(1): 9th century: Kievan Rus'
At some point in the late 9th century, a group of Norsemen who called themselves Rus (pronounced "Roos") established control of the East Slavic community in what is now northwestern Russia and then migrated along the Dnieper River to the city of Kiev, their capital in what is now Ukraine. Historians call this large medieval state Kievan Rus' .
The Nordic elite soon integrated into the local Slavic population, and they began to call themselves Rus' or Ruszings. The center of the Rus' state is today's central Ukraine. Moscow was founded in the 12th century on the far northeastern frontier at the time. In 988, Archduke Flodimer ("Volodymyr" in Ukrainian and "Vladimir" in Russian) who died in 1015 accepted Byzantine Christianity. Few people read or speak the literary language of the Church and the State, i.e. the Old Church Slavic language. Instead, they spoke a series of East Slavic dialects that eventually developed Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian.
In the mid-13th century, the loose Commonwealth of Rus' was easily conquered by the Mongol Empire, but Russia and Ukraine were still vying for the glorious legacy of medieval Rus'.
(2): 1654: Treaty of Perea Slav (aka Pereya Slavic Agreement)
Taking advantage of the decline of Mongol power in the late 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the latter eventually merged with Poland) divided up the lands of the former Rus'. A new Ukrainian Cossack social group developed on Poland's southern border to protect it from Crimean Tatars. The Ukrainian Cossacks were a large group of free men, many of them fleeing serfs, who guarded the steppe borders of southern Poland against attacks by the Turks and Tatars.
The concept of "Ukrainians" already exists, but locals continue to call themselves "Russians" while referring to future Russians as "Muscovites." By the early 17th century, the Orthodox Christian population in Ukrainian soil had become antagonistic by the religious policies of Catholic Poland and the spread of serfdom, a form of slavery in which peasants were bound to the land and sold with it. The Cossack rebellion of 1648 led by Getman (military leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky (circa 1595-1657) evolved into a massive social and religious war against Polish rule, leading to the establishment of the Emirate, a Cossack regime that nominally ruled itself under the Polish king but was independent.
In search of allies against Poland, Khmelnytsky accepted the "protection" of the Orthodox Russian Tsar in the Treaty of Pereia Slav in 1654. The exact meaning of "protection" is still debated today, but subsequent Russian policies affected the absorption of Cossack lands, especially after The Gateman Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709) failed in his attempt to break with Moscow in 1709.
(3): 1876: Ems Act
In 1764, Catherine II (1729–96) abolished the emirate in order to eliminate the last remnants of Ukrainian autonomy, and Russian troops destroyed Cossack strongholds on the Dnieper River. Cossack officers could claim to be nobles—the Empire agreed to accept them as equals with the Russian nobility, as long as they could provide the relevant paperwork—but the Ukrainian peasants were eventually enslaved.
During the partition of Poland in the late 18th century, Catherine acquired large tracts of Ukrainian land that Poland had retained after 1654. As the institutional legacy of the emirate was dismantled, intellectuals under its influence developed a new interest in Ukrainian history and folklore in Pan-European Romanticism. In the 1840s, the Ukrainian national bard Taras Shevchenko (1814–61) published his first Ukrainian poems, and subsequently co-founded a secret political society to discuss the Free Slavic Federation and the abolition of serfdom.
The Ukrainian national revival also took place in the westernmost Rus' lands, transferring from Poland to the Austrian Empire. Worried Russian authorities responded in 1863 by banning the publication of educational literature written in the Ukrainian language. In 1876, Tsar Alexander II (1818–81) signed the Ames Act while on vacation at the Baths of Bad Ems, Germany, banning all publications in Ukrainian. The Empire continued to promote the assimilation of Russian culture by rewarding those "loyal" Ukrainians that it considered to be the "little Russian tribes" that it considered to constitute the Great Russian people, while discriminating against politicized Ukrainians in the form of unemployment, arrest, and exile. Ukrainian patriots are now starting to use "Ukrainians" as an ethnic name to indicate their difference from Russians.
(4): 1918: Independence of Ukraine
With the collapse of the Russian monarchy under the pressure of war and political discord in 1917, patriotic Ukrainians established their coordinating body, the Central Rada (Committee), which soon developed into a revolutionary parliament. The Provisional Government of Russia granted Autonomy to Ukraine in the name of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), but the Bolsheviks subsequently refused to recognize it and invaded Ukraine to incorporate it into the Soviet state.
The UNR declared full independence in January 1918 and signed a peace treaty with the Allies of Brest before the Bolsheviks did so. German authorities appointed a Ukrainian monarch with the historical title of chief, but after the end of World War I, the UNR returned to power and declared unity with the territory of Ukraine in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. The UNR was unable to survive the great conflict between the Russian Red Army and the White Army during the Russian Civil War (1917-22), as neither of the great powers recognized Ukraine's sovereignty, but the precedent of Ukrainian independence forced the Bolsheviks to establish a Soviet Ukrainian republic in 1922 as one of the founding states of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1930s, however, Stalin returned to crushing the unfinished business of the Ukrainian political state that had developed during the revolution. Some 4 million Ukrainian farmers were killed in a state-orchestrated famine of 1932-33, known in Ukraine as the Great Famine ("starvation murder") and considered genocide – an explanation that is increasingly accepted worldwide but rejected by Russia. Stalin also destroyed Ukraine's cultural elite and began to preach the Tsar's notion that Ukrainians were "younger brothers" of Russians.
(5): 1945: Enlarged Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Following his agreement with Hitler on the division of Eastern and Central Europe, Stalin invaded Poland in September 1939 and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which Poland had retained after a brief war with the Bolsheviks in 1919. Ended Lenin's dream of the Red Cavalry bringing the revolution to Europe. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Churchill and Roosevelt allowed Stalin to retain these territories. The Soviets also pressured Czechoslovakia to give up its "Rusyn" lands.
Under the leadership of its energetic party leader, Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), the resulting enlarged Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic incorporated almost all ethnically Ukrainian regions. Khrushchev thus achieved the long-term goal of the Ukrainian patriots, namely the creation of a unified Ukraine, but pursued the process of cultural assimilation into Russia, rather than promoting Ukrainian autonomy. The stubborn armed resistance of Ukrainian nationalists to Soviet rule on the territory of former Poland continued until the 1950s.
(6): 1954: Transfer of the Crimean Peninsula
Crimea (the Crimean Peninsula in southern Ukraine), although connected to Ukraine only by land, became an autonomous republic within Russia in 1921, in part because of its strategic significance. Neither Russians nor Ukrainians were in the majority there, and in the 1920s the Soviet Union fostered the culture of crimean Tatars, who had lived on the peninsula since the 13th century, and the Russian Empire conquered the Crimean Khanate in 1783 to impress the Western colonies and the newly independent States of Asia with a seemingly benevolent policy.
However, when the Red Army recaptured Crimea from Nazi Germany in 1944, Stalin ordered the forced expulsion of the Tatars, which many historians consider genocide. As a result of this expulsion, ethnic Russians became the majority almost overnight. The war left the peninsula's economy and urbanization in ruins. To commemorate the 300th anniversary of Pereyaslav, Khrushchev organized the task of handing over Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, that is, to rebuild Crimea and provide it with fresh water through the main channels under construction. He also wanted to please the Ukrainian bureaucracy that formed the basis of his power and perhaps to add a balance of Russian culture to the recently merged nationalist western region.
(7): 1991: Collapse of the Soviet Union
When Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–) loosened ideological control led to a massive rejection of Soviet communism, democracy activists in Ukraine and Russia worked together to pioneer new politics, such as free speech and free elections. The government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) did not seek to preserve the Soviet Union, but sought an independent Russia. This made Yeltsin a natural ally of Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk (1934–), but only if both sides refused to accept the Soviet legacy.
The Ukrainian referendum in December 1991 marked the end of the alliance, with Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus officially dissolving. However, as economic reforms stalled in the early 1990s, Yeltsin and other Russian figures increasingly appealed to domestic nationalists nostalgic for the Soviet Empire by criticizing Ukraine's cultural policies and questioning Crimea's shift.
In 1997, a comprehensive treaty between Russia and Ukraine confirmed the integrity of Ukraine's borders — a point that Russia and the Western nuclear powers also guaranteed in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, when Ukraine agreed to hand over its Soviet-made nuclear arsenal. The Treaty expires on March 31, 2019.
(8): 2014: Annexation of Crimea and donbass wars
When a popular revolution in Ukraine overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and brought pro-Western democratic forces to power — an act approved by parliament and confirmed by an early presidential election — the Russian authorities used the upheaval to establish military control over Ukraine. Crimea. They calculated that most local Russians would support the annexation of the peninsula into Russia because they would be attracted to higher salaries and better career options without having to learn Ukrainian. But the fake referendum to join Russia produced incredible results, with the international community, with the exception of a handful of pro-Russian outliers such as North Korea, Syria and Venezuela, decisively condemning the annexation.
Faced with punitive Western sanctions, Russian authorities in Crimea began cracking down on local Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar activists. After securing control of Crimea, Russia has also incited rebellion in other provinces in southeastern Ukraine, where major regional parties have long fostered pro-Russian attitudes. But this strategy only works in Donbass, a depressed industrial area predominantly Russian-speaking. As Ukrainian troops tried to regain control, President Putin's government secretly sent regular troops to support pro-Russian separatists and Russian "volunteers."
The active phase of the war lasted until the fall of 2015, escalating again in 2017 and early 2020, resulting in the loss of an estimated 14,000 lives and the displacement of an estimated 1.5 million.
(9): 2021: The build-up of Russian troops and the ultimatum to the West
The war in Donbass never officially ended. Low-intensity fires are a daily reality, with weekly casualty reports. Western middlemen held summits in 2015 on the "Normandy model" (Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine) to help moderate military operations. The Minsk Protocol, signed during the summit held in the Belarusian capital in 2015, showed the way for a peaceful settlement, but it remained hampered by certain steps that were also unacceptable for Ukraine (one that allowed local elections in two "people's republics", where Russian troops were present, but did not establish Ukraine's control over its borders with Russia) or Russia (which recognized the presence of its troops and withdrew them).
At the end of 2021, Western and Ukrainian intelligence agencies released information about the mass buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border and the preparation of infrastructure for a possible invasion. Russian officials insist that the preparations are military exercises, but they have also issued ultimatums to the West, demanding written assurances of NATO's further eastward expansion; limiting the types of weapons of NATO members that have joined NATO since 1997; and halting any NATO military cooperation with other post-Soviet countries, particularly Ukraine and Georgia. At the same time, the Russian media is concerned about the imminent NATO attack on Russia and/or Ukraine's attack on Donbass.