The history of Ukraine

Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe, stretches from the Carpathian Mountains across the fertile black-earth plains to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Its steppes were crossed by a long succession of peoples, from the farmers of Trypillia and the Scythian horsemen to Greeks, Goths, Huns and Khazars, before the medieval state of Rus' made Kyiv one of the great cities of Europe. After the Mongol conquest the land was divided among Lithuania, Poland, the Crimean Khanate and later Russia and Austria, while the Cossacks of the Dnipro built their own state in the seventeenth century. Ukraine won a brief independence after 1917, suffered the Holodomor famine and the destruction of the Second World War as a Soviet republic, and became an independent state in 1991. Since 2014 it has been at war with Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.

Stone tools found at Korolevo in Transcarpathia are among the oldest traces of human ancestors in Europe, dated to around 1.4 million years ago. Neanderthals lived along the Dniester, and modern humans reached Crimea by about 32,000 BCE. During the last Ice Age hunters on the Dnipro and Desna built shelters from mammoth bones, some of the earliest dwellings known anywhere.

Farming arrived from the southwest around 5800 BCE. In the late fifth and fourth millennia BCE the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, which spread from Romania and Moldova into the right bank of the Dnipro, built some of the largest settlements in the world at that time, with hundreds or even thousands of houses laid out in rings and covering up to about 350 hectares. Its people made painted pottery and figurines, and periodically burned their own villages. To the east, on the open steppe, herders were domesticating the horse, and in the late fourth and third millennia BCE the Yamnaya, or Pit Grave, culture spread across the grasslands with wagons and burial mounds. Many scholars see these steppe peoples as early speakers of Indo-European languages.

In the early first millennium BCE the Iranian-speaking Cimmerians dominated the southern steppe, until they were driven out in the eighth and seventh centuries by the Scythians. The Scythians were mounted nomads whose kings were buried in great mounds, or kurgans, with horses, servants and magnificent gold work. Around 513 BCE they defeated the invasion of the Persian king Darius I by retreating into the steppe and refusing battle.

From the seventh century BCE Greek colonists founded cities along the coast, among them Olbia near the mouth of the Southern Buh, Chersonesus near modern Sevastopol, and Panticapaeum, today's Kerch. They traded wine, olive oil and fine pottery for grain, fish and slaves, and the Scythians grew rich from the exchange. The Bosporan Kingdom in eastern Crimea, formed in the fifth century BCE, was a Greek state with a mixed population, and it later became a client of the Roman Empire. By the third century BCE the Sarmatians, another Iranian people, had replaced the Scythians as masters of the steppe, while a Scythian remnant survived in Crimea.

In the third century CE Germanic Goths moved south from the Baltic and settled between the Dnipro and the Danube, where their culture mixed with that of local peoples. Their power collapsed around 375, when the Huns swept in from the east, and the steppe became the western end of the Hunnic Empire. Other nomads followed: the Avars in the sixth century, the Bulgars in the seventh, and then the Khazars, whose khaganate on the lower Volga dominated the steppe and its trade routes from the seventh to the tenth century, and whose ruling elite adopted Judaism.

Meanwhile Slavic peoples were spreading out from the forest zone. By the sixth century a confederation known as the Antes lived between the Dniester and the Dnipro, and later chronicles name East Slavic tribes such as the Polianians around Kyiv and the Siverianians to their east. Some of these tribes paid tribute to the Khazars. The medieval Primary Chronicle tells that Kyiv was founded by three brothers, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, and their sister Lybid.

In the ninth century Scandinavian traders and warriors, called Varangians or Rus', travelled the rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea during the Viking Age. According to the Primary Chronicle, Oleh, a Varangian leader from Novgorod, seized Kyiv around 882 and made it the capital of a new state, Kievan Rus', which united East Slavic, Finnic and Baltic peoples along the route "from the Varangians to the Greeks". Oleh's campaign against Constantinople led to trade treaties in 907 and 911. Princess Olha, who governed as regent after her husband Ihor was killed in 945, became a Christian, and her son Sviatoslav destroyed the Khazar khaganate in the 960s.

Sviatoslav's son Volodymyr, known as Vladimir in Russian, adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988 and married the emperor's sister, bringing Rus' into the Orthodox world of Constantinople. Under Yaroslav the Wise, from 1019 to 1054, Kyiv reached its height: he built the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, issued the law code known as the Ruska Pravda, and married his daughters into the royal houses of France, Hungary and Norway. The Kyiv Cave Monastery became the centre of learning and of chronicle writing.

After Yaroslav, Rus' broke into principalities ruled by his descendants, who fought over the throne of Kyiv. Volodymyr Monomakh briefly restored unity in the early twelfth century, but in 1169 Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal sacked Kyiv, and the political centre of the Rus' world began to shift north and east. Steppe nomads, first the Pechenegs and then the Cumans of Cumania, raided constantly. The question of which modern nation is the heir of Kyivan Rus' has long been argued among Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian historians.

In 1223 the princes of Rus' and their Cuman allies were defeated by a Mongol army on the Kalka River. In 1237 the forces of the Mongol Empire returned under Batu Khan, and in December 1240 they stormed and burned Kyiv during the Mongol invasion of Europe. Most of the Rus' principalities became tributaries of the Golden Horde.

In the west, Prince Roman Mstyslavych had united Galicia and Volhynia around 1199. His son Danylo submitted to the Mongols but sought support from the West, and in 1253 he was crowned King of Rus' by a papal legate. Danylo is credited with founding the city of Lviv, named after his son Lev. The Romanovych dynasty died out in 1340, and Galicia–Volhynia was fought over by its neighbours.

Over the fourteenth century most Ukrainian lands passed to two powers. Poland under Casimir III annexed Galicia from 1349, while the Grand Duchy of Lithuania took Volhynia, Chernihiv, Podolia and, after defeating the Tatars at Blue Waters in the early 1360s, Kyiv. Lithuanian rule was relatively light: local Orthodox nobles kept their lands, and the official written language of the grand duchy was a form of Ruthenian, the ancestor of Ukrainian and Belarusian. Transcarpathia had long belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, and Bukovina became part of Moldavia.

In the south, the Crimean Khanate emerged from the Golden Horde in the 1440s and became a vassal of the Ottoman Empire in 1475. The Crimean Khanate raided the Ukrainian lands almost every year, and over the following two centuries its slave raids carried off huge numbers of people, perhaps two million from Ukraine, Poland and Russia combined, for sale in Ottoman markets.

In 1569 the Union of Lublin turned the personal union of Poland and Lithuania into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and transferred Volhynia, Kyiv and the other Ukrainian provinces from Lithuania to the Polish crown. Polish and Polonised magnates built vast estates, peasants were increasingly bound as serfs, and Jewish communities grew as merchants, craftsmen and estate managers. The Union of Brest in 1596 brought part of the Orthodox church under the authority of the pope, creating the Greek Catholic church, and the resulting conflict made religion a central question of Ukrainian life.

From the fifteenth century runaway serfs, adventurers and frontiersmen settled the empty steppe along the lower Dnipro, living by fishing, hunting and raiding, and defending the frontier against the Tatars. They became known as Cossacks. Around 1552 Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky built a fort on an island below the Dnipro rapids, the first Zaporozhian Sich, a self-governing military community that elected its own leaders. The Commonwealth registered some Cossacks as paid soldiers but tried to limit their numbers and rights, provoking repeated revolts.

In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a great uprising, allied with the Crimean Tatars, and defeated Polish armies at Zhovti Vody and Korsun. The revolt spread across Dnipro Ukraine and was accompanied by mass killings of Poles, Catholic clergy and Jews; tens of thousands of Jews died, and the massacres are remembered as one of the great catastrophes of Jewish history in Eastern Europe. Khmelnytsky created a Cossack state, the Hetmanate, and in 1654, seeking protection, he concluded the Pereiaslav agreement with the Tsardom of Russia. Ukrainian and Russian historians have long disagreed over whether it was a military alliance or a submission to the tsar.

After Khmelnytsky's death in 1657 came decades of civil war and foreign invasion known as the Ruin. The Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 split Ukraine along the Dnipro, giving the left bank and Kyiv to Russia and leaving the right bank to Poland. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who ruled the left-bank Hetmanate from 1687, was a great patron of churches and learning, but as Peter the Great curtailed its autonomy he joined Charles XII of Sweden. Russian troops destroyed Mazepa's capital, Baturyn, in 1708, and in July 1709 Peter defeated the Swedes and Mazepa's Cossacks at Poltava. Mazepa's successor in exile, Pylyp Orlyk, drew up a constitution for the Hetmanate in 1710.

Through the eighteenth century Russia steadily absorbed the Hetmanate. Catherine the Great abolished the office of hetman in 1764, destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, and extended serfdom to the left bank. After victories over the Ottomans, the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783 and colonised the southern steppe, which it called New Russia, founding cities such as Odesa in 1794. The partitions of Poland gave Russia the right bank of the Dnipro by 1795, while Galicia passed in 1772 to the Habsburg Monarchy, which also took Bukovina in 1775.

The nineteenth century brought a national revival. Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida of 1798 was the first major work in modern vernacular Ukrainian, and the poet and painter Taras Shevchenko, born a serf, became the national bard with his collection Kobzar in 1840. He was exiled for his membership of the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The Russian government regarded Ukrainians as "Little Russians" and tried to suppress the language: the Valuev circular of 1863 banned Ukrainian religious and educational books, and the Ems decree of 1876 banned almost all printing in Ukrainian. Ukrainian lands were also the heart of the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were required to live, and waves of pogroms struck in 1881 and in 1905. In the east, coal and iron made the Donbas an industrial region, drawing workers from across the empire.

In Austrian Galicia, and later in Austria-Hungary, Ukrainians had more freedom to organise. The Greek Catholic church, reading societies, cooperatives and political parties flourished, and the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky taught in Lviv. Poverty drove hundreds of thousands of Galicians to emigrate to Canada, the United States and Brazil before 1914.

World War I turned Ukraine into a battlefield between Russia and Austria-Hungary. After the Russian Revolution of February 1917 a Central Rada, or council, formed in Kyiv under Hrushevsky, and in November it proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic. On 22 January 1918, as Bolshevik forces advanced, it declared full independence. Germany and Austria-Hungary recognised the republic at Brest-Litovsk and occupied the country, then replaced the Rada in April 1918 with a conservative Hetmanate under Pavlo Skoropadsky. In November 1918 Ukrainians in Lviv proclaimed a West Ukrainian People's Republic, which formally united with the Kyiv-based republic on 22 January 1919, but it lost a war against Poland.

In 1919 six armies fought over Ukraine, and Kyiv changed hands repeatedly. The Directorate led by Symon Petliura, the Bolsheviks, the anti-Bolshevik Whites, the anarchist Nestor Makhno and Polish forces all held parts of the country, and pogroms carried out by many of these forces, including troops nominally loyal to the Directorate, the Whites, the Red Army and local warlords, killed tens of thousands of Jews. By 1920 the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin controlled most of the country, and the Peace of Riga in 1921 divided Ukrainian lands between Soviet Russia and Poland. On 30 December 1922 the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a founding member of the Soviet Union.

In the 1920s Soviet policy encouraged Ukrainian language, schools and culture, a policy called Ukrainisation, with Kharkiv as the capital until 1934. Under Joseph Stalin this ended. Forced collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 met fierce peasant resistance, and in 1932 and 1933 the state requisitioned grain far beyond what villages could supply, blacklisted villages that missed quotas, and stopped starving peasants from leaving Ukraine to look for food. The resulting famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, "death by hunger", killed millions; widely cited estimates put deaths among Ukrainians at around four to five million out of six to eight million famine deaths across the Soviet Union. Ukraine's parliament declared the Holodomor a genocide in 2006, and many other states have since done the same; Russia rejects that description, and historians continue to debate whether it was planned as an attack on Ukrainians as a nation or arose from Soviet policy aimed at the peasantry as a whole. The famine was followed by purges in which much of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and party leadership was shot or sent to the Gulag in 1937 and 1938.

Western Ukraine, meanwhile, lay mostly in interwar Poland, where Ukrainians faced restrictions on schools and land, and where the radical Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, founded in 1929, waged a campaign of assassinations. Bukovina belonged to Romania and Transcarpathia to Czechoslovakia.

Under the pact between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the Red Army occupied eastern Poland in September 1939 and the Soviets annexed Galicia and Volhynia to the Ukrainian SSR, followed by northern Bukovina in 1940; mass arrests and deportations followed. In June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded, and by the end of the year almost all of Ukraine was under German or Romanian occupation. Kyiv fell in September 1941, and on 29 and 30 September German units shot 33,771 Jews at the ravine of Babyn Yar outside the city. Around one and a half million Jews were murdered in Ukraine during the Holocaust, most of them shot near their homes. Millions of Ukrainians were taken to Germany as forced labourers, and the occupiers starved prisoners of war and cities alike.

Between four and a half and six million Ukrainians served in the Red Army. In the west, the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought the Germans, Soviet partisans and Polish underground forces, and in 1943 and 1944 it carried out the massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, in which tens of thousands and perhaps as many as 100,000 Poles were killed, with Polish reprisals killing thousands of Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans, including as auxiliary police who took part in the killing of Jews, while many others were themselves victims of the occupation. The Red Army retook Ukraine in 1943 and 1944, during World War II's heaviest fighting. In May 1944 Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar people from Crimea to Central Asia, and many died in transit and exile. Ukraine emerged with its cities ruined and several million of its people dead, among the heaviest losses suffered by any country in the war.

After the war the Soviet Union added Transcarpathia, and Ukraine took roughly its present borders; the Ukrainian SSR was given its own seat at the United Nations. Poles were moved out of western Ukraine and Ukrainians out of Poland in large population exchanges. The Insurgent Army fought on in the western forests into the early 1950s, and in 1946 the Greek Catholic church was forcibly merged into the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1954, under Nikita Khrushchev, Crimea was transferred from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian SSR.

Khrushchev's thaw allowed a cultural revival by the "Sixtiers", a generation of poets and artists, but dissidents were arrested again in waves in 1965 and 1972. Ukraine became a heavily industrialised republic, producing coal, steel, rockets and grain. On 26 April 1986 a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kyiv exploded, the worst nuclear accident in history. The slow official response damaged trust in the Soviet system, and under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms a popular movement, Rukh, was founded in 1989 to campaign for democracy and Ukrainian rights, as the Revolutions of 1989 swept Eastern Europe.

After the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, the Ukrainian parliament declared independence on 24 August. On 1 December more than 90 per cent of voters approved it in a referendum, with majorities in every region including Crimea, and Leonid Kravchuk was elected president. A week later the leaders of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus met at Belavezha and agreed to replace the USSR with a Commonwealth of Independent States, sealing the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The new state inherited the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal, which it gave up under the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994, in which Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States promised to respect Ukraine's independence and borders. The 1990s brought hyperinflation and a deep economic collapse, and under President Leonid Kuchma from 1994 to 2005 an oligarchic system emerged, marked by corruption and the murder in 2000 of the journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. A constitution was adopted in 1996, and the hryvnia replaced the temporary currency the same year.

In 2004 mass protests against a rigged presidential election, the Orange Revolution, led the Supreme Court to order a new run-off, won by Viktor Yushchenko. His rival, Viktor Yanukovych, won the presidency in 2010. In November 2013 Yanukovych suspended an association agreement with the European Union, setting off months of protests on Kyiv's Maidan square known as the Euromaidan. In February 2014 around a hundred people were killed, most of them protesters shot in central Kyiv, and Yanukovych fled to Russia; parliament removed him from office.

Days later, Russian forces without insignia seized Crimea. After a referendum held under military occupation and not recognised by most of the world, Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. Armed separatists backed by Russia then took control of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and fighting with Ukrainian forces drew in regular Russian troops. In July 2014 a Malaysia Airlines plane, flight MH17, was shot down over separatist-held territory, killing all 298 people aboard. Ceasefire agreements signed at Minsk in 2014 and 2015 reduced the fighting but were never implemented, and by early 2022 the war in the Donbas had killed about 14,000 people. President Petro Poroshenko, elected in May 2014, signed the association agreement with the EU, and in 2019 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine received recognition of its independence from the Patriarch of Constantinople. That year the comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president by a large majority.

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion from the north, east and south. Russian forces failed to take Kyiv and withdrew from the north in early April, revealing mass killings of civilians in towns such as Bucha. The southern port of Mariupol fell after a siege that destroyed most of the city. Ukrainian counteroffensives retook much of the Kharkiv region in September 2022 and the city of Kherson in November, while Russia declared the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which most countries do not recognise. In June 2022 the EU made Ukraine a candidate for membership. In March 2023 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the deportation of Ukrainian children, and in June 2023 the destruction of the Kakhovka dam flooded much of the lower Dnipro. A Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 made little progress, and from 2024 Russian forces advanced slowly in the Donbas, taking Avdiivka in February 2024. In August 2024 Ukraine launched an incursion into Russia's Kursk region, from which its forces had largely been pushed back by 2025. Elections in Ukraine have been suspended under martial law.

The war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians; millions of Ukrainians became refugees abroad and millions more were displaced at home. After Donald Trump returned to the US presidency in 2025, Washington pressed for a settlement, with Russian and Ukrainian delegations meeting in Istanbul, a US–Russia summit in Alaska in August 2025, and three-way talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva in early 2026. These produced prisoner exchanges and a short ceasefire for Orthodox Easter in April 2026, but no agreement on territory. As of October 2026 fighting continued, with Russia occupying roughly a fifth of Ukraine's internationally recognised territory, including Crimea.