History of Ukraine

(Brief version)

For a long time, the history of Ukraine was associated with its much younger, but larger neighbor - Russia, which has its roots in the Grand Duchy of Moscow, but claims its rights to the heritage of Ancient Rus'.

The article below is a short and simplified version of Ukrainian history compiled by the Ukraine Guide team. If you prefer a more detailed version from an internationally accepted leader in education, knowledge, and information read History of Ukraine in the Encyclopædia Britannica

The Early  period

• 7th century BC. A people called the Scythians lived on the territory of modern Ukraine. Later, the Greeks settled on the northern coast of the Black Sea and founded their city-states there.
• V - VI centuries AD. Slavic tribes settled on the territory of modern Ukraine.

Ancient Rus'

• 9th century. Scandinavian Vikings, who in these lands were called Varangians, came to Eastern Europe on the rivers. Some of them stayed here to live.
• 882. According to the annals, a Novgorod prince named Oleg the Prophet (Vishchyi Oleg) came with an army to Kyiv, where he killed the local rulers - the brothers Askold and Dir. After that, Oleg decided to stay in Kyiv and, uttering the legendary phrase "let it be a Russian city," established a powerful state, later known as Kyivan Rus'.
• 907. According to the "Tales of Medieval Years," Oleg the Prophet went to war against Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Prince Oleg ruled Russia until 912, after which the throne passed to his son, Igor, and then to Igor's wife, Princess Olga - the first woman to rule Kievan Rus'.
• 988. The Baptism of Rus'. Originally a follower of Slavic paganism, Volodymyr the Great, a grandson of  Princess Olga, converted to Christianity and ordered the people of Kyiv to get baptized and to throw pagan idols into the Dnieper river. He is later become known as Saint Vladimir.
• 1015. Death of Volodymyr the Great.
• 1019-1054. Yaroslav the Wise, one of the numerous sons of Volodymyr the Great, becomes the Grand Prince of Kyiv and the ruler of Rus'. He was also the Prince of Novgorod on three occasions, uniting the principalities for a time. Yaroslav's baptismal name was George, after Saint George.
• 11-12th centuries. After the death of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, Kyivan Rus' began to disintegrate into separate principalities that formed a federation. During the second third of the XII century, almost a dozen independent principalities appeared, the largest of which on the territory of modern Ukraine were Kyivske, Chernihiv-Siverske, Pereyaslavske, and  Galicia-Volyn. Each principality had individual political and economic status. The ruling dynasty of the Rurikovichs, the Orthodox religion, and the church organization centered in Kyiv remained common.
• 1240. The Golden Horde, led by Genghis Khan's grandson, Baty captured Kyiv and all the territories of southern and eastern Ukraine.
• 1253. The fall of Kyivan Rus'. The last independent principality of Kyivan Rus' became the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia. It remained independent until the 14th century, when it was gradually absorbed by Poland and Lithuania.

The emergence of the Ukrainian Cossacks.

• 15th century. The Poles gradually pushed the Horde to the east, but the Tatars still held the Crimea until they fell under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. At the end of the 15th century, the source of the greatest danger for the Ukrainian population was the Tatar raids, which destroyed settlements, killed the elderly, and sold the youth into slavery.
• Early 16th century. Eastern Ukraine was depopulated, and from the middle of the century, the boundaries of the lands inhabited by Ukrainians ran along the northern border of the steppe and included the cities of Kamianets, Bar, Vinnytsia, Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy, Kaniv, and Kyiv. To the south of this line lay lands called the Wild Field. The strengthening of national-religious and socio-economic oppression of Ukrainians by the Catholic Church and Polish and Ukrainian nobility in the western lands contributed to their flight to the east. Looking for a place for free labor, the townspeople and peasants began to settle in the steppes of the Wild Field, despite the Tatar danger. This is how the Cossacks appeared. Translated from the Tatar language, this word meant "free, independent person."

Cossack state

• 16th-17th centuries. Many Ukrainian Cossacks and escaped peasants moved to the lower reaches of the Dnieper, fleeing from the repressions of the Polish government and feudal oppression. Collectively they established a fortified settlement under the name "Zaporizhska Sich," which became the capital of the Ukrainian Cossack state.
• The head of the state was an elected commander called Hetman, thus the name "Hetmanship." The Hetmanship dates back to the largest Cossack uprising in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi (1648-1657).
• Since 1654, it went under the protectorate of the Moscow Zardom.

18th-century Ukraine

• At the beginning of the century, the west of Ukraine belonged to Poland, and the east was under the protectorate of Russia but was not formally part of it.
• 1764. The Russian empress Catherine II decided to join eastern Ukraine to Russia, then the institution of hetmans was abolished.
• 1765. The Hetmanship was reformed into the Malorussia (Little Russia) province. 
• 1772 – 1795. The decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth led to a division of its territory between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Most of western Ukraine was captured by Russia (except for a small strip in the extreme west, which went to Austria).

19th-century Ukraine

• Ukraine was firmly under the control of Russia, but in the second half of the century, national liberation sentiments began to spread on the territory of Ukraine.

20th-century Ukraine

World War I and Revolutions 1914-1918

• 1914. A pro-Austrian Ukrainian Council headed by parliamentarian Kost Levytsky was created in Lviv, which moved to Vienna after the defeat of the Austrian army in Galicia. In parallel with this, socialists from Eastern Ukraine also formed the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in Lviv.
• 1917. In February, the bourgeois-democratic revolution ended the monarchy in the Russian Empire; in March, the Ukrainian Central Council was created in Kyiv, headed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky; in November - the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) was formed on the territory of the following provinces: Volyn, Katerynoslav, Kyiv, Podilska, Poltava, Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernihiv, and Tavria (without Crimea).
• In January 1918, the Central Rada proclaimed the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic
• October 1918. Creation in Lviv of the Ukrainian National Council — a representative political body of the Ukrainian people in Austria-Hungary.
• November 1918. Formation of the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR) in Eastern Galicia; by the end of November, most of its territory was occupied by Polish troops.
• December 1918. The government of Soviet Russia refused to recognize the independence of the Ukrainian state;

Soviet-Ukrainian war. 1919—1920

• January 22, 1919. Unification of the UNR and ZUNR. Soon, the Bolsheviks sent troops to Ukraine and forced it to join Russia

Ukraine in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

• December 30, 1922, Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union, created as a confederation of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation.
• 1928. Beginning of the collectivization in agriculture. The mass creation of collective farms;  the forced conversion of private land plots into communal;  establishment of the state ownership of the means of production. Ukrainians massively resisted collectivization, which led to repressions by the authorities.
• 1932-33 Holodomor. The leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, was determined to crush the Ukrainian farmers and caused artificial famine taking the lives of about 7 million residents of Ukraine. In 1932, collective farms received completely unrealistic quotas for grain supply to the state. Soviet law decreed farmers were prohibited from storing grain until they met their quotas. Because it was impossible to fulfill these quotas, Soviet officials confiscated all the grain, leaving the peasants to starve. This terrible
• 1937-39. The Stalin purges. The Soviet authorities actively searched for citizens who were dissatisfied with the government and sent them to Siberia or killed them.

Second World War. 1939-1945

• August 23, 1939. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. According to the secret protocol to the peace treaty between Germany and the USSR, the Red Army began the so-called "liberation campaign" with an attack on Poland, due to which Western Ukraine joined the USSR.
• 1940, Southern Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were added to the composition of the Ukrainian SSR.
• 1941. The Germans invaded Ukraine, destroyed the cities, and killed millions of Ukrainians.
• November 6, 1943. The Red Army took control of Kyiv and soon of the entire territory of modern Ukraine.

Post-war reconstruction and development of Ukraine (1945 – 1990)

• 1945. The Ukrainian delegation took part in the founding conference of the United Nations.
• 1946. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UKHC) was liquidated by a personal decree of Stalin
• 1954. The Crimean Autonomous Region joined the Ukrainian SSR.
• 1976. The Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UGG) was created. An association of the Ukrainian human rights movement activists aimed to bring the facts of human rights violations in Ukraine to the attention of wider Ukrainian and international public circles.
• 1986. The accident at the Chornobyl NPP became a catastrophe on a European scale. The authorities tried to hide the disaster, and this caused a lot of resentment. In the late 1980s, Ukrainians became increasingly dissatisfied with the leaders from Moscow.
• 1988. At a 50,000-strong rally in Lviv, the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union (UGS) was announced 
• 1989. THE MOVEMENT a.k.a Ruch  (Ukrainian People's Movement for Perestroika) was created.
• On September 7, 1989, a prayer procession of several thousand people took place in Lviv to St. George's Cathedral demanding the legalization of the UGCC in the Soviet Union, and in December of the same year, Pope Ivan Paul II met with the head of the Soviet state, Mikhail Gorbachev. These events gave rise to the revival of the legal structure of the UGCC.
• 1990. The Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR approved Ukraine's Declaration on State Sovereignty.
• 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the declaration of Ukraine's independence. On August 24, 1991, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the resolution "On the Proclamation of the Independence of Ukraine." Later, a nationwide referendum was held in which the Ukrainian people almost unanimously confirmed their desire to live in an independent state. 84.18% of Ukrainian residents took part in the referendum, of which 90.32% voted for independence.
• The transition from socialism to capitalism was painful. For several years, Ukraine experienced high inflation and economic recession. However, towards the end of the century, the economy began to grow slowly.

Ukraine of the 21st century

• 2004. Orange Revolution. The transition from Soviet-style dictatorship to democracy did not go smoothly. In late 2004, Kremlin-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovych officially won the presidential election. However, many people considered the elections rigged, and supporters of another, more progressive candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, staged mass demonstrations. Subsequently, a re-voting took place, and in early 2005, Yushchenko became president.
• 2008-2009. World economic crisis. In May 2008, Ukraine became a member of the World Trade Organization. The country was severely affected by the global financial crisis but recovered relatively quickly. The main export positions of Ukraine are sunflower oil, corn, wheat, iron ore, and iron semi-finished products.
• 2013 - 2014. Revolution of dignity. When President Viktor Yanukovych rejected the long-awaited agreement on the association of Ukraine with the EU, a wave of demonstrations swept through the country, which turned into a confrontation between citizens and Yanukovych's government. Under public pressure, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and after new elections, Petro Poroshenko became the president of Ukraine.

Russian aggression.

• In 2014, taking advantage of the political crisis in Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied part of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
• On February 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine from many directions and occupied large areas. The armed forces of Ukraine, with the support of the population, are heroically resisting the invaders.
• The large-scale escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war is currently ongoing.