrote in a language the tsars banned, to a famine engineered in a Soviet office, to the killing fields of 1941, and to the day in December 1991 when more than 90 percent of voters chose independence. Much of that history is shared with Russians, Poles, Jews, Crimean Tatars and others, and much of it is fiercely contested. This long read tries to tell it so that each of those communities would recognise its own account as fairly stated, and says plainly where the facts end and the arguments begin.

In this history

1. The land, the first farmers, Scythians and Greeks (to the 9th century)
2. Kyivan Rus' and Galicia–Volhynia (880–1349)
3. Lithuanian and Polish rule, and the rise of the Cossacks (1349–1647)
4. Khmelnytsky, Pereiaslav and the Hetmanate (1648–1764)
5. Between two empires (1764–1914)
6. Revolution and the fight for a state (1917–1921)
7. Soviet Ukraine and the Holodomor (1921–1939)
8. The Second World War and the Holocaust (1939–1945)
9. From the ruins to Chornobyl (1945–1991)
10. Independence: the hard years and the Orange Revolution (1991–2013)
11. Euromaidan, Crimea and the Donbas (2013–2021)
12. The full-scale invasion and Ukraine in 2026 (2022–2026)
13. How to understand Ukraine today

A note on names: this history uses Ukrainian forms (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chornobyl, Volodymyr), which most English-language institutions have adopted since independence. Older English books use Russian forms (Kiev, Kharkov, Dnieper, Chernobyl, Vladimir). The word Ukraina first appears in a chronicle of 1187 and originally meant "borderland" or "land", a meaning Ukrainians and Russians interpret differently.

Part 1 — The land, the first farmers, Scythians and Greeks (to the 9th century)

Black earth

Ukraine is the largest country entirely within Europe, and the second-largest in Europe after Russia. Its heart is the chornozem, the "black earth": some of the most fertile soil in the world, a deep, dark loam laid down over millennia under steppe grass. In the north lie the forests and marshes of Polissia; in the west, the Carpathian Mountains; across the middle, the forest-steppe; in the south, the open steppe running to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, with the mountainous Crimean peninsula hanging below. The great river Dnipro cuts the country in two, giving Ukrainians the old terms "Right-Bank" (west) and "Left-Bank" (east) Ukraine.

That land shaped everything. Its grain fed empires, from ancient Athens to the Soviet Union, and it was coveted by every neighbour. Its open steppe let nomads and armies move freely. And its position, between the forest north and the Black Sea, between Catholic central Europe and Orthodox Muscovy, between Christian Europe and the Muslim Ottoman world, made it a borderland in every sense.

The Trypillians

From around 5000 BC, farmers of what archaeologists call the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture spread across the forest-steppe between the Carpathians and the Dnipro. They grew wheat and barley, kept cattle, made beautiful painted pottery and clay figurines, and built some of the largest settlements in the world at the time: sites near Uman covered hundreds of hectares and may have housed more than ten thousand people, centuries before the first cities of Mesopotamia. Every few generations, for reasons still debated, they burned their own villages and moved on. Modern Ukrainians are fond of the Trypillians, whose spiral patterns appear on souvenirs and coins; archaeologists caution that there is no direct line from them to any modern people.

The steppe peoples

Later, waves of pastoral peoples crossed the steppe. Linguists and geneticists think the Pontic–Caspian steppe, including today's southern Ukraine, was the likely homeland of the first speakers of Indo-European languages in the fourth and third millennia BC; their descendants carried those languages from Ireland to India. Cimmerians were followed, from about the eighth century BC, by the Scythians, Iranian-speaking horse warriors who ruled the steppe until the second century BC. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, described their customs: drinking from the skulls of enemies, burying kings with horses and servants under great mounds (kurhany). Those mounds have yielded some of the finest goldwork of the ancient world, like the pectoral found at Tovsta Mohyla in 1971.

Greeks on the coast

From the seventh century BC Greek cities planted colonies on the northern Black Sea coast: Olbia near the mouth of the Southern Buh, Tyras on the Dniester, Chersonesus (near modern Sevastopol), Theodosia and Panticapaeum (modern Kerch) in Crimea. Several of the Crimean and Kerch cities later united as the Bosporan Kingdom, which later became a Roman client state. Grain from the Ukrainian steppe, traded through these ports, helped feed classical Athens.

The Slavs arrive

Most scholars place the homeland of the early Slavs in the region between the middle Dnipro, the Prypiat marshes, the Carpathians and the Vistula. By the fourth century AD an early Slavic tribal union, the Antes, stretched across the forest-steppe from the Dniester to the Don. By the ninth century, East Slavic tribes (the Polianians around Kyiv, the Derevlianians in the forests, the Siverianians to the east and others) were paying tribute to the Khazars, a Turkic khanate on the lower Volga whose ruling elite had converted to Judaism. A Polianian town on the hills above the Dnipro, Kyiv, was beginning to grow rich from river trade. Legend says it was founded by three brothers, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, and their sister Lybid.

Part 2 — Kyivan Rus' and Galicia–Volhynia (880–1349)

The state of Rus'

The Tale of Bygone Years, written in Kyiv in the early twelfth century, tells how a Varangian (Scandinavian) prince, Rurik, came to rule Novgorod in the north around 860, and how his successor Oleh (Oleg) seized Kyiv in 882, killing its rulers Askold and Dyr, and made it the "mother of the cities of Rus'". From Kyiv, Oleh and his successors imposed tribute on the East Slavic tribes and sailed down the Dnipro to trade, and sometimes fight, with the Byzantine Empire. Historians still argue about how Scandinavian the first rulers were (the "Normanist" debate); most accept a Norse-origin dynasty that quickly became Slavic.

Princess Olha (Olga), who ruled as regent after the Derevlianians killed her husband Ihor, had converted to Christianity by 957. Her son Sviatoslav was a warrior who destroyed the Khazar khanate. Her grandson Volodymyr the Great, who ruled from 980 to 1015, made the decisive choice.

988

In 988 Volodymyr accepted Christianity from Constantinople, married the Byzantine emperor's sister, and had the people of Kyiv baptised in the Dnipro. The chronicle's story that he chose among Islam, Judaism, Latin Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy (rejecting Islam because "drinking is the joy of the Rus'") is a later legend, but the choice was real and lasting. It bound Rus' to the Byzantine world, its church, its art and its Slavonic liturgy. Ukraine's, Russia's and Belarus's Orthodox churches all trace themselves to this baptism, and Ukraine celebrates it as a state holiday.

Under Yaroslav the Wise (1019–54), Kyiv reached its height. He built the Cathedral of St Sophia, with its mosaics and frescoes that still stand, founded schools and a library, issued the first written law code (Ruska Pravda), and married his children into royal houses across Europe: his daughter Anna became queen of France.

Fragmentation

After Yaroslav, Rus' broke into rival principalities ruled by his descendants. In 1169 Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal, in the north-east, sacked Kyiv and chose to stay in his own capital rather than rule from it. Ukrainian historians often point to this as a sign that the north-east was already a separate centre; Russian historians see it as a shift of the capital within one Rus'.

The Mongols arrived in 1223, defeating the princes of Rus' on the Kalka River, and returned under Batu in 1237. On 6 December 1240, after a siege, they took and sacked Kyiv. A papal envoy who passed through a few years later counted barely two hundred houses standing.

Galicia–Volhynia

The south-western principalities, Galicia and Volhynia, survived and became a strong state under Prince Danylo Romanovych, who ruled from 1238 to 1264. Danylo submitted to the Mongols but looked west: in 1253 he accepted a crown from Pope Innocent IV, becoming "King of Rus'". He founded the city of Lviv, named after his son Lev. For Ukrainian historians, Galicia–Volhynia is the direct heir of Kyivan Rus', proof that Kyiv's legacy passed west and south as well as north-east to Moscow.

Whose Rus'?

This is the root of the most politically charged argument in Ukrainian history.

In July 2021 Vladimir Putin wrote that Russians and Ukrainians were "one people – a single whole", descended from "Ancient Rus", with Kyiv as the "mother of all Russian cities". Ukrainian historians, following Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), argue that Kyivan Rus' was the first state of the Ukrainian people, whose history continued through Galicia–Volhynia, the Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands and the Cossacks, while Muscovy was a later and separate state that claimed Kyiv's inheritance.

Most historians outside both countries describe Kyivan Rus' as the shared medieval ancestor of three modern peoples (Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian), none of which existed in its modern national form in the eleventh century. Shared ancestry, they add, is no more an argument for shared statehood than the Roman Empire is an argument for joining Italy and France.

Part 3 — Lithuanian and Polish rule, and the rise of the Cossacks (1349–1647)

Under Lithuania

After the Mongols weakened the old principalities, the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded south through the fourteenth century. Gediminas took the title "Grand Duke of the Lithuanians and Rus'" in 1323; by the 1360s Lithuania ruled Kyiv, Volhynia and much of today's Ukraine and Belarus. It was a light rule: the Lithuanian elite adopted the Ruthenian (old Ukrainian-Belarusian) language for government, and many converted to Orthodoxy. Poland, meanwhile, occupied Galicia in 1349, and in 1385 Poland and Lithuania joined in a dynastic union.

The Union of Lublin

On 1 July 1569, the Union of Lublin turned Poland and Lithuania into a single Commonwealth and transferred most Ukrainian lands (Volhynia, Kyiv, Podillia) from the Lithuanian to the Polish crown. This mattered enormously. Polish nobles (the szlachta) acquired vast estates in Ukraine; the local Ruthenian nobility gradually adopted Polish language and Catholicism; and peasants were pushed into ever-harsher serfdom on great grain-exporting estates. Jewish merchants and leaseholders, invited by the magnates, managed estates, mills, taverns and tolls, which put them between lords and peasants, a position that would prove deadly.

In 1596, the Union of Brest brought part of the Orthodox hierarchy into union with Rome, creating the Uniate (later Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which kept the Byzantine rite but accepted the Pope's authority. Most Orthodox clergy and laity rejected it, and religious conflict deepened. In response, Orthodox brotherhoods founded schools, and in 1632 Metropolitan Petro Mohyla set up a college in Kyiv, later the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which became the leading centre of learning in the Orthodox Slavic world.

Life in the Commonwealth

The sixteenth century was a boom time for some. Western European demand for grain made Ukrainian estates rich, and towns grew in size and number. Many received self-government under Magdeburg law, but its benefits went almost entirely to Catholic German and Polish burghers; Orthodox Ukrainian townspeople faced discrimination and responded by forming religious brotherhoods that ran schools, printing presses and charities. In 1581 the Orthodox magnate Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky sponsored the Ostroh Bible, the first complete printed Bible in Church Slavonic. Jewish communities grew fast too, with their own self-government, the Council of Four Lands, and a flourishing religious scholarship. For peasants, though, the boom meant more days of forced labour on the lord's fields each week, and the open steppe to the south, dangerous as it was, became a magnet.

The Cossacks

On the open steppe south of the Commonwealth's settled lands lay the "Wild Fields", raided by the Crimean Tatars, whose khanate (from 1475 a vassal of the Ottoman Empire) took tens of thousands of captives from Ukrainian and Polish lands for the slave markets of Kaffa and Istanbul. Into this frontier fled runaway serfs, adventurers and outlaws. They became the Cossacks (from a Turkic word for free men), who lived by fishing, hunting, raiding and fighting.

Around 1552–54 Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky built a fortress on an island below the Dnipro rapids, the first Sich. The Zaporozhian Sich ("beyond the rapids") became a self-governing military community: Cossacks elected their officers and their hetman (commander) in a general assembly, and could depose them. They raided Ottoman and Tatar ports, sometimes sailing their long boats across the Black Sea to attack Istanbul itself. The Commonwealth hired some Cossacks as "registered" soldiers but never accepted them as equals; risings in the 1590s, 1620s and 1630s were crushed.

For Ukrainians, the Cossacks are the heart of the national story: a free people who elected their leaders, defended Christendom against the Tatars and Turks, and stood up to Polish lords. The national anthem ends with the line "we are of Cossack kin". Polish and Jewish memory, as the next part shows, remembers them very differently.

Part 4 — Khmelnytsky, Pereiaslav and the Hetmanate (1648–1764)

The great uprising

In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a registered Cossack officer whose estate had been seized by a Polish official, fled to the Sich, allied with the Crimean Tatars, and raised a rebellion. On 16 May 1648 his forces destroyed a Polish army at Zhovti Vody, and then another at Korsun. The uprising spread across all of Dnipro Ukraine as peasants rose against their lords. Within months, the Commonwealth's power in central Ukraine had collapsed, and Khmelnytsky entered Kyiv in triumph in December 1648.

The massacres

The uprising also brought terrible violence against civilians. Polish nobles, Catholic clergy, Uniates and, above all, Jews were massacred. Jews, concentrated in the towns and acting as agents of the magnates, were seen by the rebels as instruments of Polish oppression. At Nemyriv on 10 June 1648 Cossacks massacred the town's Jews; at Tulchyn, Polonne and elsewhere, thousands more were killed. Polish forces under Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki answered with their own atrocities against Ukrainian peasants.

How many Jews died has been argued about for centuries. The Jewish chronicler Nathan Hannover, writing in 1653, described the slaughter of hundreds of thousands; modern historians consider those figures highly exaggerated. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine puts Jewish losses at over 50,000 across the decade-long war. The historian Shaul Stampfer, writing in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, estimates that about 40,000 Jews lived in the affected regions, and that fewer than 20,000 died, "very possibly much less than half". Whatever the number, in Jewish memory the year Tah (1648) became a byword for catastrophe, mourned in prayers for centuries, and Khmelnytsky as a figure of horror.

Pereiaslav, 1654

Unable to defeat Poland alone and let down by his Tatar allies, Khmelnytsky sought a protector. In January 1654 at Pereiaslav, Cossack officers took an oath to Tsar Alexei of Muscovy; the agreed terms (the "March Articles", eleven in number, confirmed by the tsar in March and April) left the Hetmanate its own elected hetman, courts, army and foreign relations. The original documents are lost, and the treaty's meaning is one of the most argued questions in East European history.

Russian imperial historians saw it as the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia; Soviet historians, in 1954, celebrated the tercentenary of the "reunion" of two "fraternal peoples" (and that year Crimea was transferred to Soviet Ukraine as a gift for the anniversary). Ukrainian historians have read it variously as a personal union under the tsar, a protectorate in which Muscovy was the stronger partner (Hrushevsky's view), or a temporary military alliance (the view of Viacheslav Lypynsky). What is not in dispute is that over the next century Moscow steadily whittled away the Hetmanate's autonomy.

The Ruin

Khmelnytsky died in 1657. His successors split, turning to Poland, Muscovy or the Ottomans; the period of civil war and invasion that followed is called "the Ruin". In 1658 Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky signed the Treaty of Hadiach with Poland, which would have made Ukraine a third partner in the Commonwealth, and in 1659 his Cossacks, Poles and Tatars crushed a Muscovite army at Konotop; but the treaty was never carried out. The Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 divided Ukraine along the Dnipro: the Left Bank and Kyiv to Muscovy, the Right Bank to Poland.

Mazepa

Ivan Mazepa, hetman from 1687 to 1709, was a cultivated nobleman who built churches and patronised the Kyiv Academy. For twenty years he served Peter the Great loyally. When Peter's war with Sweden brought Cossack levies, heavy demands and threats to Cossack autonomy, Mazepa secretly allied with Charles XII of Sweden. In November 1708 Peter's commander Menshikov stormed Mazepa's capital, Baturyn, and massacred its defenders and many of its inhabitants. In July 1709 Peter defeated Charles and Mazepa at Poltava. Mazepa fled to Ottoman Bendery and died there.

The Russian Orthodox Church anathematised Mazepa as a traitor, and "Mazepist" became a Russian insult for Ukrainian patriots. To Ukrainians he is a statesman who tried to save his country's freedom. In exile in 1710 his successor, Pylyp Orlyk, drafted the Constitution of Bendery, which proposed separating powers between the hetman and an elected council; Ukrainians cite it as one of Europe's early constitutional texts.

The end of the Hetmanate

After Poltava, Peter and his successors tightened their grip: Cossacks were sent north to dig canals and build St Petersburg, Russian officials supervised the hetmans, and Ukrainian trade was redirected through Russian ports. Catherine II abolished the office of hetman in 1764, had the Zaporozhian Sich destroyed in 1775, and in 1783 extended serfdom to Left-Bank Ukraine. On the Polish-ruled Right Bank, peasants rose repeatedly against their lords: the haidamaka revolt of 1768, the Koliivshchyna, massacred thousands of Polish nobles, Jews and Catholic clergy, notably at Uman, before Russian troops helped crush it.

Part 5 — Between two empires (1764–1914)

Partition

The three partitions of Poland–Lithuania (1772, 1793 and 1795) completed the division of Ukrainian lands. By 1795 the Russian Empire held about 80 percent of them; the Habsburg (Austrian) Empire held Galicia and, from 1775, Bukovyna; Hungary, part of the Habsburg lands, held Transcarpathia. Catherine's armies had also taken the southern steppe and, in 1783, annexed the Crimean Khanate. The new province of "New Russia" was settled by Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Jews; Odesa, founded in 1794, became a cosmopolitan port. Many Crimean Tatars emigrated to the Ottoman Empire.

Little Russia

In the Russian Empire, Ukrainians were officially "Little Russians", a branch of a single Russian people. Their language was treated as a peasant dialect. Many members of the Ukrainian elite made careers in imperial service, and some of the empire's leading figures, from the writer Nikolai Gogol to the composers and scholars of St Petersburg, came from Ukraine.

Yet a national revival began. In 1798 Ivan Kotliarevsky published Eneida, a comic retelling of Virgil's Aeneid with Cossacks as heroes, the first major work of literature in vernacular Ukrainian. Kharkiv University (1805) and then Kyiv University (1834) became centres of a new Ukrainian intelligentsia that collected folk songs, studied Cossack history and asked what made Ukraine distinct.

Shevchenko

The revival found its prophet in Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861). Born a serf in the Kyiv region, he was taken to St Petersburg as a servant, where artists who recognised his talent bought his freedom on 5 May 1838. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts and in 1840 published Kobzar, a collection of poems in Ukrainian. His verse mourned the lost Cossack freedom, condemned serfdom and the tsars, and called on Ukrainians to "rise up and break your chains". In 1847 he was arrested as a member of the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which dreamed of a free federation of Slavic peoples, and he was sentenced to serve as a private soldier in Central Asia, with the tsar's personal order that he be forbidden to write or paint. He died in St Petersburg in 1861, days before the emancipation of the serfs was proclaimed. Every Ukrainian town has a Shevchenko street or statue; for Ukrainians he is what Shakespeare and Burns combined would be for Britain.

Banning a language

The imperial government came to see the Ukrainian movement as a threat. In July 1863 Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev issued a circular banning religious and educational publications in Ukrainian, declaring that "there never was, is not, and cannot be" a separate Little Russian language. The Ems Decree of 1876 went further, banning the import of Ukrainian books, Ukrainian stage performances and song texts. Restrictions were eased only after the 1905 revolution, when the number of Ukrainian-language periodicals in the empire rose from two to eighteen by 1906.

Galicia: the Ukrainian Piedmont

Under Habsburg rule, Galicia's Ukrainians (then called Ruthenians) had more room. Serfdom was abolished in the Habsburg lands in 1848, and Galicia elected deputies to a provincial diet and, later, the parliament in Vienna. Ukrainians there built reading rooms (the Prosvita society, founded in 1868), co-operatives, newspapers, schools and a scholarly society. In 1894 Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a historian from Russian-ruled Ukraine, took up a chair at Lviv University and began his ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus'. The writer Ivan Franko, a socialist and poet, became Galicia's great literary figure. Galicia's Ukrainians competed, often bitterly, with the dominant Poles, and the province became the "Piedmont" of the Ukrainian movement, as Piedmont had been for Italian unity.

Industry, emigration and the village

In the Russian-ruled east, the late nineteenth century brought coal and steel. In 1872 the Welsh industrialist John Hughes built a steel plant at Yuzivka (later Stalino, now Donetsk), and by 1900 the Donbas outproduced the Urals as the empire's main metallurgical base. Its miners and workers came from all over the empire, many of them Russians, which is one reason the Donbas became the most Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. Ukrainian cities grew fast: between 1860 and 1897, Kyiv grew from 55,000 to 248,000 people. Yet in 1897 only 13 percent of Ukraine's people lived in towns, and only 13 percent of Ukrainians could read.

Land hunger drove migration. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians moved east to the Kuban, Siberia and the Russian Far East; from Galicia and Bukovyna, hundreds of thousands crossed the Atlantic to the prairies of Canada and the mines and mills of the United States, founding the diaspora that would keep Ukrainian culture alive through the Soviet years. Ukraine was also the heart of the Pale of Settlement, and the waves of pogroms of 1881–82 and 1903–06 hit its Jewish communities hard, driving mass Jewish emigration too.

Part 6 — Revolution and the fight for a state (1917–1921)

The Central Rada

When the tsar fell in March 1917, Ukrainian activists in Kyiv formed the Central Rada (council) on 17 March, with Hrushevsky as its head. At first it asked only for autonomy within a democratic Russian federation. As the Provisional Government in Petrograd hesitated and then collapsed, the Rada went further. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in November, its Third Universal (proclamation) declared the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) within a federal Russia. As a Bolshevik army invaded from the east, the Rada issued its Fourth Universal, dated 22 January 1918, declaring full independence; days later, on 29 January, young volunteers were killed trying to hold the approaches to Kyiv at Kruty.

On 9 February 1918 the UNR signed a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary at Brest-Litovsk, and German and Austrian troops drove out the Bolsheviks. But in April 1918 the Germans replaced the socialist Rada with a conservative regime under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. When Germany lost the war in November 1918, a new Directory under Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura overthrew the hetman.

Amid the chaos, Ukrainian cultural life exploded. Ukrainian-language schools, newspapers, theatres and publishing houses opened by the hundred. Under Skoropadsky's Hetmanate in 1918 the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was founded, along with Ukrainian universities in Kyiv and Kamianets-Podilskyi. In the villages, peasants took matters into their own hands: they seized landlords' estates, divided the land and formed militias to defend it against whichever army came next. For most of them the question of which state they belonged to mattered less than who would own the land.

Two Ukrainian republics, one war of all against all

In November 1918, as the Habsburg Empire collapsed, Ukrainians in Lviv proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR), and immediately found themselves at war with Poland over Galicia. On 22 January 1919 the two Ukrainian republics proclaimed their union in Kyiv's St Sophia Square; Ukraine marks the date as its Day of Unity. In practice they were overwhelmed.

Between 1917 and 1921 Ukraine was fought over by the UNR, the West Ukrainian army, the Bolshevik Red Army, the anti-Bolshevik White armies of General Denikin, the Polish army, the Romanians, French intervention forces in Odesa, and peasant warlords, including the anarchist Nestor Makhno, whose movement held much of the south-east. Kyiv changed hands repeatedly, by some counts more than a dozen times.

The pogroms

The civil war brought the worst massacres of Jews before the Holocaust. Units of the UNR's army and allied warlords, the White armies, Red Army units and independent peasant bands all carried out pogroms; historians estimate that tens of thousands of Jews were killed (some estimates run far higher), and studies of the pogroms attribute the largest shares of them to forces nominally under the UNR and to the Whites. In 1926 Petliura, in exile in Paris, was shot dead by Sholem Schwartzbard, a Jewish anarchist who said he was avenging the pogroms; a French jury acquitted him. Ukrainian historians argue that Petliura himself opposed the pogroms and issued orders against them but could not control his forces; Jewish historians stress his responsibility as commander. The argument continues.

Why the first independence failed

Ukrainian historians list many reasons: a mainly peasant nation with a small educated elite; Russian-speaking cities with little sympathy for Ukrainian statehood; divisions between socialists and conservatives; no reliable foreign ally; and enemies on every side. But the attempt mattered. It created the symbols (the blue-and-yellow flag, the trident, the anthem "Ukraine has not yet perished") that independent Ukraine adopted after 1991, and it forced the Bolsheviks to create a Ukrainian Soviet republic rather than simply absorbing Ukraine into Russia.

Part 7 — Soviet Ukraine and the Holodomor (1921–1939)

Ukrainization

In the 1920s the Soviet government, seeking legitimacy in the non-Russian republics, launched "indigenisation" (korenizatsiia). In Ukraine from 1923 this meant Ukrainization: schools, newspapers, government offices and the party itself were to work in Ukrainian; by the end of the decade most schoolchildren were taught in Ukrainian. Literature, theatre and art flourished. Writers like Mykola Khvylovy, who urged Ukrainian culture to turn "away from Moscow" toward Europe, the theatre director Les Kurbas, and the film-maker Oleksandr Dovzhenko made Kharkiv, then the Soviet Ukrainian capital, a centre of modernism.

Collectivisation and the famine

From 1929 Stalin forced the peasants of the USSR into collective farms and deported hundreds of thousands of families as "kulaks". In Ukraine, the most important grain republic, resistance was strong and the grain quotas brutal. By 1932 harvests were falling, and the quotas were not cut. What followed is called in Ukrainian the Holodomor, "killing by hunger".

Villages emptied. People ate grass, bark and pets; there were cases of cannibalism. Peasants who fled to cities were turned back. In the spring of 1933, at the famine's peak, many thousands were dying every day.

How many died

Earlier estimates, made before the Soviet archives opened, ran from about 3 million to 7 million or more for Ukraine; the demographic work of the 2000s narrowed the range.

Was it genocide?

This is the central argument, and it is both scholarly and political.

The case for genocide. The lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide", described the destruction of the Ukrainian nation in 1953 as "the classic example of Soviet genocide". Scholars who agree, and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in Canada, point to the measures above, aimed specifically at Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban, and to the simultaneous assault on Ukrainian culture (below). They argue this fits the Genocide Convention's definition, including "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Ukraine's parliament declared the Holodomor a genocide in November 2006, and many other parliaments and governments have since done the same, especially after 2022.

The case against, or for a different label. Historians such as Davies and Wheatcroft agree that Stalin's policies caused the famine and that he chose to let millions die rather than cut exports or quotas, but they argue the evidence shows a brutal policy aimed at extracting grain and breaking peasant resistance across the USSR, not an intention to destroy Ukrainians as a nation. Some use terms like "man-made famine" or "crime against humanity" instead. The Russian government acknowledges the famine as a tragedy shared by many Soviet peoples, including Russians and Kazakhs, and rejects the genocide label.

Both sides agree on the essentials: the famine was caused by Soviet policy, the regime knew people were dying in vast numbers, it kept taking food and sealed the borders, and Ukraine suffered more deaths than any other Soviet republic.

The Executed Renaissance

The famine coincided with a purge of Ukrainian culture. Ukrainization was reversed from 1933; leading figures were arrested as "nationalists". Khvylovy and the senior communist Mykola Skrypnyk, who had led Ukrainization, killed themselves in 1933. In the Great Terror of 1937–38, much of the generation of the 1920s was shot; in November 1937 the theatre director Les Kurbas and scores of other Ukrainian writers and scholars were shot at Sandarmokh forest in Karelia, and thousands of Kyiv's victims lie in the mass graves of Bykivnia forest. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine estimates that four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite perished in the decade. Ukrainians call this generation the "Executed Renaissance".

Western Ukraine under Poland

In interwar Poland, about five million Ukrainians lived in Galicia and Volhynia. Polish governments restricted Ukrainian schools and settled Polish veterans on Ukrainian lands; a brutal "pacification" campaign in 1930 followed a wave of Ukrainian sabotage. Legal Ukrainian parties and a vigorous co-operative movement coexisted with an underground: the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in Vienna in 1929, which embraced an authoritarian, integral nationalism and assassinated Polish officials. In March 1939 Ukrainians of Czechoslovak Transcarpathia declared an independent Carpatho-Ukraine, which Hungary overran within days.

Part 8 — The Second World War and the Holocaust (1939–1945)

1939–41: the first Soviet occupation

Under the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 and annexed Galicia and western Volhynia to Soviet Ukraine; in 1940 it took northern Bukovyna and southern Bessarabia from Romania. Soviet rule brought the "unification of Ukrainian lands" that Soviet propaganda celebrated, and also mass arrests and deportations of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews deemed hostile. As the Germans invaded in June 1941, the NKVD massacred thousands of political prisoners in the jails of Lviv and other western Ukrainian towns.

Occupation

Germany and its allies attacked on 22 June 1941 and overran all of Ukraine by mid-1942. Some Ukrainians, especially in the west, at first greeted the Germans as liberators from Soviet rule; the illusion did not last. Nazi plans saw Ukraine as "living space" and its people as a source of food and labour. More than 2 million people were deported from Ukraine to Germany as Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), most of them young and treated as slaves. Cities were starved, villages burned in reprisal for partisan attacks, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war died in German camps.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

About 2.3 million Jews lived within Ukraine's present borders on the eve of the war. Of them, about 1.4 to 1.5 million were murdered, most not in death camps but shot close to their homes by German SS and police units, the Einsatzgruppen, with the help of local auxiliary police. This has been called "the Holocaust by bullets".

At Babyn Yar, a ravine on the edge of Kyiv, German units shot 33,771 Jews on 29–30 September 1941, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Over the following two years tens of thousands more were murdered there: Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric patients and Ukrainian nationalists. The Soviet authorities later tried to erase the site, and a memorial to Jewish victims was not built until after independence.

The Holocaust was organised and carried out by Nazi Germany. But, as the Encyclopedia of Ukraine states, the Germans relied on local helpers: more than 120,000 Ukrainian auxiliary policemen served the occupiers, and many took part in the round-ups and shootings. In the first days after the German invasion of western Ukraine, some OUN groups staged or incited pogroms, most notoriously in Lviv in late June and July 1941, after the discovery of the NKVD's murdered prisoners. At the same time, many Ukrainians risked their lives to hide Jews: by 2003, 1,984 people from Ukraine had been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations; the number has risen since. The Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky organised the hiding of well over a hundred Jews, many of them children, in his church's monasteries and convents.

The OUN and the UPA

No part of Ukrainian history is more contested than the record of the nationalist underground.

In 1940 the OUN split into a younger, more radical faction led by Stepan Bandera, the OUN(B), and an older one led by Andrii Melnyk, the OUN(M). On 30 June 1941, in German-occupied Lviv, the OUN(B) proclaimed a Ukrainian state, pledging to work with Nazi Germany. The Germans refused to accept it, arrested Bandera and kept him in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1944. In 1942–43 nationalist partisans in Volhynia formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which the OUN(B) came to dominate under Roman Shukhevych. The UPA fought the Germans, Soviet partisans, the Polish Home Army and, after 1944, the returning Soviet forces.

In 1943–44 UPA units carried out the mass killing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and then in eastern Galicia, burning villages and murdering men, women and children, in what Poles call the Volhynia massacre or genocide. Polish reprisals killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

After the war, the UPA fought a long guerrilla war against Soviet rule in western Ukraine. According to Soviet interior ministry figures reported to Beria, between 1944 and 1952 about 153,000 people were killed, 134,000 arrested and 203,000 deported from western Ukraine in the campaign against the nationalist underground. Bandera, living in Munich, was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959.

How these men are remembered divides Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and Russians:

• In western Ukraine and in much of Ukraine since 2014, the OUN and UPA are remembered first as fighters for independence against both Hitler and Stalin, who held out against the Soviet state into the 1950s. In 2015 Ukraine's parliament passed a law honouring them as "fighters for Ukraine's independence". Since 2022 the red-and-black UPA flag has been flown by some army units.
• In Poland, the UPA is remembered for the Volhynia massacres. In 2016 Poland's parliament declared 11 July a national day of remembrance for the victims of the "genocide" committed by Ukrainian nationalists. In 2026 the issue flared again: after President Zelensky named a special-forces unit "Heroes of the UPA" in May, Polish President Karol Nawrocki in June revoked the Order of the White Eagle that Poland had awarded Zelensky.
• In Jewish memory and Holocaust scholarship, the OUN's antisemitic ideology, the 1941 pogroms and the participation of nationalists in the auxiliary police are central, and the honouring of Bandera and Shukhevych is deeply offensive.
• In Soviet and Russian state propaganda, "Banderites" became a label for all Ukrainian nationalists, and later for Ukrainians who reject Moscow's authority; the Kremlin's 2022 claim to be "denazifying" Ukraine draws on that tradition.

Most historians would say that the OUN and UPA were authoritarian nationalists who fought for independence, committed mass atrocities against Poles and took part in violence against Jews, and were in turn the victims of brutal Soviet repression. Holding all of that at once is uncomfortable for every side.

Liberation, deportation and the toll

The Red Army retook Kyiv in November 1943 and all of Ukraine by late 1944. In May 1944 the NKVD deported the entire Crimean Tatar people, about 180,000 people, to Central Asia, accusing them of collaboration; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine says 20 to 25 percent died in transit or soon after. Crimean Tatars call it the Sürgün (exile).

By the Encyclopedia of Ukraine's count, 6.8 million people were killed in Ukraine during the German occupation, including about 1.4 million Jews and 1.4 million Soviet military personnel, and some 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army. Ukraine, with Belarus and Poland, was at the centre of what the historian Timothy Snyder called the "bloodlands".

Part 9 — From the ruins to Chornobyl (1945–1991)

A new Soviet Ukraine

The war's end redrew the map. In 1945 Czechoslovakia ceded Transcarpathia to the USSR, and the new Polish–Soviet border left Galicia and Volhynia in Soviet Ukraine. Population exchanges sent hundreds of thousands of Poles west and Ukrainians east; in 1947 Poland's communist government deported the remaining Ukrainians of its south-east to its new western territories in "Operation Vistula". For the first time, almost all Ukrainian-majority lands were in one state, the Ukrainian SSR, which in 1945 became a founding member of the United Nations, with its own seat, although Moscow made all real decisions. In 1946 the Soviet authorities forcibly dissolved the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church; it survived underground for more than forty years.

A famine in 1946–47, caused by drought and continued grain procurement, killed hundreds of thousands more. Reconstruction was rapid, and Ukraine became the industrial and agricultural powerhouse of the USSR: its steel, coal, rockets, ships, tanks, grain and sugar.

Crimea, 1954

In February 1954 the Soviet leadership transferred the Crimean region from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one, formally to mark the 300th anniversary of Pereiaslav and citing Crimea's economic ties to the mainland. At the time it seemed an administrative change inside one country. After 1991 it became the legal basis for Crimea being part of Ukraine, and Russian nationalists have since called it Khrushchev's mistake.

Thaw, Sixtiers and repression

After Stalin's death, Ukrainians rose high in the Soviet system: Khrushchev had run Ukraine's party for years, and Leonid Brezhnev was born and made his career there. The Thaw produced a new generation of Ukrainian writers and artists, the shistdesiatnyky (Sixtiers), including the poets Lina Kostenko and Vasyl Symonenko and the critic Ivan Dziuba, whose 1965 essay Internationalism or Russification? documented the decline of the Ukrainian language. Arrests in 1965 and a larger wave in 1972 sent many to the camps. The poet Vasyl Stus died in a labour camp in 1985. Under Petro Shelest (party leader 1963–72), Ukrainian culture got some protection; under his successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsky (1972–89), Russification accelerated. By the 1980s Russian dominated Ukraine's cities, higher education and official life; Ukrainian was widely seen as the language of villages.

Chornobyl

At 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986, during a safety test, reactor No. 4 of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, about 100 kilometres north of Kyiv, exploded and burned, spreading radioactive fallout over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and much of Europe. The nearby city of Pripyat, home to about 50,000 people, was evacuated only after a day and a half; the town of Chornobyl itself, and a 30-kilometre zone around the plant, were later emptied. In Kyiv, the May Day parade went ahead under the radioactive cloud while the authorities stayed silent. Dozens of firefighters and plant workers died of acute radiation sickness within weeks; the long-term death toll from cancers among the most exposed is still debated, with estimates differing by orders of magnitude depending on the method used.

For Ukrainians, Chornobyl became a symbol of Moscow's indifference to their lives and a turning point in public opinion. Environmental groups became one of the first channels of open protest under glasnost.

Toward independence

In 1989 Ukrainian writers and dissidents founded Rukh (the People's Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika). Hundreds of thousands formed a human chain from Lviv to Kyiv on 22 January 1990, the anniversary of the 1919 union. On 16 July 1990 the Ukrainian parliament declared state sovereignty. In October 1990 a student hunger strike on Kyiv's central square, the "Revolution on Granite", forced the prime minister to resign.

After the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, Ukraine's parliament, including many communists led by its chairman Leonid Kravchuk, declared independence on 24 August 1991. On 1 December 1991 more than 90 percent of voters confirmed it in a referendum, with majorities in every region: 83.9 percent in Donetsk region, 83.9 percent in Luhansk, and 54.2 percent in Crimea. Kravchuk was elected president the same day. A week later, on 8 December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared that the USSR had ceased to exist.

Part 10 — Independence: the hard years and the Orange Revolution (1991–2013)

Building a state

Independent Ukraine inherited a large industrial economy tied to Russia, a huge army, the Black Sea Fleet, and the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. It had no tradition of independent statehood since 1921, no currency, and a divided society: Ukrainian-speaking west and centre, Russian-speaking east and south, Crimea with an ethnic Russian majority.

The economy collapsed. By World Bank figures, consumer prices rose by about 4,700 percent in 1993, and output fell almost every year from 1990 to 1999, shrinking by about three-fifths in total, a deeper collapse than Russia's. Factories paid wages in kind or not at all; savings vanished; millions went abroad to work. Leonid Kuchma, elected president in 1994, stabilised the economy; a new constitution was adopted in 1996, and the hryvnia was introduced as the national currency in September 1996. Growth returned in 2000.

Nuclear weapons and the Budapest Memorandum

Ukraine had about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads on its soil, controlled operationally from Moscow. Under pressure from both the United States and Russia, and in exchange for compensation and security assurances, it agreed to give them up and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On 5 December 1994 in Budapest, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed a memorandum in which they undertook to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and existing borders, to refrain from the threat or use of force against it, to refrain from economic coercion, and to seek Security Council action if Ukraine became the victim of nuclear aggression.

The memorandum contained assurances, not a defence guarantee, and it created no mechanism to enforce them. After 2014 Ukrainians came to see it as a lesson that giving up nuclear weapons had left them defenceless; Russia argues that its obligations were not breached, or did not apply, after what it calls an unconstitutional change of government in Kyiv in 2014. Most international lawyers and the other two signatories say Russia violated it.

Crimea and Russia in the 1990s

Crimea, with its ethnic Russian majority and the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, was the most dangerous fault line. In January 1994 Crimeans elected a pro-Russian president, Yurii Meshkov, who pushed for a referendum and a separatist constitution; Kyiv suspended it and in 1995 abolished the Crimean presidency, leaving the peninsula as an autonomous republic within Ukraine. Crimean Tatars had been returning from Central Asian exile since the late 1980s, about 250,000 of them by January 1994; denied their old homes, many built shanties on vacant land. In 1997 Russia and Ukraine divided the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, with Ukraine leasing the main facilities at Sevastopol to Russia, and signed a Treaty of Friendship in which each recognised the other's borders.

Kuchma's Ukraine

Kuchma's Ukraine was more stable but deeply corrupt: privatisation created a class of oligarchs with regional power bases (Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv), and the presidency dominated through patronage. In September 2000 the investigative journalist Heorhii Gongadze disappeared; his headless body was found weeks later, and secretly recorded tapes appeared to have Kuchma ordering action against him. The "Ukraine without Kuchma" protests that followed were the first mass rallies of the new era.

The Orange Revolution

In the 2004 presidential election, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma's chosen successor from Donetsk, openly backed by Putin, faced the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, a former central bank governor. During the campaign Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, which disfigured his face. The first round was almost a tie (39.9 percent to 39.3 percent). When official results of the runoff gave victory to Yanukovych amid evidence of massive fraud, hundreds of thousands of people in orange scarves filled Kyiv's Independence Square (the Maidan) in freezing weather for weeks. On 3 December the Supreme Court annulled the runoff and ordered a re-run, which Yushchenko won on 26 December.

The Kremlin saw the Orange Revolution as a Western-engineered plot; its supporters saw it as a peaceful democratic uprising against a stolen election. Its hopes faded quickly. Yushchenko and his ally, the charismatic Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, fell out; the economy was battered by the 2008 financial crisis (output fell 15 percent in 2009); and gas disputes with Russia cut supplies to Europe in 2006 and 2009.

Yanukovych

Yanukovych won the presidency fairly in 2010. He restored the strong presidential powers of the pre-2004 constitution, jailed Tymoshenko in 2011 in a case the EU condemned as selective justice, and presided over corruption on a new scale. He also negotiated an Association Agreement with the European Union, popular with most Ukrainians.

Part 11 — Euromaidan, Crimea and the Donbas (2013–2021)

The Revolution of Dignity

On 21 November 2013, under heavy pressure from Moscow, which had imposed trade restrictions that summer (and in December would offer a $15 billion loan), Yanukovych's government suspended preparations to sign the EU Association Agreement. That evening a few hundred students and journalists gathered on the Maidan. On the night of 30 November riot police beat the young protesters; the next day hundreds of thousands came out. The movement, known as the Euromaidan, became a protest against Yanukovych's whole system of rule.

On 16 January 2014 parliament passed, by a show of hands, a set of laws sharply restricting protest. Clashes followed. Between 18 and 20 February, as police and protesters fought in central Kyiv, more than 100 people were killed, most of them protesters, many shot by snipers; protesters remember them as the "Heavenly Hundred". On 21 February, Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed an agreement brokered by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland, with a Russian envoy present but not signing, to restore the 2004 constitution and hold early elections. That night Yanukovych fled Kyiv, eventually to Russia. Parliament voted to remove him and scheduled elections.

How the two sides name it. Ukrainians call these events the Revolution of Dignity: a popular uprising against a corrupt, violent government that had abandoned its post. The Kremlin calls them a Western-backed "coup" that brought "nationalists" and "neo-Nazis" to power, and has used that description to justify everything that followed. Independent observers note that far-right groups were a visible part of the Maidan's street-fighting units, and that the parliament's removal of Yanukovych did not follow the constitution's impeachment procedure; they also note that Yanukovych had fled, that parliament (including much of his own party) voted to replace him, and that in the elections of 2014 far-right parties won only a few percent of the vote.

Crimea

Within days, Russian special forces without insignia (the "little green men") seized Crimea's parliament, airports and government buildings, and blockaded Ukrainian bases. Putin at first denied they were Russian soldiers, and later admitted it. A referendum held on 16 March 2014, under occupation and without independent observers, reported overwhelming support for joining Russia; Russia annexed the peninsula two days later. On 27 March 2014 the UN General Assembly, by 100 votes to 11 with 58 abstentions, affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity and declared that the referendum, "having no validity, cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status" of Crimea. Most Crimean Tatars, whose national assembly, the Mejlis, Russia later banned, boycotted the vote. Ukraine and almost all other UN members still regard Crimea as Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation.

The Donbas

In April 2014 armed groups, led in key places by Russian citizens such as the former FSB officer Igor Girkin, seized government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk regions and proclaimed "people's republics" (7 and 27 April). Ukraine sent its army; when its forces were on the verge of winning in August 2014, and again in February 2015 at Debaltseve, Russian regular troops intervened in force. Russia denied that its army was fighting in Ukraine. On 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over separatist-held territory with a Russian Buk missile, killing all 298 people on board; a Dutch court in 2022 convicted Girkin and two others of murder in absentia, and in July 2025 the European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible.

The Minsk agreements of September 2014 and February 2015, brokered by France and Germany, froze the front line but never brought peace. By the end of 2021, according to the UN, the war in the Donbas had killed 14,200–14,400 people, including at least 3,404 civilians (counting the 298 on MH17), about 4,400 Ukrainian soldiers and about 6,500 members of the armed groups. More than a million people were displaced.

A different country

The years after 2014 changed Ukraine. A new army was built, much of it from volunteers. The EU Association Agreement came into force; visa-free travel to the EU began in 2017. Laws in 2015 banned communist and Nazi symbols and removed thousands of Lenin statues; the same package honoured the OUN and UPA, as described above. In January 2019 the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granted independence (a tomos of autocephaly) to a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, separate from the Moscow Patriarchate. More and more Ukrainians, including many native Russian speakers, began to use Ukrainian in public life.

In 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, best known for playing a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president in a TV series, defeated President Petro Poroshenko with 73.2 percent of the vote in the runoff, promising to end corruption and bring peace to the Donbas. His attempts at a deal with Moscow, including prisoner exchanges and troop disengagements, stalled. In July 2021 Putin published his essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people". By the end of the year more than 100,000 Russian troops had massed on Ukraine's borders.

Part 12 — The full-scale invasion and Ukraine in 2026 (2022–2026)

24 February 2022

Before dawn on 24 February 2022, Putin announced a "special military operation" to "demilitarise and denazify Ukraine" and protect people he said faced "genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime". Russian forces invaded from Belarus in the north, from Russia in the east and from Crimea in the south, and missiles struck cities across the country. Many governments expected Kyiv to fall within days. Instead, Ukrainians fought back. Zelensky stayed in Kyiv, filming himself in the streets with his ministers: "We are all here." Russian columns were stopped on the approaches to the capital and withdrew from the north by early April, leaving behind evidence of mass killings of civilians in Bucha and other towns. In the south-east, Russia captured Mariupol in May after a siege that reduced much of the city to ruins.

Russia rejects these rulings and resolutions. Its government says it is fighting a defensive war against NATO's expansion and the "Kiev regime". On 24 February 2025, the UN Security Council adopted its first substantive resolution on the war, drafted by the United States, which called for a swift end to "the Russian Federation-Ukraine conflict" without naming an aggressor; it passed 10–0 with five abstentions.

The course of the war

In autumn 2022 Ukrainian counter-offensives liberated most of Kharkiv region in September and the city of Kherson in November. Russia declared the annexation of four Ukrainian regions (none of which it fully controlled), mobilised hundreds of thousands of men, and began a campaign of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine's power stations. In June 2023 the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro, under Russian control, was destroyed, flooding towns and farmland downstream; Ukraine's 2023 counter-offensive in the south failed to break through Russia's fortified lines. In August 2024 Ukrainian forces crossed into Russia's Kursk region; North Korean soldiers were later sent to help Russia push them out. Through 2024–26 Russian forces advanced slowly in the east at great cost, while Ukraine increasingly struck Russian refineries, airfields and ships with its own long-range drones. A UN- and Turkish-brokered deal let Ukraine export grain through the Black Sea from July 2022 to July 2023; after Russia left it, Ukraine pushed Russia's fleet back from the western Black Sea and reopened its own sea corridor.

The human cost

Military casualties on both sides are not published by either government and are not verified by the UN; independent estimates run into the hundreds of thousands killed and wounded. Ukraine's economy shrank by almost 29 percent in 2022, by the World Bank's measure, and has grown modestly since (1.8 percent in 2025). Its population, about 52 million in 1990 and 44 million in 2021, was estimated by the World Bank at about 39 million in 2025, including people in occupied territories, with millions abroad.

UN investigators have documented torture and sexual violence against detainees, summary executions, and the deportation of children. The UN human rights chief reported in October 2026 that of more than a thousand documented cases of conflict-related sexual violence, 89 percent were attributed to Russian forces and 11 percent to Ukrainian forces. In October 2026 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Russia's systematic attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Life and politics in wartime

Under martial law, in force since 24 February 2022, Ukraine's constitution does not allow national elections. Parliamentary elections due in 2023 and the presidential election due in March 2024 were not held, and Zelensky's five-year term, which would otherwise have ended in May 2024, continues. Ukrainian constitutional lawyers and most of the opposition accept this; the Kremlin uses it to call Zelensky "illegitimate". Men aged 18 to 60 may not leave the country, and mobilisation has been a constant source of strain.

Corruption remained a battlefield too. In July 2025 a law curbing the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies brought thousands of young protesters onto the streets, and was reversed. In November 2025 the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) exposed what it called a high-level criminal organisation extracting kickbacks in the state nuclear company Energoatom ("Operation Midas"); two ministers were dismissed and, on 28 November, Zelensky's powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak resigned after his home was searched. In January 2026 Zelensky appointed the military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov in his place.

Ukraine applied to join the European Union days after the invasion and was granted candidate status in June 2022. It ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2024, becoming a member on 1 January 2025.

Where things stand in late 2026

As of the end of October 2026, the war continues. Russian forces occupy Crimea and large parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Direct talks between American, Ukrainian and Russian delegations were held in Abu Dhabi in January 2026 and in Geneva in February, without agreement; Russia still demands, as set out by Putin in June 2024, the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the whole of the four regions it claims and a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO, terms Ukraine rejects. Localised arrangements have been tried: in October 2026 a local ceasefire around the occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson region, announced on 23 October to run until 1 November, was welcomed by UN officials as offering "hope" for civilians there. Attacks continue: on 29 October 2026 a Russian drone strike on the railway station in Dnipro killed 13 people. Ukraine's relations with Poland, its most important neighbour and supply route, have been strained in 2026 by the dispute over the memory of the UPA.

Part 13 — How to understand Ukraine today

Four ways the story is told

The Ukrainian national account. Ukraine is an old European nation with its own continuous history from Kyivan Rus' through Galicia–Volhynia, the Cossacks and the Hetmanate. For centuries it was divided and ruled by others, its language banned, its peasants enserfed, its elites absorbed, and in the twentieth century its people starved in the Holodomor and slaughtered in a world war. Each time it tried to build its own state (1648, 1918, 1991) it was attacked. Independence in 1991 was a democratic choice by every region, and the Revolution of Dignity and the defence of 2022 are proof that Ukrainians are a political nation, defined not by ethnicity or language but by the choice to be free. Many Ukrainians who see themselves this way also accept that dark chapters, like 1648 and Volhynia, must be faced honestly.

The Russian state's account. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are one people with a common origin in Rus' and a common faith; "Little Russia" was always part of the Russian world; modern Ukraine's borders were drawn by Lenin and Stalin and include "historically Russian" lands in the east and south and Crimea, given away by Khrushchev. Ukrainian nationalism is in this view a creation of Austrian and Polish intrigues and Western hostility, and the 2014 change of government in Kyiv was an illegal coup that unleashed neo-Nazis against Russian speakers. This is the account set out in Putin's essay of July 2021 and his address of 24 February 2022, and it is rejected by the Ukrainian government, by most historians outside Russia, and by the UN General Assembly's resolutions.

The Polish and Jewish perspectives. Poles remember Ukraine as a land once part of their Commonwealth, the site of the Khmelnytsky and haidamaka risings, and of the Volhynia massacres of 1943, and many are angered when Ukraine honours the UPA, even as Poland has been Ukraine's strongest supporter since 2022. Jewish memory holds Ukraine as both a cradle of East European Jewish life (Hasidism was born there, in Podillia, in the eighteenth century) and the scene of 1648, the pogroms of 1881–1921, and the Holocaust by bullets. That a Jewish president leads Ukraine in a war in which Russia claims to be fighting "Nazis" is one of the bitter ironies of this history.

The Crimean Tatar perspective. For Crimean Tatars, the Indigenous people of Crimea, Russian rule has meant annexation in 1783, emigration, the deportation of 1944, a return only after 1989, and since 2014 renewed repression. They are among the most determined supporters of Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea.

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. A borderland that became a nation. For most of its history Ukraine was divided among empires, and its people were peasants ruled by foreign or assimilated elites. Its national identity was built in the nineteenth century by poets and scholars, and made political by the wars of the twentieth. That is a common European story (think of Finland, Czechia or Ireland), not proof, as the Kremlin argues, that Ukraine is artificial.

2. Language matters, but it is not the whole story. Centuries of bans and Russification made Russian the language of Ukraine's cities. Yet millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Zelensky among them, fought for Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Since 2014, and especially since 2022, many have switched to Ukrainian by choice. Ukrainian identity today is civic more than ethnic.

3. Freedom from below. The Cossack assemblies that elected and deposed their hetmans, the Orlyk constitution, the Rada of 1917, the Maidans of 2004 and 2014: Ukrainians tell their history as one of a society that does not easily accept an all-powerful ruler. Unlike Russia, Ukraine since 1991 has had six presidents, and incumbents have repeatedly lost elections.

4. Memory wars are real wars. The Holodomor, Pereiaslav, Mazepa, the OUN and UPA, 1945, the Maidan: each is fought over in textbooks, parliaments and, now, on the battlefield. A history that leaves out 1648 or Volhynia is as incomplete as one that leaves out the Holodomor or Babyn Yar.

5. Corruption and courage at the same time. Independent Ukraine has been plagued by oligarchs and graft, and still is, as the scandals of 2025 showed. It has also produced a civil society that keeps forcing change from below, from the Revolution on Granite in 1990 to the young people who took to the streets in July 2025 to defend the anti-corruption bureau in the middle of a war.

"Fight, and you will win," wrote Shevchenko in 1845; "God is helping you." The line, from his poem The Caucasus, about a people under Russian conquest, is painted on walls across Ukraine today.

The takeaway

Ukraine's lands were home to the Trypillian farmers, the Scythians and the Greek cities of the Black Sea, and then to Kyivan Rus', the medieval state from which Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians all descend. For six centuries after the Mongol sack of Kyiv in 1240, its people were ruled by Lithuania, Poland, the Ottomans, Austria and Russia; the Cossacks of the seventeenth century built a state of their own, whose meaning, and whose massacres, are still argued over. The national revival of the nineteenth century survived language bans; the independence of 1917–21 was crushed; Soviet rule brought the Holodomor, the Terror and Russification; the Second World War killed some 6.8 million people in Ukraine, including about 1.4 million Jews. In 1991 more than 90 percent of voters chose independence. Since 2014 Russia has annexed Crimea and, from 2022, waged a full-scale invasion that the UN General Assembly deplored as aggression. In 2026 Ukraine is still fighting for its survival, and still arguing, openly, about its own past.

Try this: find a recording of a Ukrainian folk song, like Shchedryk (which became the Christmas carol Carol of the Bells in English), or read a short poem by Shevchenko in translation. Then look up when and where it was written and who was ruling that part of Ukraine at the time. You will find that most of Ukraine's best-loved culture was made under someone else's flag.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), entries including "History of Ukraine", "Famine-Genocide of 1932–3", "Khmelnytsky, Bohdan", "Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654", "Mazepa, Ivan", "Shevchenko, Taras", "Central Rada", "Holocaust", "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists", "Ukrainian Insurgent Army", "Crimean Tatars", "Budapest Memorandum", "Orange Revolution", "Revolution of Dignity" and "Donets Basin".
- Shaul Stampfer, "Khmelnytskyi, Bohdan", YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe; US Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Kiev and Babi Yar" and "Mobile Killing Squads".
- Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Poland), conference volume Wołyń 1943 – rozliczenie (Volhynia massacre estimates); Nicolas Werth, Mass Violence and Resistance network, Sciences Po (famine, Terror, deportations and the 1944–52 campaign in western Ukraine).
- Mark Harrison's review of R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (University of Warwick); Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), on Lemkin and the genocide debate.
- UN General Assembly resolutions 68/262, ES-11/1, ES-11/4 and ES-11/7; Security Council resolution 2774 (2025); UN document A/49/765 (Budapest Memorandum, 1994); ICJ order of 16 March 2022; International Criminal Court press releases (2023–25).
- UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine: conflict-related civilian casualties to 31 December 2021 (published 27 January 2022) and to 30 September 2026 (published 16 October 2026); UN News, September–October 2026; UNHCR refugee population statistics.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026); World Bank, EU, UN and Government of Ukraine, Fifth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (February 2026).
- President of Russia website: Putin's article of 12 July 2021, address of 24 February 2022 and speech of 14 June 2024.
- Kyiv Independent on Zelensky's term (May 2024) and the 2026 talks; BBC News on Yermak's resignation (November 2025) and Budanov's appointment (2 January 2026); NABU on Operation Midas (11 November 2025); DW on the 2026 Poland–Ukraine dispute over the UPA; Government of the Netherlands on the ECtHR's MH17 ruling (July 2025).

Go deeper
- 📘 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine — Serhii Plokhy (the best single-volume history, from Herodotus to the present; updated editions cover the war)
- 📘 Ukraine: A History — Orest Subtelny (the classic textbook, strong on the Cossacks and the national revival)
- 📘 Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine — Anne Applebaum (a narrative history of the Holodomor; read alongside Davies and Wheatcroft for the opposing interpretation)
- 📘 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder (Ukraine at the centre of the mass killing of 1932–45)
- 📘 Voices of Chernobyl — Svetlana Alexievich (oral history of the disaster and its survivors)
- 🌐 Encyclopedia of Ukraine (the free scholarly encyclopedia used throughout this history)
- 🌐 Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (documents, survivor testimony and teaching materials)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: A Brief History of Russia (this series); Russia: A Condensed History of Tsars, Revolution, and Empire; Leaders of the 1930s; The International Institutions: What They Can and Can't Do