Who ruled Kyiv?

Kyiv rises on wooded hills above the right bank of the Dnipro (Dnieper), at the edge between the forests of the north and the open steppe of the south. The river carried the trade route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", which linked the Baltic with the Black Sea and Constantinople. A thousand years ago it was the capital of Kyivan Rus', the medieval state from which Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians all trace parts of their history, and today it is the capital of independent Ukraine. Earlier English usage spelled the name Kiev, from the Russian form.

The Primary Chronicle, written in Kyiv in the early 12th century, tells of three brothers, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, and their sister Lybid, who founded the town and gave it the eldest brother's name. Archaeology shows Slavic settlements on the hills by the 6th to 8th centuries. According to the Chronicle, the Varangian prince Oleg took Kyiv around 882 and made it the centre of a realm stretching from Novgorod to the steppe. In 988 Grand Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) adopted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and had the townspeople baptised in the river.

Under Yaroslav the Wise in the 11th century Kievan Rus' reached its height, and Kyiv became one of the largest cities in Europe. Yaroslav built the Cathedral of Saint Sophia and the Golden Gate, and monks founded the Kyiv Cave Monastery (Pechersk Lavra). After 1132 the realm broke into rival principalities, and princes fighting over the Kyivan throne sacked the city in 1169 and 1203. On 6 December 1240 the Mongol army of Batu Khan stormed and largely destroyed Kyiv, and it fell under the overlordship of the Golden Horde.

Around 1362 the Grand Duchy of Lithuania took the city after defeating the Horde, and in 1569 the Union of Lublin transferred it to the Polish crown within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Kyiv, which had received town self-government under Magdeburg law in the 1490s, remained the chief centre of Orthodox culture in the region; the academy founded by Metropolitan Petro Mohyla in 1632 became a leading Orthodox school. In 1648 the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky took the city, and after the Pereiaslav agreement of 1654 the Cossack Hetmanate accepted the protection of the Muscovite tsar. The Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 handed Kyiv to the Tsardom of Russia for what was meant to be two years, but the Eternal Peace of 1686 made the transfer permanent.

Within the Russian Empire Kyiv was a provincial city and pilgrimage centre until the 19th century, when sugar, railways and industry made it a boom town.

After the 1917 revolutions Kyiv was the capital of the Ukrainian People's Republic and changed hands many times in the wars before Soviet rule was established. It became the capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1934, in the shadow of the famine of 1932 and 1933 and of Stalin's purges, and many historic churches were demolished. German forces captured the city in September 1941, and on 29 and 30 September they murdered 33,771 Jews at the ravine of Babyn Yar, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. The Red Army retook Kyiv on 6 November 1943. In April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear disaster struck about 100 kilometres to the north.

On 24 August 1991 the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv declared independence from the Soviet Union. The city's central square, the Maidan, was the stage of the Orange Revolution of 2004 and of the protests of 2013 and 2014 that removed President Viktor Yanukovych. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian forces advanced to the city's northern outskirts but withdrew from the region by early April; Kyiv has since been repeatedly struck by missiles and drones. The city had close to three million people before the invasion and remains the country's political, economic and cultural centre.