A History of Ukraine

Oleksandr Palii

Published by Samit-book, 2018.

This book is dedicated to my grandparents Serhii andGalina who taught me to love history.

History is inspiring. You will never lose heart afterlearning what humanity has had to go through.

Countless generations paid with their lives for thelessons of history. We would be ill-advised to refuseto learn them for free.

So turn the pages of history, moving from one erato another, for each page opens a treasure trove of humanexperience.

Oleksandr Palii

Oleksandr Palii

A HISTORY OF UKRAINE

A short course

Edition 3

Kiev, 2018 Samit-book

Palii, Oleksandr.

A history of Ukraine. A short course / Oleksandr Palii. — K.: Samit-book, 2018. — 464 p.

ISBN 978-617-7672-93-6

This book sets out Ukraine's history from antiquity to the present day, offering a condensed overview of the turbulent history of this European country. This book will help answer the following questions: What is Ukraine, a country which has recently been much talked about in the world? How has Europe become precisely as we see it now?

2018 © Oleksandr Palii

UDK 94(477) (02.062)=! 11

This book is dedicated to my grandparents Serhii and Galina who taught me to love history.

History is inspiring. You will never lose heart after learning what humanity has had to go through.

Countless generations paid with their lives for the lessons of history. We would be ill-advised to refuse to learn them for free.

So turn the pages of history, moving from one era to another, for each page opens a treasure trove of human experience.

Oleksandr Palii

Contents

Prehistory....................................10

Homo sapiens..............................12

Ice Age............................................16

The Neolithic Revolution .......................................22

The Trypilian Culture....26

Indo-European Homeland.30

The Cimmerians........................36

The Scythians ........................38

Victories of Greater Scythia.......................................48

Ancient Greek Cities.......54

The Sarmatians........................58

The Goths......................................64

The Slavs......................................68

The Hunnic Empire................74

The Founding of Kyiv.......78

The Origin of the Ukrainian people.......................................82

Princes of Varangian Origin.......................................84

The Conquest of the Crimea and Zalissya.......................................90

Volodymyr the Great..........94

Yaroslav the Wise.............100

Victories over the Nomads.......................................104

Feudal Fragmentation....110

Volodymyr Monomakh..........112

Mstyslav the Great..........116

Iziaslav Mstyslavych....118

Rus'..................................................122

The Origin of Russia....128

The Language of Kyivan Rus' .......................................134

Ukraine.........................................140

Fighting the Mongols....144

The Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia and Samogitia .... 154

The Principality of Galicia-Volhynia.......................................160

The Kyiv and Volhynia Principalities in the 1430s

to the 1470s ........................164

The Decline of Lithuania170

The Crimean Khanate.......178

The Ukrainian Cossacks182

The Zaporozhian Sich .186

Campaigns against Moldova, Turkey and the Crimea... 190

Campaigns against Muscovy.......................................196

Anti-Polish Uprisings.200

The Liberation War of 1648-1657.......................................206

The Pereiaslav Treaty.216

The Treaty of Hadiach.224

The Partition of Ukraine228

Petro Doroshenko................232

Ivan Sirko ........................... 238

The Restoration of Right-Bank Ukraine.......................................242

Ivan Mazepa and the "Mazepists".......................................246

The Curtailment of Ukraine's Rights.......................................256

The Haidamakas.....................264

The Introduction of Serfdom.......................................268

The Danubian Sich.............272

The Karmaliuk Rebellion276

The Opryshoks and Oleksa Dovbush.......................................278

The National Revival in Galicia.......................................280

Sloboda Ukraine ................288

The Donbas.................................294

South...............................................298

The Awakening of Greater Ukraine.......................................300

The Destruction of Ukrainian Identity.......................................306

Taras Shevchenko................310

The Abolition of Serfdom316

The First World War . 320

The War with Bolshevik Russia .......................................324

The Western Ukrainian National Republic .......................................332

The Course of War.............338

Ukrainian Insurgents....344

Symon Petliura.....................350

The Soviet Regime.............354

The Holodomor of 1932-1933.......................................362

The Soviet-Nazi Alliance370

The Soviet-German War.374

The Ukrainian Contribution to the Victory.......................................382

The OUN and UPA..................384

Post-war USSR........................390

The Independence of Ukraine.......................................400

Post-communist Problems408

The Revolution of Dignity.......................................418

The Occupation of the Crimea by Russia.......................................436

Aggression in the Donbas444

Prehistory

The first humanoid creatures emerged in East Africa some 2.5 million years ago. About 1.2 million years ago, humanlike beings came to Europe via the Balkans. The oldest discovered settlement of hominid creatures in Central and Eastern Europe is located in Ukraine. Hand axes and scrapers made from stone and bones dating back more than 1.1 million years were discovered at a site near the village of Korolevo in Transcarpathia. Flint tools and the bones of the steppe elephant, the Etruscan rhinoceros, the giant deer, hyenas etc. were found at a 400,000-year-old site near Medzhybizh in Khmelnytsky Oblast (region).

A history of Ukraine. A short course

Homo sapiens

Modern humans (Homo sapiens, or Cro-Magnons, thus named after a rock shelter in France where their fossils were found in the 19th century) emerged in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, came to the Middle East some 100,000 years ago, and reached Europe 40,000 years ago. The territory of Ukraine and the Mediterranean coast were the first European lands inhabited by Homo sapiens.

Alongside them Neanderthals, hominid creatures named for the Neandertal valley in Germany where their fossils were discovered, inhabited Europe, including Ukraine, from the 200th to the 28th millennium BC. Neanderthals did not form tribes and thus lost out to Homo sapiens. However, they did not vanish without a trace: scientists have found different proportions of their genes in various peoples.

Few of the primitive peoples lived to be 30, and yet Homo sapiens gave birth to art.

A site of primitive people dating back to the 25th millennium BC, complete with mammoth tusks and painted ornaments, was unearthed near St. Cyril's Church in Kyiv. Figurines representing birds dating back to the 18th millennium BC and a bracelet made

The figure of a bird made from mammoth ivory from excavations at the Mizyn site, Chernihiv Oblast

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from mammoth ivory and covered with a meander, the world's most ancient geometric pattern in the form of a continuous sinuous line, were found near the village of Mizyn in Chernihiv Oblast. Later, meanders became popular in Ancient Greece. Cro-Magnons buried their dead following a particular rite, which indicates the emergence of religious beliefs. People learned to use nature for their own needs.

Intact walls from 15,000-year-old dwellings made from the bones and tusks of mammoths were discovered in the village of Mezhyrich in Cherkasy Oblast. Also found at the site were lamps, figurines of people, needles and the world's most ancient musical instruments, including a decorated drum made from the skull of a mammoth.

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A history of Ukraine. A short course

Ice Age

The great glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere began 1 million years ago, reaching a peak from the 150th to the 100th millennium BC. Lower temperatures caused a glacier up to several kilometers thick to spread out from Scandinavia and cover much of Europe. In those days, most of the territory of Ukraine was periglacial — it was traversed by herds of mammoths, reindeer, buffalo etc., as well as by primitive hunters. In certain periods, the glacier reached down the valley of the Dnipro to the territory of what is now the city of Kremenchuh. Winds blowing from the glacier toward periglacial plains picked up dust and carried it south, thus forming the fertile Ukrainian soil. The peak of the cooling occurred in the period from the 18th to the 16th millennium BC. At the time of the Ice Age, glaciers locked up huge volumes of water, causing the sea level to be 130 meters lower than it is today. The Sea of Azov and the Gulf of Odesa did not exist back then, while the Black Sea was an inland freshwater lake.

In the 12th and the 11th millennia BC, mammoths became extinct in the territory of Ukraine, probably due to the glacier's sudden melting and retreat. Winters

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A history of Ukraine. A short course

brought more snow, and mammoths were not able to find enough grass in winter. Woolly rhinoceroses, musk oxen and other animals disappeared. Researchers believe that their thick fur became wet during thaws and later froze, causing animals to die. On the contrary, reindeer, buffalo, elk, aurochs, horses and other species multiplied. People hunted them, often forcing herds into a ravine or coastal precipice, just like American Indians hunted buffalo until the 19th century.

Ukraine's land is rich in game birds, and deep rivers contributed to a better life for human communities, their communication and the exchange of experience. At this time, culturally distinct big tribes began to emerge in Ukraine.

When the glacier began to melt, a gigantic lake was formed in the north of Ukraine and Belarus. It eventually burst out, generating a mudflow that rushed down the Dnipro valley to the sea circa 11,500 BC.

Around 5,600 BC, due to rising sea levels, the Mediterranean Sea spilled over into the Black Sea as a giant salty waterfall and dug out the Bosporus. The water level in the Black Sea rose by 100 meters within 2-3 years, and this sea acquired its familiar shape. The death of freshwater creatures in the Black Sea led to the contamination of its deep water with hydrogen sulfide, which persists until today.

People fled from the sea which devoured several hundred meters or even several kilometers

Dwelling constructed of mammoth bones, Mezhyrich site, ca. 15,000 years ago

of land per day. This disaster contributed to the denser settlement of Central Ukraine.

Some believe that the flooding of huge swaths of land by the Black Sea in ancient times gave rise to ideas about the Great Flood. However, stories about a big flood are found in peoples that are too remote from this region.

Boundaries of the Black Sea before and after water from the Mediterranean Sea spilled over

The Neolithic Revolution

Around the 7th millennium BC, the residents of what is now Ukraine started using bows and arrows and domesticated dogs at the same time as those who lived in Southern Europe and Western Asia. People learned to travel along rivers on rafts and later in boats. The rivers of Ukraine turned into transportation routes and accessible sources of fish. From the 7th until the 4th millennium BC, people in Ukraine learned not only to gather the gifts of nature but also to reproduce them thanks to cattle breeding and agriculture. Hunting no longer provided enough food for the growing tribes and, moreover, reduced the population of wild animals. To survive, people learned to gather wild cereals using wood and bone sickles with blades made of sharpened flints.

The transition to a food-producing economy is called the Neolithic Revolution. This revolution first took place in the Middle East in the 8th millennium BC and spread to the Balkans, Ukraine and the Mediterranean in the 7th and 6th millennia BC. Improved diet and a more sedentary life caused rapid demographic growth.

In order to store grain, flour, milk, kvas etc., people invented pottery. Within several centuries, pottery

history of Ukraine. A short

spread throughout Ukraine. Tribes of farmers in Ukraine learned slash-and-burn agriculture: they would cut down portions of forest and burned it to obtain fertilizer. In this way, farmers colonized impassable thickets.

In the territory of Ukraine, the Stone Age ended in the 5th to 3rd millennium BC depending on the region, i.e. until copper, and later bronze, items became widespread. The Stone Age ended in Ukraine at the same time as in Southern Europe and the Balkans.

To the north and east of Ukraine, in the territory of what is now Central Russia, the Stone Age lasted for another 3,000-5,000 years, until the middle of the 1st millennium AD and in some places up to the 2nd millennium AD.

Ceramic figurine of a woman, Trypilian culture, 4th millennium BC, the Archaeological Museum of Lviv University

The Trypilian Culture

In the late 19 th century, the Ukrainian archaeologist Vikentii Khvoika discovered ancient, masterfully designed pottery near the village of Trypilia in the Kyiv region.

The oldest of these dated back to the Stone Age, the 6th millennium BC. Similar earthenware was later found throughout Right-Bank Ukraine and in some parts of Left-Bank Ukraine. Scientists named it the Trypilian Culture. This culture was close to the contemporary cultures of the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

Trypilian society was similar to the early civilizations of the Ancient East in terms of development. The Trypilians built unfortified settlements, were not afraid of enemy attacks and, most important, learned to grow plants not only on the river floodplains and meadows but also in plain fields.

The population of the territory covered by the Trypilian Culture was at least one million at any given time. Trypilian villages formed large populated areas where neighbors lived in safety.

In Trypilian settlements, houses formed circles around the temple area. The largest Trypilian settlements are located in the Cherkasy region (the villages

Ceramic building, likely a model of a temple, Trypilian culture

of Maidanetske, Talianky etc.). Each had 3,000 houses and a population of some 20,000, i.e. more than an average medieval town. Most houses in these "proto-towns" had two residential floors. At the time, these were likely the world's largest population centers. They were able to reach such a large size due to the fertility of the Ukrainian lands.

Ceramic female figurine, Trypilian culture

Indo-European Homeland

In the mid-4th millennium BC, the Serednii Stih culture (named after a site in Zaporizhia) emerged on the outskirts of the Trypilian Culture between the Lower Dnipro and the Lower Don. The local population switched from agriculture to transhumance. Groups of herdsmen would drive flocks to remote pastures in the spring and return to the villages in the fall.

Cattle breeders initially found it difficult to compete with the Trypilians as they had worse tools and weapons. Archaeologists found a settlement in southern Ukraine in which all men were Trypilians and all women came from the Serednii Stih culture.

At the time, a farmer could provide for a family of several people, while a herdsman could feed several dozens or even hundreds of tribesmen.

Several dozen thousands of Serednii Stih Culture people were among the ancestors of a third branch of humanity — the group of peoples now called Indo- European because they inhabited a huge territory stretching from Europe to North India and the lands they colonized overseas. Indo-European languages are now spoken by more than half of the world's population.

A history of Ukraine. A short course

Indo-Europeans had typical hominid idols (known in Ukrainian steppes as 'stone baba), burial mounds and maces used as weapons. Indo-Europeans worshiped weapons, the sun and fire. They buried stone axes in graves — even long after metals were invented. Red is the color of rebirth in the Indo-European tradition. Indo-Europeans put red ocher into the graves and people in India color their hands and feet with red paint until today.

The Indo-European tribes were more or less closely related. The closest relatives of the Slavs were the Balts (modern Lithuanians and Latvians), northern Indo-Iranians (the Ossetes today speak an Indo-Iranian language) and the Germanic peoples (Germans, Danes, Swedes, British, Norwegians, Dutch etc.).

The Indo-European peoples embarked on migrations of gigantic proportions in the 4th to 2nd millennium BC, populating territories from Ireland to India. Indo- European tribes moved from the territory of Ukraine across the steppes to Asia and the West, settling in new lands. This was possible because the horse was domesticated on the territory of Ukraine in the 4th millennium BC.

The remains of the world's first domesticated horses were found in the village of Deriivka on the right bank of the Dnipro. The teeth of these horses were uniformly damaged by bone bridles. Horses were domesticated later than other animals because of their resistance to control.

A history of Ukraine. A short cours

Cavalry and the use of wagons gave the ancestors of Indo-European peoples a decisive advantage over other tribes. Even two millennia later, armies in ancient Egypt feared horses, considering them the spirits of the desert.

Samples of bronze harness, 3rd millennium BC

The Cimmerians

After the settlement of the Indo-European tribes, i.e. part of them, the Indo-Iranian tribes remained in the steppes of southern Ukraine. They were thus named because ethnic groups related to them settled in North India and Iran.

Indo-Iranians, or Cimmerians, who lived in the territory of Ukraine became the first people in Eastern Europe to be mentioned in a written source, the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer. They had long swords and attacked settlements in modern central Ukraine.

In the 7th century BC, the Scythians came to Ukraine. This was another Indo-Iranian tribe that returned to Ukraine from Asia. Some Cimmerians submitted to the Scythians, others died in a war and the rest left their homeland and embarked on a journey to the heart of civilization at the time — Asia Minor and the Middle East — where they started attacking the states of Lydia, Urartu and Assyria, as well as Greek cities.

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A history of Ukraine. A short course

The Scythians

The Scythians believed that their ancestral home was the territory of modern Ukraine and claimed that they lived along the Dnipro 1,000 years before their return in the 7th century BC. The Scythians were among the first peoples in Europe, following only Greece and Italy, to develop a full-fledged state with a permanent army, government, taxes, minted money etc. The Scythian state existed for a millennium (until the 4th century AD) in some regions of Ukraine. The name of Scythians was given to them by the Greeks. They called themselves Skolotoi, after their king Scyles, who ruled in the 5th century BC.

The Greeks counted the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis (6th century BC) among the Seven Sages as the only non-Greek. He was thought to have invented the anchor and the potter's wheel and his maxims were memorized by schoolchildren in ancient Greece. Anacharsis considered wealth vanity, believed in God and the immortality of the soul, and thought the natural order of things was best. He put the highest value on freedom. He wrote in defense of his origins: "The Greeks are wise people but not in any way wiser than the barbarians from whom the gods have

Gold pectoral of a Scythian king from the Tovsta Monyla burial mound (near the city of Pokrov), 1.14 kg, 4th century BC

taken away the ability to recognize beauty... Signs of stupidity, just like signs of intelligence, are the same among the Greeks and the barbarians." Ancient Greek authors considered the Scythians most honest among all peoples. It is known that the police force in the Greek state of Athens was recruited from among the Scythians in the 4th century BC. The Apostle Paul wrote in the 1st century AD that in Christianity there was neither Greek nor Jew, Barbarian or Scythian, thus separating the Scythians from the rest of "barbarian" peoples. Greater Scythia had clear boundaries from the Danube to the Don, almost coinciding with the territory of modern Ukraine. The Scythians were governed by the Paralatae, or "Royal Scythians". The king and part of the tribal chiefs had to come from this tribe.

The Royal Scythians roamed the territory between the Lower Dnipro and the Lower Don. Scythian tillers and farmers lived on both banks of the Dnipro River. They accounted for a bigger portion of the population of Greater Scythia and included the ancestors of the Slavs. The plow, yoke, axe and bowl were among the sacred objects of the Scythians. The plow could only be sacred in an agricultural people.

From the beginning, the Scythians buried their kings in Gerros, an area reportedly located up the Dnipro River, 40 days of navigation from the Black Sea. This is probably

Scythian bowl from the Haimanova Mohyla burial mound (Zaporizhia Oblast), silver-gilt, 4th century BC

an area in Kyiv Oblast near Vasylkiv, where the biggest ancient Scythian burial mounds were discovered.

Large wooden fortresses and ramparts were built in Greater Scythia. More material was used for ramparts in the vicinity of one fortress only, the Motronynske settlement, than for the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. In the 7th century BC, the Scythian king Ariant conducted a sort of "census" of the population, forcing all residents to give him one copper arrowhead each. These were melted into a giant cauldron whose size indicated that Greater Scythia had a population of several million.

The Scythians invaded the Middle East in their pursuit of the Cimmerians. In the mid-7th century BC, the Scythians crushed the Median army, turning the population of Western Asia into their tributaries.

In 625 BC, the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I had to pay tribute to the Scythians. The Scythians were involved in the destruction of the bloody Assyrian state that had ruled over the region for more than a millennium. It was a turning point in the history of the Middle East. The Scythians dominated Western Asia for 28 years. However, the vassal king of the Medes invited Scythian leaders to a banquet and killed them, after which the rest of the Scythians returned to their home region along the Dnipro River.

Every soldier in the Scythian cavalry knew his place and role in the joint attack and retreat. The Scythians used

The Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, engraving, 18th century copied from an ancient miniature stone engraving

circular fortifications — cart camps — for defense. They were able to repel the attacks of a fairly large army from within such a camp set up in the steppe. This defensive tactic was used by Ukrainians until the 18th century.

The rich Scythian culture was associated with the cultures of the Balkans, the North Caucasus and the Middle East. In contrast, the eastern and northern neighbors of the Scythians were still wild at the time, stuck in the Stone Age. According to the great Greek historian Herodotus, at that time the tribe of Androphagi (i.e. cannibals) lived in what is now Central Russia: "They neither observe justice, nor are governed by any laws. They are nomads, and their dress is Scythian; but the language which they speak is peculiar to themselves [i.e. non-Indo-European]. Unlike any other nation in these parts, they are cannibals." The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) wrote that the Androphagi dwelt ten days' journey, i.e., 400-700 kilometers, beyond the Dnipro. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (4th century AD) mentioned that they were nomads and that other peoples did not want to live next to them due to their cannibalism. In the late 19th century, the Czech Slavicist Wilhelm Tomaschek proposed that Mordva, the name of a Finno- Ugric group of peoples, came from the Scythian word mard-xwaar "man-eater". The Mordvins call themselves Erzya and Moksha.

Silver amphora vase, 4th century BC, Chortomlyk burial mound, near Nikopol

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Ellis Minns, a British archaeologist whose studies focused on Eastern Europe, placed the Androphagi in central Muscovy: "The Androphagi were probably Finns, and the most barbarous of them, as no trade route passed through their land." The Androphagi were mentioned by an Armenian geographer back in the 7th century AD.

Until the mid-Ist millennium AD, the tribes in Central Russia used primarily bone and flint tools. Metals were very rare and primarily imported. Arrowheads were made from bones in a shape resembling that of Scythian bronze arrowheads. The area to the north of Scythia, what is now Belarus, was inhabited by the Neuri, a Baltic tribe which also borrowed extensively from the Scythians.

Similar to Indo-European peoples, the Scythians had a typical European appearance, which is evidenced by contemporaneous images. The Ukrainian language inherited certain features from the Scythian language: ikavism, the distinct h vowel, the vowel combination hv instead of f etc. Sharovary (wide trousers), the traditional bowl haircut, the animal style of the Kyivan Rus' art and the fairytale character Babai (namedfor the chief Scythian deity Papai) — all of this Ukrainians inherited from the Scythians. The Kyivan medieval state maintained the Scythian order of succession in the ruling dynasty — not from father to son, as in Europe, but to the oldest of kin.

Gold plate depicting the Scythian fraternity ritual, southern Ukraine, 4th century BC

Victories of Greater Scythia

By the 6th century BC, Persia (now Iran) became the most powerful state in the ancient world, having conquered Lydia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and part of India. Persia became the first superpower of the world simultaneously on three continents — Asia, Europe and Africa. The army of the Persian Emperor Darius I invaded Scythia in 513 BC. Herodotus wrote about 700,000 Persian soldiers, not counting ship crews, and 600 ships. Bridges were built over the Bosporus Strait and the Lower Danube for the Persians.

In response to a demand of surrender, the Scythians sent a bird, a frog, a mouse and five arrows to the Persian king. This signified, according to the historian, "Unless you take to the air, like a bird; to the earth, like a mouse; or to the water, like a frog, you will become the victim of the Scythian arrows." The Scythians initially retreated before the Persian army, driving away their cattle, filling wells with earth, and burning the steppe. In southern Ukraine, there are still place names associated with Darius I and his campaign — Darievy Mist and Darievy Brid. The Persians advanced all the way to the Don River. However, overwhelmed by the victorious heroism of the Scythians, the Persian king fled during a decisive battle, leaving the wounded behind.

Gold plate, 4th century BC, with an image of a Scythian wearing sharovary (wide trousers). Sharovary are a part of the traditional Ukrainian costume

It turned out that the world's biggest superpower could not wage war against Scythia with impunity. Pursuing the enemy, the Scythian army reached the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The Scythians made a pact against Persians with Sparta, the most powerful Greek state at the time. According to Herodotus, the Spartan king became drunk during negotiations with the Scythians, because he drank, together with envoys, pure wine, while the Greek custom was to dilute wine with water. Since then, the Greeks said "pour in the Scythian style" when they drank undiluted wine.

In 334 BC, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great started his military campaign, advancing to the east. He defeated the huge army of the Persian Empire, taking the Persian royal family captive, subjugated Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, and was preparing to go to India. Alexander ordered Zopyrion, his governor in Thrace (the territory of modern Bulgaria), to go and help along the northern coast of the Black Sea. The Macedonians planned to conquer the Scythians and the Greek city of Olbia (now in Mykolaiv Oblast). Zopyrion's 30,000-strong army besieged the city but was unable to take it, with the Scythians in the rear. As the Macedonian army retreated, it was defeated by the Scythians near the Dniester estuary. At the time, it was the only defeat of the invincible Macedonia.

For centuries after this event, enemies preferred not to touch Scythia. In the 4th century BC, the Greek historian Thucydides called the Scythians "the strongest not only in Europe but also in Asia". The Scythian state survived until the 4th century AD. Later, the Scythians dissolved among related peoples, the Sarmatians and the Slavs. States that later emerged in the territory of Ukraine — the Hun Empire and Kyivan Rus' — considered themselves to be successors of Great Scythia.

Scythian coin of King Ateas, 4th century BC

Ancient Greek Cities

Since the 7th century BC, people originating from the Greek cities of Asia Minor (mainly from the city of Miletus, now in Turkey) started to widely settle in what is now Ukraine. They were driven from Greece by poverty and overpopulation.

The population of all Greek cities and villages in Ukraine at their peak exceeded 200,000 people. The largest Greek city in Ukraine was Olbia with a population of 20,000-25,000. The other major cities were Chersonese Taurica, Tyras and Panticapaeum. In the 5th century BC, Greek cities in the eastern Crimea founded the Bosporan Kingdom, which existed for eight centuries. Greek cities at different times depended on the Scythians, minted their coins and were their allies, but sometimes they were enemies to them. In particular, Chersonese Taurica, not willing to pay tribute to the Scythians, resorted to support from the Roman Empire for protection in the 2nd century BC and the Romans were driven out of the Crimea only in the 3rd century BC. The Bosporan Kingdom was ruled by royal dynasties of Sarmatian origin for several hundred years.

Interestingly, the trident, which was common in the Bosporan Kingdom, became the family sign

of the great Kyivan princes from the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty and is now Ukraine's national emblem. Tridents were used in the Bosporan Kingdom to mark the king's property, including tiles from the royal workshops.

The majority of Greek cities in the territory of Ukraine were conquered by the Hun Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and fell into decline. In contrast, Chersonese Taurica (Korsun in Ukrainian) was seized by Prince Volodymyr the Great of Kyiv only in 988 AD and finally collapsed under Tatar attacks in the 14th century.

Coin of the Bosporan King Cotys II, 2nd century AD

The Sarmatians

The Sarmatians started coming from beyond the Don River to settle in what is now Ukraine in the 3rd century BC. The ancestors of both the Sarmatians and Scythians moved east from the territory of Ukraine in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC but later returned. The name 'Sarmatian' means 'girded with a sword' in Indo-Iranian languages. Greeks even said that Sarmatians were "under women's control" because of numerous female military units and the great power of their queens. Greeks called Sarmatian female warriors 'Amazons'. They were as good fighters as men were and in some cases even better, because they weighed less and were better carried by horses. The Sarmatians invented the military tactics of heavily armed armored cavalry, cataphracts, which was the first European precursor of the medieval knights. The Roman historian Tacitus called them the best horsemen in the world.

At first, the Sarmatians attacked Scythian defense fortifications but later made peace with them. Starting in the 2nd century BC, a large resettlement began among the Scythians and the Slavs — to west of the Dnipro in the basins of the Ros, Rosava, Tiasmyn rivers and all the way to the Carpathian mountains. The Romans

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called the Carpathians "Sarmatian mountains" from the 1st to the 4th century AD.

Initially, Sarmatians were nomads and lived in horse-drawn carts. Soon, however, the poorest of Sarmatians and later the entire Sarmatian population of the Ukrainian forest-steppe became agricultural. The most militant Sarmatian tribe, the Roxolani, settled along the Middle Dnipro. Sarmatians received income from the export of commodities, especially crops, to the Greek cities on the northern coast of the Black Sea.

Early in the 2nd century AD, after Rome annexed Dacia (modern Romania), the Roman Empire came close to Ukraine's modern borders. The Roman poet Ovid, whom the emperor banished to the northwest coast of the Black Sea, wrote about constant Sarmatian attacks, complained that he was forced to speak Sarmatian more than Latin and that he saw "barbarians" everywhere — Sarmatians in their traditional wide trousers which later became part of the Ukrainian national costume.

The Romans built huge earthen fortifications — Trajan's Wall, named after the Emperor Trajan — in order to resist the offense of the Sarmatians and their allies the Slavs. Remnants of these walls are still preserved in the territory of Odesa, Ternopil and Khmelnytsky oblasts in Ukraine. The Sarmatians played a prominent role in the creation of the Ukrainian ethnos as they interacted with the Slavs within the Antean (Slavic-Sarmatian) tribal union.

The name Rus' most likely comes from the name of the Sarmatian tribe Roxolani. Initially, the Rus' people actually were the remaining Roxolani who settled "on an island": between the Dnipro, the Ros and Tiasmyn rivers in ancient times. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Arab and Persian travelers found some purely Sarmatian features in the Rus' culture — the cult of the sword,  the prevalence of wide trousers (sharovary) and hats with a pointed end (shlyk) which were later popular among Ukrainians, the name zhupan for chieftains and so on.

The Ukrainian Cossacks traced their origin and name back to the Roxolani. Rox meant 'clear, transparent' in Sarmatian. The Sarmatians made fine jewelry and weapons decorated with precious stones. The Sarmatian "polychromous" jewelry art style spread throughout medieval Europe. Some of their chieftains had their heads tied up in childhood to achieve their "noble" elongation. The Sarmatians participated in countless historical events: they attacked Rome and Byzantium, settled in the Balkans together with the Slavs, were Rome's mercenaries in Britain, and founded joint states with Germanic tribes — with the Goths in Spain and with the Vandals in Africa. However, the Sarmatians were divided into many separate tribes and eventually dissolved among various peoples.

Some Sarmatian tribes (the Alans) existed in Sloboda Ukraine and in the Crimea until the Mongol invasion in the 13 th century.

Sarmatians, image on Trajan's Column in Rome, 113 AD

The Goths

In the 230s, a large Germanic tribe of Goths came from Scandinavia to the area north of the Sea of Azov and near the Black Sea. The Goths started to launch raids into the Roman Empire, including by sea. As a result, Rome's borders were pushed back beyond the Danube River in the late 3rd century AD. In the 4th century, the Slavs and the Sarmatians in the territory of modern Ukraine were forced to pay tribute to the Gothic king Ermanaric (350-375 AD). Incited by an instigator, he cruelly executed Sunilda, one of his wives and a daughter of a Roxolan prince. Her brothers broke into Ermanaric's palace and were killed in a fight, but not before they were able to wound the Gothic king, who later also died. The Goths also killed the Slavic prince Bozh and his 70 boyars.

The Sarmatians and the Slavs turned to the Huns for assistance. In 375 AD, together they were able to subjugate the Goths and drive a portion of them out of the territory of Ukraine. In 378, crowds of fleeing Goths defeated an army of the Roman Empire and killed the emperor. Finally, after roaming Europe for quite a while, the Goths seized Rome on 24 August 410 AD. This event upended the usual state of affairs

in the world, which had existed for half a millennium. Part of the Goths founded a state in Northern Italy, while others created a state jointly with the Alans-Sarmatians in Northern Spain (thence Catalonia — Goth-Alania). Some of the Goths stayed back in the Crimea where they intermixed with the Greeks and the Sarmatians. Their small polity, the Principality of Theodoro, existed in the southern Crimea until 1475 when it was destroyed by the Turks.

The Slavs

The Slavs were first mentioned under the name Veneti in the 1st century AD. Contemporaries described them as a large and militant people inclined to anarchy and self-rule. Roman historians wrote about their long raids on land and unions with the Sarmatians. Byzantine military commanders noted the Slavs' special skills in fighting in the woods, tracking enemies, capturing informers as prisoners, hiding in the water for hours and breathing through blades of reed etc. At present, most scholars believe that the homeland of the Slavs was in the Northern Carpathians and

Volhynia, as well as in Polisia and the area on the right bank of the Dnipro. Purely Slavic names of rivers are concentrated in this part of modern Ukraine. Other parts of Ukraine frequently feature Indo-Iranian (Scythian and Sarmatian) and Turkic names for rivers. (For example, the name of the Dnipro, Dniester, Danube and the Donets come from the Sarmatian word for water.) Since the 3rd century AD Slavic groups were noted as living along the Lower Dniester and near the Black Sea.

The location of the first Slavic settlements in the forests of Volhynia and Polisia protected them

against numerous attacks, which were common in the steppe. At the same time, the Slavs learned the art of war through contacts with the steppe people in Greater Scythia, through unions with the Sarmatians and by being part of the Hunnic Empire. In the first half of the 1st millennium AD, the Slavs split into the Antes and the Sclaveni. The Antean tribal union (4th to 7th centuries AD) was made up of the Slavs and the Sarmatians (largely Roxolani) and inhabited the greater part of Ukraine, in particular all of Right- Bank Ukraine between the Dnipro and the Dniester, including the northern coast of the Black Sea.

The families of Antean princes included both Slavic and Sarmatian tribes. The Greeks called the Antes "the most powerful of all Slavs" and referred to their "countless tribes".

The Sclaveni lived between what is now Ljubljana and the Dniester and up to the Vistula River in the north. In the first centuries AD, the giant Serpent's Wall — defensive fortifications stretching across most of the steppe and forest-steppe zone in Ukraine — were built. They were 2,000 kilometers in length, reaching over 15 meters in height. It is not known with certainty whether they were built against the Goths or the Huns. In the times of Kyivan Rus', people no longer knew who built them and when.

After the defeat of the Byzantine army near Adrianople in 551 AD, part of the Antes and the Sclaveni

Fantastic animal, silver-gilt plate, Cherkasy Oblast, 6th century AD

resettled to Byzantine lands. Contemporaries compared this resettlement to a flood. The resettlement of the Slavs until the 580s led to the total Slavicization of the northern Balkans (the territories of Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia). Groups of Slavs dared attack imperial fortresses with much larger garrisons. Since then, the Balkans have many names peculiar to Ukraine — Kyiv, Malyn, Sambir etc. Slavic tribes settled even in the Peloponnesus in Greece — the heart of the Byzantine Empire — establishing separate autonomous principalities, slavinia, in the lands of the empire.

In the 7th century, the Slavs settled in the vicinity of Novgorod. In the 8th century, the first Slavs came to the territory of Belarus, intermixing with the local Baltic people. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Slavic tribes of Vyatichi and Radimichi came from Poland to what is now Central Russia, populated by numerous Finno-Ugric peoples back then, and intermixed with them.

Amazons, frieze of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae (Greece), 5th century BC

The Hunnic Empire

The Huns are known to have inhabited the territory between the Danube River and the region near the Sea of Azov from the 2nd century AD. Most scholars believe that this was a small tribe of Turkic or Mongol origin which came from the east to an area surrounded by numerous Slavic, Scythian-Sarmatian and Gothic tribes. In the 5th century AD, the Huns mostly spoke a "Scythian" language which included the words med (honey) and strava (dish), now in the vocabulary of standard Ukrainian.

The multiethnic Hunnic Empire emerged after the Huns defeated the Goths in 375 AD. It covered most of what is now Ukraine, as well as Hungary and parts of Romania and Moldova.

Hunnic kings believed they continued the cause of the kings of Greater Scythia. Their land continued to be called Scythia. Hunnic kings accomplished something that Scythian kings had failed to do — conquer nearly all the Greek cities along the northern coast of the Black Sea.

The Hunnic Empire reached the zenith of its power under King Attila (444-453 AD) whom Romans and Greeks nicknamed "the Scourge of God" for the fear he instilled in both empires. Since the end

The Feast of Attila, painting by Mor Than (1870), based on the memoirs of the eyewitness Priscus of Panium

of the 4th century, the Roman Empire began paying tribute to the Huns. Until 442 AD, this tribute was 114 kilograms of gold annually, and the amount was later raised to 687 kilograms.

According to a contemporaneous account, a cow happened to dig up an ancient Scythian sword which the Scythians used for sacrifice offerings. A shepherd gave the sword to Attila who viewed it as a good omen for conquering both the Roman and Byzantine Empires.

Attila had a condescending attitude to these empires and told the emperors that they were equals not to him but to his "generals".

The Pope had a personal meeting with Attila in which he begged him not to destroy Rome. In 451 AD, a battle between the Hunnic Empire and the joint forces of the Roman Empire and the Visigoths did not yield a decisive outcome. Before the battle, Attila said the words that were often cited in the Middle Ages: "Those who are marching towards victory are not hit by any arrows, while those who are bending down towards decline are ruined by fate even at the time of peace."

The Hunnic Empire fell into decline soon after Attila's death. His numerous sons each demanded a share of the empire and cast lots to split up the lands and subjects, which enraged the other princes. No strong leader emerged. The surrounding lands, which had been conquered with much difficulty, were lost, and the core of the polity broke up into hostile principalities.

Ukrainian peasants in the Carpathians wearing hunias, outer garments borrowed from the Huns, early 20th century

The Founding of Kyiv

One of the Antean princes involved in a campaign in the region of the Danube River was Kyi, a prince from the tribe of the Polans. The city of Kyiv, which he founded, was located on hills, which was convenient for defense. It stood at the crossroads of many trade routes between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, the Desna River etc. According to the Rus' Primary Chronicle, an ancient Ukrainian chronicle, the three Polan princes Kyiv, Shchek and Khoryv initially founded, each his own fortress, on the Kyivan hills and later formed one city under the leadership of the eldest brother. This occurred after the breakup of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western (395 AD), approximately in the late 5th or early 6th century AD. Kyi founded the city of Kyievets on the Danube. According to the chronicle, Kyi was a fairly important prince and met personally with the Byzantine emperor. The history of the three brothers and their founding of a city in "the land of Palun" (Scythia) was retold in Armenian sources in the 7th century AD.

Kyiv still has the Starokyivska, Shchekavytsia and Khoryvytsia hills. The Vikings were amazed at the large number of fortresses in Ukraine and called it Gardariki, "the realm of cities".

In the 11th century, Kyiv was the second largest city in Europe, after only Constantinople. It had a population of between 50,000 to 150,000 people, according to various sources. The inhabitants of Rus' had a somewhat higher standard of living than people in Western Europe, because at the time wealth was largely determined by the fertility of land and convenient trade routes. All proper names associated with Kyiv that are found in ancient chronicles have distinctly Ukrainian sounds: Kyiv, Lybid, Pecherska lavra, Dovbychka, Uhorske urochyshche etc.

The founders of Kyiv Kyi, Shchek, Khoryv and Their Sister Lybed, painting by Ivan Yizhakevych, 1907

The Origin of the Ukrainian people

For several millennia, Indo-Iranian tribes settled in the steppe zone of Ukraine and proto-Slavic tribes in the forest zone, interacting with the former in the forest-steppe zone. The Ukrainian people emerged primarily as a result of this union. Since the Slavs, the Scythians and the Sarmatians were present almost across all of the territory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people were more homogeneous than many large nations. It should be mentioned that neither the Slavs until around 500 AD, nor the Scythians, nor the Sarmatians were Ukrainians — they were only the direct ancestors of Ukrainians. Following Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the majority of Ukrainian historians date the actual origin of the Ukrainian people with its main features to the time of the Antean tribal union in the 4th until the 7th century AD. At the time, the Scythians and the Sarmatians began to dissolve among the Slavs, adopting the Slavic language and sharing their culture, linguistic traits and ways of everyday living. Other foreign influences on Ukrainians (Turkic, Tatar, Polish, Russian etc.) were short-lived and took place at a time when the Ukrainian ethnos had already been formed.

Princes of Varangian Origin

Since the end of the 8th century, groups of Scandinavian warriors began to attack European states. They were called Varangians in Ukraine, Normans in Western Europe, and their self-designation was Vikings. The most active Varangians started to establish their own dynasties in France, England, Southern Italy and in the lands of the Slavs.

According to chronicles, the Varangians Askold and Dyr came with a group of warriors along the route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", i.e. from Scandinavia to Byzantium, seized power in Kyiv in 862 and established control over the surrounding lands. At the time, foreigners wrote about a powerful principality headed by "King Dyr" on the Dnipro River. However, Kyiv attacked the capital of Byzantium even before the arrival of the Varangians, which means it was a fairly strong city.

In 882 BC, other Varangians came to Kyiv — young Prince Ihor, son of the Varangian leader Rurik, and his relative Oleh, named "the Prophet" for his prescience. The new arrivals treacherously killed Askold and Dyr on the pretext that they were not of the princely family.

Prince Oleh began to view other towns and tribes controlled by the Varangians as being subject to Kyiv.

Varangians in Byzantium, from the Chronicle of John Skylitzes, 12th century

"This will be the mother of the Rus' cities," he said about Kyiv. It should be emphasized that the territory of modern Central Russia fell under the rule of Rus' only a hundred years later, and the "Rus' cities" Oleh referred to were the towns of the Polans in the area around the Middle Dnipro. Oleh brought the tribes of the Drevlians (883 AD) and Siverians (884 AD) into the Kyivan state. Kyivan princes made several raids to the Khazar state and Transcaucasia. In 907 AD, the Kyivans attacked Byzantium. According to a chronicler, Prince Oleh nailed his shield on the gate of Constantinople as a sign of his success and exacted tribute. He also concluded an advantageous trade agreement with Byzantium. Prince Ihor began to rule in Kyiv around 915 AD. He made a series of raids on Byzantium and Transcaucasia and was killed by the Drevlians, a tribe that lived close to Kyiv, while trying to extort tribute from them. In 946 AD, Princess Olha, Ihor's widow, brutally suppressed the Drevlian rebellion and, according to the chronicle, burned their main city with the help of sparrows and pigeons which she treacherously demanded as tribute from each homestead. She ordered to tie some tinder with a fire to the birds' legs and set them free. The birds flew onto the roofs and into threshing barns, setting the town on fire. Princess Olha learned a lesson from the rebellion and set a quota

Using "Greek fire", from the Chronicle of John Skylitzes, 12th century

––––––––

of tribute for all dependent towns and lands. Two-thirds of tribute collected went to Kyiv and the army and a third to Vyshgorod, where Olha set up her residence.

In 957 AD, Olha visited the capital of the Byzantine Empire where she adopted Christianity. Despite Olha's ambitions, the southern borders of the Kyivan state suffered from the attacks of the Pechenegs, a nomadic Turkic tribe which came to southern Ukraine from the east in the late 9th century.

Entry in a chronicle about the campaigns of Prince Ihor, early 10th century

The Conquest of the Crimea and Zalissya

Varangian princes quickly intermixed with the Slavs. Sviatoslav the Brave was the first prince from the Rurik dynasty to receive a Slavic name. The chronicle points to his bravery — he warned enemies before launching campaigns against them: "I am coming for you." The Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon saw Sviatoslav with his own eyes and his description is an archetypical image of a Ukrainian Cossack: long mustache, haircut in the form of a long lock of hair sprouting from an otherwise shaven head, an earring in one ear and a white shirt.

For the first time in history, Sviatoslav the Brave subjected to Kyiv the lands in the Crimea and Zalissya, which would later become Central Russia and were inhabited by Finno-Ugric tribes (Merya, Muroma, Meshchera, Erzya, Moksha etc.) at the time. In 964-966, Sviatoslav subjugated the tribes of the Vyatichi and ordered them to pay tribute to Kyiv rather than to the Khazars, as they did before.

Sviatoslav destroyed the Khazar state, a powerful competitor which hurt the Slavic lands with their raids and demands for tribute. In 965, after covering a distance of several thousand kilometers, Sviatoslav conquered

Sviatoslav the Brave, 19th-century reconstruction, according to a description by his contemporary Leo the Deacon (10th century)

the Khazar capital Atil, forcing the Khazar magnates to hide on Volga River islands. Moreover, Sviatoslav conquered the second Khazar capital Sarkel on the Don River (now in Rostov Oblast in Russia) to which he gave the Ukrainian name Bila Vezha. This city played the role of an advanced outpost of the Kyivan state until the early 12th century.

Sviatoslav initially helped Byzantium in its war against the Bulgars but later switched sides. In numerous battles in the Balkans, the prince ordered to have the gates locked behind his troops so that no- one could take refuge behind the fortress walls in case of defeat. However, his army was exhausted in battles, while the Byzantine warriors received aid. As the Kyivan force retreated to obtain reinforcements, the Byzantines incited the Pechenegs to attack the Rusyns. Only a small part of the army led by a voivode fought its way to Kyiv, while the prince himself was killed in action.

Sviatoslav the Brave was the first to establish Kyiv's control over the lands in the Crimea previously controlled by the Khazars. The Eastern Crimea became the core of the Tmutorokan Principality which was dependent on Kyiv.

Volodymyr the Great

The rule of Volodymyr the Great (980-1015) was of great importance for Ukraine. He introduced Christianity to Ukraine and extended it to the subordinated lands in Eastern Europe. He built many cities around Kyiv along the rivers Desna, Oster, Trubizh, Sula, Stuhna and others for protection against nomads. Under his rule, Ukraine developed written law, similar to that in other civilized states. Ancient chronicles always have his name in its Ukrainian pronunciation — Volodymer. Volodymyr increased Kyiv's control over the lands in modern Central Russia: at the beginning of his reign the Vyatichi stopped paying tribute, but he exacted it again in 981, this time "from the plow", i.e. from each household. In a battle on the Pishchana River, his voivode Vovchy Khvist (Wolf's Tail) scattered the Radimichs.

Prince Volodymyr, whose mother was a Slav from the city of Liubech in the Chernihiv region, no longer felt much affinity with Varangian mercenaries and the opinion of Kyiv residents was more important to him. He drove out those Varangians who wanted to impose additional tribute on the people.

In 987 AD, Volodymyr sent a 6,000-strong force to aid Byzantium in internal struggles. When he

A gold and a silver  coins of Prince Volodymyr the Great. c. 1000 AD 

realized that the emperors were not going to give their sister in marriage to him as they had promised to do, he besieged Chersonese Taurica and seized it after nine months in 988 with the help of local residents who knew how to disrupt the city's water supply. Volodymyr the Great became the first conqueror of the city in its 1,500-year-long history at the time. After seizing Chersonese Taurica, he founded his palace there and exchanged the city for marriage with the Byzantine princess. Meanwhile, the Tmutorokan Principality in the eastern Crimea remained under Kyiv's rule. A condition of the marriage was Volodymyr's baptism. According to the chronicle, the prince had 12 official wives and 800 concubines before the baptism. He renounces them all.

After returning to Kyiv, Volodymyr ordered all pagan idols to be dismantled — some were chopped up and others were burned. According to his orders, the idol of the chief god Perun was tied to a horse's tail and dragged from Starokyivska Hill along Borychiv rise and thrown into the Dnipro. Men were dispatched to push it away from the banks until it reached the Dnipro rapids.

Volodymyr baptized only Kyiv and its neighborhood in 988, while paganism retreated gradually in other lands under Kyiv's rule. In Novgorod, pagan rebellions had to be repressed by force, while volkhvy (pagan priests) in Suzdal incited people to revolt against Christianity even 150 years after the baptism of Kyivans.

As late as in the 1130s, Vyatichi pagans executed Kuksha of the Kyiv Caves, a preacher from Kyiv. In contrast, there are no known cases of heathens executing Christians in the territory of Ukraine. Kyiv residents knew about Christianity since ancient times. Andrew, an apostle of Jesus Christ, preached in Scythia and Pope Clement I, one of the first popes, was in exile in the Crimea.

Before Volodymyr built fortresses in the southern regions of his state, the inhabitants of the steppe posed a very serious threat to Rus'. Their military forces reached the Stuhna River, 40 kilometers away from Kyiv. The chronicle relates a comic situation when the residents of the besieged town of Bilhorod near Kyiv exploited the superstitions of the Pechenegs: they dug a hole in the ground, filled it with wheat kysil (a kind of drink) and told envoys they were not afraid of the siege, because the soil produced food like that. The strangers believed this and were impressed by the fertility of Ukrainian lands.

The prince said: "I shall not find an army with silver and gold, but I shall find silver and gold with an army." He also ordered that alms be handed out to the disabled and sick Kyivans at their homes. Moreover, Volodymyr began to take the children of the nobility and send them to education institutions.

Baptism of Prince Volodymyr and his army, miniature from the Radziwill Chronicle, 14th century

Yaroslav the Wise

In 1018, after a war in which Volodymyr's sons Borys and Hlib were treacherously murdered, their brother Yaroslav established himself in Kyiv. Historians called him "Yaroslav the Wise". Yaroslav defeated the Poles, Lithuanians, Yatvingians and Finns and subjugated the Finno-Ugric tribes in what is now Central Russia. Especially important was the 1036 victory over the Pechenegs near the place where St. Sophia's Cathedral stands in Kyiv. With Yaroslav's facilitation, Rusyn Ilarion was elected metropolitan of Kyiv in 1051. This was the first attempt at autocephaly (autonomous management) of the Ukrainian Church.

Yaroslav founded the so-called "Yaroslav's City". He expanded the fortress on Zamkova Hill in Kyiv, adding walls up to 20 meters high, 30 meters wide at the base and 3.5 kilometers long.

Kyiv's border outposts named after him were set up in Poland (Jaroslaw) Zalissya (Yaroslavl), Estonia (Yurev, named after Yaroslav's Christian name, Yurii-Georgii, now Tartu) and the Ros region (Yuriv, now Bila Tserkva). These cities, from Ukraine to the current territories of Poland, Estonia and Russia, formed a symbolic cross as a sign of Prince Yaroslav's blessing of the lands controlled by Kyiv.

Nearly all of Yaroslav's children became related through marriage with European royal families — Hungarian, Norwegian and Polish kings, Byzantine and German emperors and so on. The descendants of the prince became kings and queens in several European countries. In particular, his daughter, Princess Anna Yaroslavna, married the French king. French government documents preserve her signatures made in Cyrillic. They are surrounded by crosses made by illiterate French barons. Her letter from Paris to her father Yaroslav the Wise was a favorite source of quotes in later years: "To what barbarian country have you sent me; the dwellings are gloomy here, the churches are ugly and the customs are horrible." Anna's descendants ruled France until the 14th century.

Victories over the Nomads

Starting from the 4th through the 6th centuries AD, numerous aggressive Turkic hordes began to invade the steppe part of Ukraine. They were lured by rich pastures and an opportunity to attack the lands of the Slavs and the borders of Byzantium.

The Pechenegs started to establish themselves in the Ukrainian steppes since the late 9 th century. This powerful tribe attacked, among others, the Byzantine Empire. After their defeat near Kyiv in 1036, they disappeared from the historical arena. In the mid-11th century, the Cumans invaded the Ukrainian steppes and rallied the remaining Pechenegs around themselves. The core of the Cuman horde was in the Donbas and Sloboda Ukraine. In the 1090s,the Cumans repeatedly attacked the outskirts of Kyiv. The Kyivan army finally defeated the Cumans on the Molochna River (now in Zaporizhia Oblast) in 1103 and near Lubny in 1107. St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery was built in Kyiv to commemorate these victories. In 1111, Prince Sviatopolk Iziaslavych of Kyiv and Volodymyr Monomakh of Pereiaslav defeated the Cumans on the Dehiia River and the Salnytsia River (now in Kharkiv Oblast) and seized the Cuman

Turkic nomad leads a captive, image on a gold pitcher, 8th century

capital. The Cuman Khan Atrak fled to Georgia with his tribe. However, despite all these successes the Cumans were not subjugated and remained independent until the Mongol invasion.

A 12th-century chronicle reports that the Rusyns captured from the Cumans a flame thrower for shooting "Greek fire".

Kyiv stopped the Turkic hordes, while the Byzantine Empire suffered defeat at their hands in 1071.

However, some Turkic families wanted to serve Kyivan princes in exchange for which they asked (and received) lands for settlements. These families, which were nicknamed "black klobuks", lived largely in the Ros region south of Kyiv. However, after the Mongol invasion the Horde took the remaining families of "black klobuks" back to Asia to prevent them from reinforcing Kyiv again. Their descendants formed the Karakalpak people which now live in Uzbekistan.

The campaigns of the Kyivan princes Sviatopolk Iziaslavych and Volodymyr Monomakh gave rise to the process of joining the Donbas lands to Ukraine. It lasted for half a millennium and ended as late as in the 15th and the 16th centuries when Ukrainian Cossack settlements reached the Don River.

The Tmutorokan principality, located in the lands of the former Bosporan Kingdom, existed for 200 years, from the time it was conquered by Sviatoslav the Brave until the mid-12th century when it was

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seized by Byzantium. The families of the Halych princes Rostyslavovychi and the Chernihiv princes Olhovychi fought for control over the Crimea. Removed from the center of Rus' by hundreds of kilometers, this principality remained faithful to Kyiv despite numerous hordes of foreign nomads roaming the area between them.

Feudal Fragmentation

The history of Rus' of those times consisted largely of wars with the Cumans and internecine fighting between dynasties, primarily those of Monomakhovychi and Olhovychi, and the gradually increasing domination of the centers of various principalities — Chernihiv, Halych, Volodymyr in Volhynia etc.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, there were three principalities on the territory of Ukraine: the Kyiv principality, directly ruled by the Grand Prince;  the Pereiaslav principality to which the Grand Prince  usually appointed his son or brother who was to inherit his throne; the Chernihiv principality, closely connected with the Novhorod-Siverskyi principality, which was dependent on the former from the beginning. These principalities comprised Rus. The Volodymyr principality with the center in Volodymyr (Volhynia) was closely associated with the Lutsk principality; the Halych principality (as part of the Peremyshl, Terebovlia and Zvenyhorod principalities) began to be called Rus' in the 12th century.

The Kyiv principality maintained control over a number of fortresses located far to the south, including Oleshky, which controlled Rus' trade in the Black Sea region and the Tmutorokan principality in the Crimea.

Children of Yaroslav the Wise, fresco from the Saint Sophia Cathedral (Kyiv), 11th century

Volodymyr Monomakh

Volodymyr Monomakh (so named because of his mother, a Byzantine princess from the Monomakh family) ruled in Kyiv in 1113-1125. His rule was victorious and fair. He wrote in his Instruction for My Children: "I conducted a total of 83 large campaigns and I don't remember how many smaller ones." Nevertheless, the prince managed to remain a humanist. It was his idea to abolish capital punishment: "Do not kill either someone who is right or someone who is guilty and do not order to have him killed; if  [someone] deserves death, do not kill any Christian soul."

Volodymyr Monomakh issued a special law prohibiting the beating of debtors and it was out of the question for landlords to beat free people (smerds, i.e. peasants, and town residents, i.e. over four-fifth of the population in the Kyivan state). At the time, some European countries debated whether commoners were the same people as upper classes. In particular, most of the population in Russia, until 1861, were slaves and were sold at markets like cattle.

Volodymyr Monomakh was married to Gytha, the daughter of the English king Harold II, and gave his

"Monomakh's Cap" from the Kremlin; in fact, a Mongol-style cap given by Uzbeg Khan of the Golden Horde to the Muscovite prince as a sign of the khan's power over him, early 14th century

granddaughter Dobrodeia in marriage to the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, thus increasing the prestige of the Kyivan state. Moreover, Volodymyr Monomakh built a bridge across the Dnipro for the first time in history. Like other princes named Volodymyr, Monomakh's name follows the Ukrainian phonetic norms in all ancient chronicles — Volodymer. Half a millennium later, the Muscovites wished

to bask in the glory of the Ukrainian prince. In Muscovy, a Mongol-style cap of Central Asian origin, which Uzbeg Khan of the Golden Horde gave to the Muscovite prince as a sign of the khan's power over him, was presented as Monomakh's Cap. The fake cap was supposed to grant the Muscovite prince some special rights.

Mstyslav the Great

Monomakh's son Mstyslav (1125-1132) was called "the Great" by his contemporaries for his authority both inside the country and internationally. His mother was an English princess, the daughter of Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. Mstyslav subdued attempts to secede in Kyiv-controlled lands and strengthened Kyiv's standing as a capital. Mstyslav's descendants maintained control over Ukraine until the 16th and the 17th centuries.

Vyshgorod (Volodymyr) Theotokos icon, brought from Byzantium under Mstyslav I Volodymyrovych, stolen from Vyshgorod and taken to Zalissya, now in Moscow

Iziaslav Mstyslavych

Iziaslav (1146-1154) was the son of Mstyslav the Great and the Norwegian princess Christina. His main opponent was his uncle Yuri Dolgorukiy, prince of Suzdal (Zalissya), located on the northeastern outskirts of the Kyivan state. He received his sobriquet for his unusually long arms.

Yuri Dolgorukiy was extremely unpopular in Kyiv for cooperating with the Cumans, the main enemy of Rus', and for being married to the daughter of the Cuman Khan Ayepa. This was the reason why he was thrown out of Kyiv three times by the younger Iziaslav Mstyslavych.

Yuri Dolgorukiy constantly sought to return to Kyiv and preferred playing second fiddle in the capital to ruling in Zalissya. Moscow was mentioned as a village in Zalissya at that time.

In order to assert his rights, Iziaslav invited his uncle Viacheslav, a son of Volodymyr Monomakh, as a co- ruler to Kyiv, because Viacheslav was older than Yuri Dolgorukiy.

In 1151, Yuri Dolgorukiy attempted to cross the Dnipro to bring the capital under his control. This led to one of the biggest "river" battles in history. From the mouth of the Desna River and all the way

to the modern River-Boat Station in Kyiv, the river was covered with armored ships and boats.

Iziaslav organized the large-scale defense of Kyiv, the biggest one in its medieval history. Perimeter defenses with ramparts stretched for 10 kilometers. Yuri Dolgorukiy's army was defeated on the banks of the Lybid River. His ally, the Cuman Khan Svench Boniakovych, was killed. Yuri Dolgorukiy's remaining warriors were finally defeated, taken into captivity or drowned in the Rutets River in the area known as Perepetove Pole.

In 1152, Yuri Dolgorukiy gathered Murom and Ryazan regiments and the Cuman cavalry and launched another attack on Kyiv. However, as soon as they heard about Iziaslav's approaching troops, the Cumans left Yuri Dolgorukiy and later he himself fled.

In the difficult struggle with Yuri Dolgorukiy, Iziaslav Mstyslavych established full control over the entire territory from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. Nearly all of the lands in this vast area were ruled by his sons or vassals. It was only after the death of Iziaslav that Yuri Dolgorukiy managed to briefly seize the throne in Kyiv.

Rus'

Just like Ukrainian Cossacks, many historians now believe that the name Rus' comes from the Sarmatian tribe of Roxolani which settled in Central Ukraine to the south of Kyiv starting from the 2nd century BC.

In this region, there are rivers with such names as Ros, Rosava, Rostavytsia, Rutets etc. Since ancient times, Rus' was the name applied only to Central Ukraine — the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereiaslav principalities, i.e. the territory of modern Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Chernihiv oblasts and parts of Sumy, Cherkasy, Vinnytsia and Poltava oblasts. Starting from the 12th century, it was extended to include Western Ukraine. Princes believed that Rus' was their homeland (votchyna 'patrimony'). The other dependent territories were thought of as being subject to Rus'.

In the time of Kyivan Rus', the population of Ukraine was called rusyny (rarely rusy). The name Rusyn largely persisted in Central Ukraine until the 18th century, in Halychyna and Bukovyna until the 20th century and in some places in Zakarpattia until this day.

The outskirts of the Kyivan state, where the Russian and Belarusian peoples later arose, were not called

Christ Pantocrator, mosaic, main dome of St. Sophia's Cathedral, Kyiv, 11th century

Rus' — neither when they were under Kyiv's rule until the 12th century, nor several centuries later.

Imperial Russian ideologues have tried to create a myth that the capital of Rus' allegedly "moved" first from Novgorod to Kyiv and then from Kyiv. However, the Varangians could not bring with them the name of Rus' because this name was used in reference to Ukraine in the writings of the Gothic historian Jordan in the 4th century and in the works of the Syrian author Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor in the 6th century, while the Varangians appeared in the historical arena in the late 8th century.

In Muscovy itself, the term Russia began to be used in reference to this country by the authorities as late as in the 15th century when the idea of seizing Ukraine's lands began to circulate there. This word is taken from the Greek language because it was common knowledge at the time that Rus' was the territory of Ukraine.

Muscovy was finally renamed as Russia by the tsar's ukases of 1713 and 1721. In the late 18th century, Empress Catherine II ordered people, under the threat of flogging, to identify themselves as Russians and banned the customary designation "Muscovites".

Since the times of the Volhynian Prince Roman Mstyslavych (the late 12th century), all the princes of the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia bore the names "princes and rulers of the Rus' land" and their seals had the inscription "king of Rus'". In contrast, Andrei

Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki, mosaic, St. Michael's Cathedral of Kyiv, early 12th century

Bogoliubskiy, the prince of Suzdal, reportedly "wanted to be the ruler of all Suzdal lands".

In the 16th and the 17th centuries, the Ukrainian Cossacks considered their campaigns against Stambul to be a continuation of the campaigns launched by Kyiv princes against Constantinople. Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky was called "the ruler of Rus'" in official documents and diplomatic correspondence. The History of the Rus' People, a work written in Ukraine in the 18th century, underlined the unambiguously Ukrainian nature of Rus'.

Taras Shevchenko did not use the word Russia in his works, always referring to Muscovy instead. The Ukrainian language has the word rosiiany 'Russians', while the adjective ruskyi 'Rus'' refers to all things connected with the Kyivan medieval state.

Archangel, mosaic, St. Sophia's Cathedral of Kyiv, 11th century

The Origin of Russia

The Kyiv state freed the ancestors of Russians from having to pay tribute to the Khazars, taught them literacy and introduced them to Christian culture. However, in the mid-12th century the ancestors of Russia separated from Kyiv and created their own state, Suzdal, which later came to be known as Muscovy. The borders of the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal were those of the Finno-Ugric tribe Merya. Kyivan princes sent their youngest sons to rule there. Suzdal princes were able to build strength, while Rus' was wearing down in the struggle against the steppe peoples.

Since the 12th century, the descendants of Mstyslav the Great ruled largely in Ukraine and in Smolensk and Novgorod, which were subordinated to Kyiv, while the descendants ofYuri Dolgorukiy, Monomakh'syoungest son, ruled in Zalissya with increasing independence.

Andrei Bogoliubskiy, a son of Yuri Dolgorukiy, was born of a Cuman woman, Khan Ayepa's daughter, and had the peculiar features of the Asian steppe people. In his struggle against Kyiv, Bogoliubskiy constantly supported his kin people, the Cumans, who were the main enemy of Rus'. Yuri Dolgorukiy lived in Zalissya almost his entire life, making every

Prince Andrei Bogoliubskiy, "the first Great Russian on the historical stage", 20th-century reconstruction based on his skull

effort to seize Kyiv. In contrast, Bogoliubskiy said: "There is no room for us in Rus'." He was the first to break the three century-long tradition of the Rurik princes to recognize Kyiv and the Kyiv region as their only homeland. Bogoliubskiy stole the famous icon of the Mother of God (later known as the Theotokos of Vladimir), which had been brought from Byzantium for Mstyslav the Great. Bogoliubskiy took it from Vyshhorod (near Kyiv) to Vladimir-on-Klyazma.

In 1169, an army sent by Bogoliubskiy against Kyiv besieged the city. After three days of fierce fighting on the walls, the invaders outflanked the defenders of the city over Yurkovytsia Hill. The nomadic Berendei and Torkils, whose companies served the prince of Kyiv, betrayed him. The prince of Suzdal seized the city and ravaged it. The chronicle calls his army pagans, because Christianization had not been completed in the Central Russian lands from which they came. Bogoliubskiy continued to drive out the princes of the Kyiv dynasty, the descendants of Mstyslav the Great, from their ancient lands and organized a campaign against Novgorod to defeat Roman Mstyslavych, the future founder of the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, but the Suzdal force suffered a crushing defeat.

In the Kyiv region, the resistance was led by Mstyslav the Brave, the best known and most loved prince in Ukraine at the time. He ordered the envoy of the Suzdal prince to shave his head and beard.

The murder of Andrei Bogoliubskiy, miniature from a chronicle, 14th century

Bogoliubskiy gathered a 50,000-strong army composed of warriors from Suzdal, Ryazan etc. This was one of the biggest armies mentioned in Ukrainian medieval chronicles. The Suzdal force besieged Mstyslav the Brave in Vyshgorod. The Rus' army fought the attackers on the city walls and near the city for nine weeks. The Suzdal army was defeated at Vyshgorod in the early winter of 1173 and Bogoliubskiy was soon killed in Suzdal by conspirators who rebelled against his cruelty.

The church made Mstyslav the Brave, who led the defeat of the Suzdal army, a saint. The chronicle reports that the Novgorod residents invited him to come and rule over them, but he did not want to leave Rus' at any cost. Prince Mstyslav the Successful, son of Mstyslav the Brave, crushed the army of the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal at the Lipytsia River in 1216.

According to the chronicles, the Suzdal prince and his brother Yaroslav, the future father of Alexander Nevsky, fled in their underwear, tiring out seven horses and leaving behind their entire army on the battlefield. Under the attacks of Kyivan princes, the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal fell apart.

Therefore, the attempts of Suzdal princes to take control over Rus' and its subjects Novgorod and Smolensk fell through. Kyiv remained the capital of all lands that belonged to the Kyivan state from the 10th to the 12th century and a powerful political, economic and religious center.

A helmet abandoned, together with chain armor, by the fleeing prince of Vladimir-Suzdal 20km away from the site of the Battle of Lipitsa. The helmet was found by a peasant woman in the early 19th century

The Language of Kyivan Rus'

The Ukrainian language was for the first time recorded in Ruska Pravda, a collection of laws, and especially in household inscriptions and the charters of princes (the 10 th until the 12th centuries).

Most Ukrainian scholars believe that the Ukrainian language with its special features was formed on the basis of ancient Slavic dialects under some influence from the Scythian and Sarmatian languages at the time of the Antean tribal union, i.e. in the mid- 1st millennium AD. There were no Slavs in the territory of either modern Russia or modern Belarus.

Unlike princes' charters and household inscriptions, the literature of Kyivan Rus' was written mainly in Church Slavonic. This language was artificially created on the basis of the Thessalonian dialect of the Bulgarian language by the Slavic educators Cyril and Methodius for the purposes of Christianization of the Slavs. Church Slavonic became the lingua franca for the East Slavs and the South Slavs, a role similar to that of Latin, which was used in Western Europe for worship, writing and education.

However, the ancient chronicles written in Church Slavonic and The Tale of Ihor's Campaign preserved

Ostromir Gospels, 1056-1057, written in Church Slavonic

many Ukrainian words not found in Church Slavonic. Volodymyr Monomakh had a good command of Church Slavonic but was unable to avoid hundreds of Ukrainian words when writing instructions for his children.

The names of princes in the chronicles and charters are typically Ukrainian: Volodymer, Vsevolod, Volodymerko, Volodar, Vasylko, Ivanko, Volodyslav, Olena, Mykhalko, Dmytro, Danylo etc.   The name of the capital itself always had the Ukrainian spelling Kyiv in the chronicles.

The chronicles also contain the local Ukrainian names for August (serpen') and December (hruden').

The language spoken by the Rusyns had the following features: o-voweling, the soft ending of verbs in the third person in both singular and plural (pyshet', imut') and the pronunciation of the letter as the aspirated [h] consonant. These are some of the characteristic features of the Ukrainian language.

In contrast, the Russian language was formed in the 12th to the 14th centuries as the local, largely Finno-Ugric, population learned Church Slavonic, which was imposed by the church and the authorities. At present, most rivers in Central Russia and many Russian cities in Central Russia, including Moscow, have Finno-Ugric names. In imperial times, Ukrainian was viewed by many people in Russia as a Polonized version of Russian. This proposition is utterly unscientific, because Ukrainian

features were found in the language of Kyivan Rus long before any Polish influence. Importantly standard Ukrainian is based on the vernacular spoken in the Poltava and Chernihiv regions. These territories were part of Poland in 1569-1648 and over this short period of time many people there did not have to deal with the Polish authorities, to say nothing of changing the language of their ancestors. The written sources in Ukraine dating to the 16th and the 17th centuries do not record any changes in the language. Ukrainian has been able to withstand much greater, centuries-long pressures.

Even though The Tale of Ihor's Campaign (1187) is written in Church Slavonic, it contains many Ukrainianisms.

Ukraine

The Great Prince Sviatoslav II Yaroslavych with his family, life-time illumination from the Izbornik of Sviatoslav, 1073

The word Ukraine (Ukraina) first appeared in a chronicle in 1187. This happened even before the Mongol invasion, which undermines the Russian imperial storyline about a “common cradle” of Ukraine with the Russian people. For a long time, Russia tried to promote the idea that Ukraina was derived from the word okraina “outskirts, borderland”. This was possible because in conditions of censorship, few researchers even read the chronicles.

An entry in the chronicle for 1187 mentions that the Pereiaslav Prince Volodymyr Hlibovych was “mourned by all of Ukraine”.

The Pereiaslav Principality was one of the principalities of Rus' proper (which included the principalities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Pereiaslav and Novhorod-Siverskyi at the time). Much of the Pereiaslav Principality was further removed from the borders of Rus' than Kyiv itself. Therefore, the word "Ukraine" could not mean the outskirts of the principality. Most important, it would be absurd to assume that the prince was mourned by precisely borderlands rather than the entire principality.

In the year 1189, the chronicle mentions Prince Rostyslav Berladyk, that he came to "Galician Ukraine" (a prince would come to a principality to rule it as one entity rather than some of its border regions). The Galician-Volhynian chronicle has the following entry for 1213: "Danylo returned home and traveled with his brother and accepted Berestii, Uhrovesk, Vereshchyn, Stolpe, Komov and all of Ukraine." Again,  this is a reference not to outskirts but to the entire principality of Zabuzhia with the center in Uhrovesk (now the site of a settlement in the village of Novouhruzke in Luboml Raion (county), Volyn Oblast).

The chroniclers also wrote about Polish princes who,  after a military expedition to Galicia and Volhynia, returned "to their Ukraine", i.e. to their own principality. Furthermore, there was no principality, state or other entity whose outskirts could include Chernihiv Ukraine, Siverskyi (Novhorod-Siverskyi) Ukraine and, all the more so, Kyiv Ukraine.

The use of the designation Ukraina in the literature from the 12th until the 15th century clearly shows that this term was a synonym for "principality" and "land". The modern Ukrainian word kraina means "country".

Therefore, Ukraine is a more recent name for Rus, just like France for Gaul and Spain for Iberia. Before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, modern Great Britain was called Britain, then Albion and later England. China changed its name with each subsequent ruling dynasty. Russia was called the USSR only recently, the Muscovite Kingdom prior to that, and Zalissya and Suzdal in earlier times.

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Silver coin, minted under Prince Volodymyr the Great of Kyiv, ca. 1000 AD

Fighting the Mongols

In the early 13 th century, Ukraine was still fragmented, the Cumans no longer posed a threat and few people thought about a common defense. Meanwhile, a new horde was emerging in Asia. The nomadic Mongols borrowed from China knowledge and tools for storming cities and kept strict discipline in their army, including punishment by death for the slightest of violations. The Mongol ideology was to establish worldwide rule — "a military expedition to the last sea". The Mongols formed a huge army of hundreds of thousands of warriors from subjugated peoples.

Meanwhile, the hired military forces of the Rus' princes rarely exceeded several thousand warriors. These detachments did not have a unified command and disliked discipline.

In 1223, the Mongol army crosses the Caucasus after conquering Central Asia. All princely dynasties, with the exception of Zalissya, came out to fight the Mongols. The armies clashed near the Kalka River. The army of the great Kyiv Prince Mstyslav Romanovych fended off Mongol attacks for three days until its water supply was exhausted. The Mongols promised to let the army go free in exchange for a ransom, but they broke their

Mongolian soldiers, Persian miniature, early 14th century

word. They captured and choked princes to death by putting them under a wooden platform on which they had a banquet after the victory.

In 1239, the Mongols led by Batu Khan began the invasion of Ukraine. They attacked Kyiv together with units from the conquered Finno-Ugric peoples of Central Russia, including the Moksha. According to the chronicles, the Mongols did not dare storm Kyiv,  impressed by its grandeur. After a long siege and several assaults in December 1240, Mongol rams broke the walls near the Liadski Gate in a place where the forest came closest to the walls and protected the attackers from the arrows shot by the defenders. The Kyivans built new fortifications on Starokyivska Hill around the Church of the Tithes. During the fighting in the Churth of the Tithes, the Mongols captured Dmytro, a wounded voivode of the Prince Danylo Romanovych, who had led the defense of the city. The chronicle reports that, in order to save his homeland, Dmytro convinced Batu Khan to promptly leave Rus.

However, some cities in the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia withstood the invasion. These included Kremianets and Kholm, both of which had the reputation of being impregnable. Rus' was spared even greater devastation due to the fact the Mongols moved to Hungary as quickly as the winter of 1241 and roamed its territory for the next three years, attacking Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Germany and Croatia.

Mongol machines used in siege warfare, Persian miniature, early 14th century

However, the population of Kyiv plummeted, and there were a mere 2,000-3,000 residents in the city in 1245.

On the backdrop of the ruined state, the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia stood out. It became the strongest principality in Rus' back in the late 12th and the early 13th century under Prince Roman Mstyslavych, who united nearly all the Ukrainian lands. The state organization of Galicia and Volhynia remained strong, relying on energetic and gifted princes, Danylo Romanovych and Vasylko Romanovych. Salt trade helped the principality to quickly restore its strength.  Galicia and Volhynia enjoyed the greatest degree of independence from the Mongols and Tatars. The Kyiv and Chernihiv regions also revived, albeit more slowly. In 1245, they had a tysiatsky, i.e. a city governor, and other nobility, bishops and merchants from the Italian cities of Venice, Genoa and Pisa.

The Mongol and Tatar invasion undermined the statehood of Kyivan Rus' but was unable to obliterate it. The local princes from the Rurik dynasty maintained power in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Pereiaslav, Volhynia and Galicia regions. Their power was weak in some places that were close to the territory where the Mongols roamed, but strong in other regions. The Kyivan lands were not made part of the Horde and the Mongol troops were not quartered in Kyiv. Kyiv continued to be considered the capital. However, the khan approved the powers of the grand prince with the formula "Kyiv with all of Rus' land".

Mitre of Peremyshl bishops, likely an alteration of the crown of Danylo Romanovych

Despite Mongol efforts to weaken the statehood traditions of Rus', Kyiv remained the main Orthodox religious center in Eastern Europe. In 1243, Danylo Romanovych appointed his governor Kurylo as the metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus'. All the new metropolitans of Kyiv, even those who fled from Kyiv to the calmer Galicia or Vladimir-on-Klyazma, were ordained in St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv. The Pope hoped that Danylo would help fight off the Mongols, while Danylo hoped for a crusade against the Mongols. In late 1253, the Pope crowned Danylo Romanovych as the king of all Rus'. The royal crown established Danylo's superiority over the princes of the neighboring Catholic countries. Galicians and Volhynias were the first to dare a rebellion against the Mongols. In 1255-1256, King Danylo's army liberated the lands along the Boh, Sluch and Teteriv rivers in immediate proximity to Kyiv and repelled attacks on Kremianets and Lutsk. However, an additional horde led by Khan Burundai came to Rus'. All the defensive fortifications, which had been built by strenuous efforts, were destroyed on his orders. Only the strongest fortress in Kholm was preserved with the use of some cunning.

At the time of these rebellions, the Prince of Suzdal Alexander Nevsky helped the Mongols kill his own brother, suppressed popular rebellions against the Horde with fierce punishments and acknowledged himself

the adopted son of Batu Khan — all in the territory of modern Russia.

Large-scale Mongol-Tatar attacks on Ukrainian lands took place approximately once per decade. Ukrainian princes sometimes tried to fight back, at times with some success. In 1275, the Mongol Khan Kurdan led a large army and invaded Polisia. Grand Prince Sviatoslav of Kyiv joined forces with Lithuanian princes and received the support of a detachment from Lutsk to counter the Mongols. A battle on the Okunivka River near Mozyr (now in Belarus) ended in the defeat of the Mongol-Tatar army, and only the khan with a small unit managed to escape.

Decades later, the Horde itself began to experience a growing crisis. Mongol khans turned on each other. The Mongols and the Tatars remained at a low level of development and their economy was based on extracting resources from other peoples.

Castle Hill, Kremenets, 19th century. The castle survived a Mongol siege in the winter of 1241

The Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia and Samogitia

The lands of the Lithuanian tribes were separated from the Mongols by dense forests. Lithuanian chieftains acquired military experience as they launched attacks on the lands of the former Kyivan state, Poland and the Teutonic Order. The Belarusian chronicle reported that the Lithuanians were so poor prior to their ascent that they paid tribute to Galician and Volhynian princes in bast and brooms for lack of more valuable goods. During the rule of the Grand Lithuanian Prince Gediminas (1295-1341), Lithuanian forays turned into a massive onslaught. Noteworthily, his predecessor Prince Butvydas was forced to give Galician and Volhynian princes lands in the center of the Duchy of Lithuania "for the sake of peace". According to Lithuanian chronicles, the great Lithuanian army inva-ded Volhynia in 1320, seizing the city of Volodymyr. The boyars made an agreement with Gediminas, acknowledging him their supreme ruler, while he pledged to respect governance customs, not to take away the possessions of the Volhynian nobility and to appoint only locals to offices. Gediminas attacked the Kyiv principality the next year and the Rus' princes were defeated in a battle on the Irpin River near Kyiv.

The Kyivans withstood a siege for a month but then made an agreement with Gediminas acknowledging him as supreme ruler. In exchange, he again promised not to violate the established order, not to take away the lands of the local magnates and to appoint only Rusyns to high offices. Gediminas acquired the title of "the king of the Lithuanians and the Rusyns". The new state began to be called the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia and Samogitia (from the name of a region in northwestern Lithuania).

It should be noted that Muscovy was under Mongol rule for over 240 years, three times longer than Ukraine. Ivan I (1325* 1340, known as Kalita), one of the founders of Muscovy, spent most of his time on the throne not in ruling in Moscow but traveling to Sarai. Muscovy freed itself from the Great Horde as late as in 1480, while tribute was last paid to the descendants of Genghis Khan in the early 18th century. The Mongol-Tatar yoke was denigrating even to the nobility. Contemporaries wrote that Muscovite princes met, on foot, Tatar envoys on Poklonnaya Gora. They would take Tatar horses by the bridle and gave them mare's milk to drink and if it dripped onto the horse's mane, they would lick it up. After casting off the Mongol-Tatar yoke, Muscovite princes put an even greater burden on other peoples. In particular, they destroyed, to the last man, the population of Novgorod, which was closely tied to Kyiv by historian and religious connections.

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Around 1362, the decisive battle with the Mongols and Tatars took place at Syni Vody (according to various versions, on the Syniukha River or the Snyvoda River in Central Ukraine). Ukrainian units made up the bulk of the army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The main enemy forces were crushed and the Mongol-Tatar khans died in action. This victory marked the end of the Horde's power over the larger portion of the Ukrainian lands. As a result of the victory, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Ruthenia extended to the Black Sea coast. The Mongol empire had been expanding until that time, but began to disintegrate starting from the 1360s. For more than three decades after the battle at Syni Vody, the Tatars were practically not seen in Kyivan lands. The country began to revive.

Fortress in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, controlled by the Kyiv principality in late 14th and early 15th centuries

The Principality of Galicia-Volhynia

The Principality of Galicia-Volhynia continued the statehood traditions of Kyivan Rus' for a century. The same dynasty of the descendants of Mstyslav the Great continued to rule there. Under Prince Lev Danylovych (1264-1301) and Yurii Lvovych (1301-1308), the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia became the most powerful state in Eastern Europe. Lviv, Kholm and other, new cities in the principality grew and trade flourished. Dozens of princely charters written in Ukrainian have survived since those times. After another Mongol-Tatar attack on Kyiv in 1299, the metropolitan of Kyiv, who was Greek by birth, moved to Vladimir-on-Klyazma and Yurii Lvovych obtained the consent of Constantinople to establish the Halych Metropoly in 1303.

However, both rulers of the principality, Andrii Yuriiovych and Lev Yuriiovych, died in 1323, probably in a battle with the Mongols and Tatars. Their death was disastrous for the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. Galicia lost its independence, after a long struggle, in 1349. Later, the lands of the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia were occupied and divided up among its neighbors, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The Kyiv and Volhynia Principalities in the 1430s to the 1470s

The Slavic lands were more developed than the Lithuanian ones in the Duchy of Lithuania and Rus'. Rus' accounted for 90% of the territory and official records and chronicles were kept in the literary Ukrainian language of the time. Even in the late 16th century, when the state apparatus was being Polonized in the wake of Ukraine's inclusion into Poland, the current Lithuanian Statute of 1588 required that all officials write official documents only in Ukrainian. In some regions, Lithuanian princes kept rulers from the Rurik dynasty in place, but the grand duke of Lithuania removed the local Prince Fedor from power in Kyiv and appointed his eldest son Volodymyr (1362-1394) instead.

The prince of Kyiv had to acknowledge dependence on the grand duke of Lithuania, which, however, did not extend to the internal affairs of the principality. Volodymyr, the son of Algirdas, pledged to maintain the territorial integrity of the Kyiv principality, to appoint only Kyivans to administrative positions in the principality and not to curtail the rights of the local nobility. The borders of the Kyiv principality at the time almost coincided with its former borders within Kyivan Rus'. The Kyiv principality also controlled

the territory between the Dnipro and the Dniester, including the Black Sea coast. During the rule of Vytautas the Great, Kotsiub Yakushynsky founded the city of Hadzhybei (now Odesa), which was first mentioned in 1415. Moreover, the Bilhorod fortress near the Dniester Liman (estuary), the Dashiv fortress (now Ochakiv) and other fortifications on the Black Sea coast and along the Dnipro were built. The Kyiv principality began to mint its own coins, and a strong fortress was built on Zamkova Hill in Kyiv.

Volodymyr, son of Algirdas, signed his charters as "the Grand Prince of Kyiv", i.e. as an equal to the grand duke of Lithuania. In 1392, he refused to pledge allegiance to the grand duke of Lithuania and pay tribute to him. Other princes of Ukraine joined him in rejecting dependence on Lithuania. However, they failed to win this struggle. The Kyiv principality was abolished in the early 15th century and the same fate befell the Volhynia principality.

Under Svitrigaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania (1430-1440), Ukrainian landlords took over the most important cities and administrative posts and thus had an edge over the Lithuanian nobility. Svitrigaila's reliance on the Ukrainian nobility displeased Lithuanian feudal lords, who were supported by Poland. In 1432, they elected another grand duke. The Lithuanian state essentially disintegrated into two parts. Kyiv, Sivershchyna, Volhynia, Podillia, Polotsk and Smolensk, i.e. the lands

A tower of the Lutsk castle

with strong historical ties to Kyiv, united into the "Grand Principality of Rus", recognized Svitrigaila as their ruler and were essentially independent of Lithuania. A war erupted. The Kyivan and Volhynian voivodes defeated the Lithuanian troops multiple times. As a result of this struggle, the Polish King Jogaila and the Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund were forced to issue privileges in 1432 and 1434 granting equal personal and substantive rights to Orthodox and Catholic (Lithuanian) nobles. Despite this, the Ukrainian nobility conspired to remove Sigismund. In 1440, Skobeiko, a nobleman from Kyiv who undertook to carry out the plot, hid armed men under 300 carts of hay and they killed Sigismund at the Trakai castle.

As a result of the liberation struggle led by the Ukrainian nobility and population, the Kyiv and Volhynia principalities were restored in 1440. Prince Oleksandr (Olelko, 1440-1455), son of Prince Volodymyr, son of Algirdas, became the ruler of the Kyiv principality, while Volhynia was ruled by Svitrigaila himself (14401452). The restoration of the principalities protected the national and religious rights of Ukrainians and revived their statehood for a while.

A coin of Volodymyr, son of Algirdas, the Grand Prince of Kyiv (1362-1394)

The Decline of Lithuania

In 1471, the Lithuanian prince abolished the Kyiv principality and appointed the Lithuanian landlord and Catholic Martynas Gostautas as voivode in Kyiv. The Kyivans denied him entry into the city. The boyars asked the Lithuanian prince to respect Kyiv's glory and appoint an Orthodox prince or one of his sons to the city. Only after Gostautas assembled a large army was he able to establish himself in Kyiv.

A large Lithuanian garrison permanently stayed in the Kyiv castle and new Lithuanian administrations were appointed in counties and volosts.

The abolition of the principality disgruntled the population in Ukraine. People reminisced with regret about the times when Lithuania paid tribute to Kyiv. Ukrainian landlords began to prepare an armed action against Lithuanian rule. Princes Mykhailo Olelkovych, Fedir Bilsky and Ivan Holshansky led the conspiracy to put Mykhailo Olelkovych on the great princely throne. The conspiracy was uncovered in 1481. Prince Bilsky managed to escape dressed only in a shirt and leaving behind his wife whom he had just married, while princes Olelkovych and Holshansky were beheaded.

In 1508, Ukrainian feudal lords led by Prince Mykhailo Hlynsky decided to stage an insurgency in an effort to restore the Kyiv principality. Hlynsky raided the estates of his enemies, but when government forces approached, he fled to Moscow where he was granted the boyar title and given estates. However, he returned and sided with Lithuania during the next Muscovy-Lithuania war. These events further weakened the positions of the Ukrainian nobility in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Ruthenia.

As long as Lithuanian princes acted as the unifiers of the historical lands of the Kyivan state, respected the rights of the Ukrainian nobility ("neither touched old things nor introduced new things"), accepted Ukrainian culture and the Orthodox faith, the Ukrainian nobility and population ensured the success of the Grand Duchy.

It was thanks to this support that the Lithuanian state became one of the most powerful countries in Eastern Europe, more powerful than Muscovy and other neighboring principalities.

Ukrainians joined the Lithuanian state based on mutual agreements, "as an equal joins an equal and a free man joins a free man". After the policies of the Lithuanian government changed and became pro-Polish and pro-Catholic, Lithuania began to lose its ground and had to seek support from other states. It finally found it in Poland but lost its sovereignty and the status of a great power in exchange.

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Union of Lublin by the Polish painter Jan Matejko, 19th century

After several small appanage princes in the Siversk principality, which together with the Kyiv and Pereiaslav principalities had been called Rus' since ancient times, sided with the prince of Muscovy in the late 15th century, he assumed the title "sovereign of all Rus", in an obvious claim to Kyiv's status.

The defeat of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Ruthenia in a war against Muscovy in 1500-1503 showed that Lithuania had become weaker than Muscovy. Nevertheless, the Lithuanian army led by the Ukrainian Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozsky crushed the 80,000-strong Muscovite army at the Battle of Orsha in Belarus.

Meanwhile, Muscovy became much more powerful with the addition of the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in 1553-1556. Muscovite forces led by a Tatar khan invaded the Livonian Confederation (a state created by German knights in the 13th century in the lands of the Estonians and Latvians) in 1557. Lithuania stood in defense of Livonia and the Livonian War broke out.

The Polish king took advantage of the situation and proclaimed a "universal", the joining of Volhynia and Podlachia to Poland. The universal promised to grant offices in Volhynia only to the local landlords. With no resistance coming from Lithuania, which had been weakened by the war and internal strife, the Polish king issued another universal joining the Kyiv and Bratslav regions to Poland. Thus, the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was halved. On 1 July 1569, the Union

The Muscovite and Tatar elites of Muscovy, engraving from Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii by Sigismund von Herberstein, early 16th century

of Lublin was signed under which the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania united into a single state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with an elected monarch, common diet (parliament) and treasury, one monetary system and a shared foreign policy. Lithuania lost its statehood by becoming a part of the commonwealth and preserved its sovereignty only in local administration, the organization of the army and the justice system.

The Union of Lublin left the Ukrainian people without its own state organization and facing greedy Polish landlords at a time when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had become the most powerful state in Europe.

The new state defeated Muscovy several times. Seeing the bravery of the Zaporozhian Cossacks during the siege of Pskov, the Polish King Stephen Bathory issued, on 9 April 1582, a royal universal in Riga granting wide-ranging rights to the "registered" Cossacks, including the noble right not to pay taxes and recognizing lands stretching to the Don River as belonging to the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Bathory prophetically said that the Cossacks would found their own state.

King Stephen Bathory, Polish painting, 16th century

The Crimean Khanate

After the Mongol invasion, hordes led by Mongols and composed also of the remaining Cumans and natives of Central Asia roamed southern Ukraine. The unpopulated Wild Fields lay between these lands and the areas settled by Ukrainians. In 1348, a plague epidemic originated in the Crimea, spread via Turkey, sweeping across all of Europe within several years and reaching Ukraine via Poland.

In 1441, Khan Haci I Giray founded his own khanate in the Crimea. In 1478, the Crimea recognized its dependence on Turkey. The lands along the southern coast of the Crimea and cities in the eastern Crimea were handed over directly to the Ottoman Empire. Although Khan Haci I Giray came to power in the Crimea with the help of Lithuanian princes, the Crimean Khanate pushed the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Ruthenia back from the Black Sea coast by the late 15th century.

The Crimean khanate made numerous raids on the lands of Eastern Europe. The Crimea itself was home to many Christians (Greeks, Armenians, Genoese etc.) who were a leading force in the economy of the khanate.

In Muscovy, the defensive line against the Crimean Tatars was 200 km away from Moscow, between the cities

Crimean Tatar vanguard of the Turkish army (bottom), Turkish miniature depicting a military expedition to Europe in 1566

of Nizhniy Novgorod, Serpukhov and Tula. Muscovy continued to periodically pay tribute to the Crimean Khanate as the successor of the Great Horde. This tribute was called upomynky and was paid until the early 18th century.

The Ukrainian Cossacks

During the Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars in the 15th and the 16th centuries, the Crimean khans acted in alliance with Muscovy. These enemies would take Ukrainians and Poles prisoner and sell them on the slave markets in Caffa and Stambul. Muscovite princes instigated the Crimean khans to make military expeditions into Ukraine. As a result of one such campaign the Tatars burned Kyiv and sent ritual implements from looted churches as a gift to the prince of Muscovy. They killed the metropolitan of Kyiv during another raid. Ukrainian hunters, fishermen, farmers and merchants who lived along the Lower Dnipro were forced to keep their weapons ready for battle and gather in groups to put up a joint defense. They were joined by ambitious young people and outcasts. This is how the Cossacks emerged. The word "Cossack" meant "independent person" in Crimean Tatar and Cuman.

Defense against the Tatars was organized by the starostas (elders, heads of administration) of border cities. The "war of raids" was fought on Ukraine's borders starting from the 15th century. Local residents took turns to do watch duty at the outposts

On Reconnaissance, painting by Jozef Brandt, 19th century

in the steppe and notified further outposts about the approaching enemy using fire at night and smoke in the daytime.

The first written mentions of the Cossacks go back to 1490-1492. Khan Mengli Giray complained to the Grand Prince Oleksander about the residents of Kyiv and Cherkasy who had seized a Tatar ship near Tighina (now Bendery, Moldova) and attacked a fortress.

In 1493, the Cherkasy starosta Bohdan ruined the Ochakiv fortress which the Tatars had built on the site of the Lithuanian Dashiv fortress and captured its garrison.

In 1514, the Ukrainian nobleman Ostafii Dashkovych from Volhynia was appointed starosta of Cherkasy and he defeated the Tatars multiple times. Irked by the raids of the Cossack fleet to the Crimea, the Crimean Khan brought a horde of many thousands of armed fighters that had cannons and encircled Cherkasy in 1532, but was forced to retreat.

Portrait of a Cossack colonel, second half of the 17th century. (Lubny Colonel Hryhorii Hamaliia)

The Zaporozhian Sich

In 1554, Dmytro Vyshnevetsky (1516-1563), a Volhynian prince of Ukrainian-Lithuanian origin, built at his own cost a fortress called Sich on Mala Khortytsia Island in the Dnipro, downstream of the rapids. The Sich became the headquarters of the Cossack Host. The islands Khortytsia and Mala Khortytsia with their high rocky shores were best suited for the deployment of the Cossack fleet and the organization of voyages to the Black Sea. When Vyshnevetsky went on a military expedition to Moldova, the local boyars betrayed him and handed him over to Turkey. Vyshnevetsky was executed on the sultan's order in Stambul in 1563 using the cruel method of putting an iron hook under ribs and lifting the body. Vyshnevetsky remained in people's memory as the die-hard Cossack Baida, who shot arrows at his enemies even as he was being tortured. The folk nickname Baida meant "a free man".

Many started joining the Cossack Host especially after the Union of Lublin in 1569. Under Lithuania, peasants had personal freedom and paid quitrent to landlords or performed corvee for them, two days per week at the most. However, large quantities of gold and silver originating in America's Hispanic lands came to Europe and the price

Prince Dmytro "Baida" Vyshnevetsky, painting, the 16th century

of grain skyrocketed. Polish landlords increasingly turned peasants into serfs in order to earn more. In Poland itself, peasants had virtually no rights, except that they could not be sold, as was the case in Muscovy.

The Sich had no other population than the Cossacks and a small number of merchants. The Cossack garrison in the Sich was organized based on the example of a knight order. A person of any nationality could join it after reading the Lord's Prayer in Ukrainian. A novice, who was called molodyk (literally, a young man), acquired equal rights with other Cossacks after participating in military campaigns. The Sich had extremely strict discipline during wartime, which was relaxed at times of peace. All Cossack starshyna (officers), including judges, were elected in direct elections and the same type of elections were held in each unit — kurin and palanka. The Kish otaman, elected by the Cossacks, had the power of life and death over them. Crimes were punished severely. The Cossacks buried murderers together with their victims.

In the early 16th century, permanent settlements of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (zymivnyky) extended to the Sea of Azov and the Don River. A charter from the Polish King Stephen Bathory of 9 April 1582 recognized the eastern boundaries of the Zaporozhian lands as extending "from the upper Orel River to the upper Kalmius River and from there to the Don estuary". The lands of the Zaporozhian Cossacks reached the Dniester River in the west.

Cossacks in a battle against the Turks, Turkish miniature, 1592

Campaigns against Moldova, Turkey and the Crimea

In the 16th century, the boyars of Moldova and Wallachia often called upon the Ukrainian Cossacks for  help as they fought for power. In 1577, the Cossacks led by Hetman Yakiv Shakh put the Cossack Ivan Pidkova, who had a Moldovan background, on the Moldavian throne. He received his nickname (pidkova means 'horseshoe') for his incredible physical strength and ability to bend horseshoes.

The Cossacks turned the Black Sea into a battlefield, although it was surrounded by Turkish territory. They seized Trabzon, Varna, Sinop, Kaffa (now Feodosia), Gezlev (now Yevpatoria) and the suburbs of Stambul, liberating prisoners and capturing booty.

At one point, a squadron led by Hetman Samiilo Kishka was defeated and he himself was taken prisoner. Chained to a Turkish galley, Kishka rowed for 26 years until he organized a rebellion of rowers. They killed the Turkish crew and returned to Ukraine where they were hailed as heroes and Kishka was elected hetman.

Roman Katirzhny, the leader of another revolt of slave rowers on Turkish galleys, and his fighters seized a ship, sailed to southern Italy and from there returned to Ukraine by land.

Under Hetman Petro Sahaidachny the Cossacks repeatedly defeated the fleet of the Ottoman Empire, the most powerful state at the time. The Cossacks developed their own tactics, using small chaikas (boats) each of which had two small cannons and 40-50 men to attack much bigger Turkish galleys armed with dozens of big cannons. The main objective was to distract the enemy ships until the enemy flagship was destroyed. Such actions were impossible without strict discipline in the Cossack Host and the Cossacks' confidence in their brothers-in-arms. The Cossack Host had strict discipline during military campaigns. Those who got drunk or even as much as took alcohol with them during a campaign were thrown into the sea. In 1615, the Cossack flotilla entered the Bosporus, on which the Turkish capital is located, burnt Turkish galleys in the Bosporus and ports close to Stambul and released a large number of Christian captives. Sailors were recruited to serve in the Turkish navy under pain of punishment.

In 1616, the Cossacks seized Kaffa, the largest city in the Crimea, including its citadel and the khan's treasury and freed thousands of captives.

In the summer of 1621, Turkey set out to conquer Poland. The armies met near Khotyn (now in Chernivtsi Oblast). The Turkish-Tatar army had, according to various estimates, from 180,000 to 460,000 soldiers besides auxiliary forces from Moldova and Wallachia.

Turkish Sultan Osman II with a vizier and janissaries leading captives, including Zaporozhian Cossacks, after the Battle of Khotyn. Propagandist illumination from a Turkish manuscript. In fact, the Turks lost the battle

It was one of the greatest armies in the Middle Ages. The Cossacks had 40,000 troops. After five weeks of inconclusive fighting by the walls of Khotyn, six attempts to storm the Ukrainian-Polish positions and the loss of about a third of his army, the sultan learned about Cossack attacks in the Black Sea and asked for peace.

The Poles admitted: "The real victors at Khotyn and the saviors of Poland were the Cossacks." The triumph at Khotyn stopped the victorious advance of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. However, Hetman Sahaidachny was wounded by an arrow and soon died.

The Cossacks strengthened the authority of the Zaporozhian Host. During the national liberation war of the Ukrainian people, which began in 1648, Turkey took a pro-Ukrainian stance.

In 1637, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, including the future liberation war hero Ivan Bohun, made a surprise attack, together with the Don Cossacks, on the Turkish fortress of Azov. They held the fortress for five years, repulsing the attacks of larger enemy forces.

Campaigns against Muscovy

After the carnificial reign of Ivan the Terrible, Muscovy saw the Time of Troubles and the Don Cossacks started inviting the Zaporozhian Cossacks to help them upport their candidates for the throne. The Cossacks took part in the civil war in Muscovy and defeated Muscovite government troops in 1604, 1608 and 1610. In 1618, a 20,000-strong Ukrainian army led by Hetman Sahaidachny starting assisting the Polish prince who, seeing the end of the Muscovite dynasty, wanted to become king himself. In Muscovy, the Cossacks advanced with surprising speed, seizing more than 20 fortresses. Seeing them, the Muscovite army of Prince Dmitry Pozharsky scattered and fled. Another voivode made a failed attempt to prevent the hetman from forcing a crossing over the Oka. The Sahaidachny-led Cossacks attacked the Muscovite forces and crushed them near the Donskoy Monastery.

Under the terms of the Truce of Deulino, the Commonwealth regained control over Smolensk, Chernihiv and Novhorod-Siverskyi which Muscovy took from Lithuania a century earlier. Since then, the ethnic Ukrainian lands of Chernihiv and Novhorod-Siverskyi have always been part of Ukraine.

During the Polish-Muscovite Smolensk War of 16321634 the Muscovite forces found themselves in a trap after the Zaporozhian Cossacks led by Hetman Tymofii Orendarenko caught them by surprise by forcing a crossing over the Dnipro. Near Smolensk the Poles and the Zaporozhian Cossacks forced the Muscovite army to capitulate and led its men under a gallows to shame them. On the tsar's orders, the commander of the Muscovite army was perfidiously executed in Moscow. These campaigns showed that the Ukrainian Cossacks became stronger than not only the Muscovite army but also the Poles, who had achieved less.

The capitulation of the Muscovite army in the Smolensk War, Polish painting, 1634 (fragment below)

Anti-Polish Uprisings

It did not take the Commonwealth much time to turn from a state tolerant to different peoples into a state which was alien to Ukrainians and in which they did not enjoy equal rights, even formally. Under pressure from the government the Ukrainian magnate elite began to switch to Catholicism, with just a handful of landlords and the gentry remaining on the side of their people. The king called on the Cossacks to leave their settlements beyond the rapids in order not to irritate Turkey. He did not recognize the Cossacks in towns and villages (except for the commanders of several thousand "registered" Cossacks) as nobility, even though the Cossacks performed noble military service in the interests of the Commonwealth. The Polish government started demanding from the Cossacks the performance of the same duties as it did from ordinary townspeople and peasants.

The first uprising was led by Kryshtof Kosynsky (1545-1593), a hetman of the registered Cossacks and a member of the gentry from Podlasie. The insurgents were successful in the first couple of battles, but later suffered a crushing defeat.

The fight was continued by Severyn Nalyvaiko (ca. 1555-1597), a native from Husiatyn (now

in Ternopil Oblast), a town of artisans. Nalyvaiko was praised for his exceptional bravery and he was a skilled cannoneer. He had an axe to grind — his father had been tortured by the servants of a Polish magnate. Nalyvaiko started a war against the Turks and their appointee in Moldova and won. In the summer of 1594, Nalyvaiko's Cossacks destroyed the Turkish fortress Tighina (now Bender in Moldova) as they chased the retreating Tatars.  The Polish Hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski wrote that "all of Ukraine has become Cossack". Nalyvaiko asked the king to appoint him hetman of the southern steppes between the Dniester and the Boh River. The insurgents were encircled by the Poles near the Solonytsia River (in the vicinity of Lubny in the Poltava region). Under cannon fire, experiencing a lack of food and water and seeing their exhausted women and children most of whom were in the camp, part of the Cossacks made a peace agreement. However, after seizing the leaders of the insurgents, the Poles violated the agreement and started killing everybody indiscriminately. The Cossacks took up arms, but it was too late. A mere 1,500 Cossacks, who broke through the encirclement and went to Zaporizhia, survived. Nalyvaiko was executed after savage tortures.

After these events, anti-Polish uprisings erupted one after another in Ukraine. The biggest ones were led by Mark Zhmailo (1625), Taras Triasylo (1630), Ivan Sulyma (1632), Pavlo Pavliuk (1637), Ivan Ostrianyn and

Polish nobility with the coat-of-arms and dressed in the costumes of different voivodeships of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Dmytro Hunia (1638). The Cossacks seized fortresses, including the large Kodak fortress on the Dnipro.

The Poles complained that the registered Cossacks did not want to fight for them against their fellow Ukrainians: "It is easier to plow with a wolf than to fight with the Cossacks against their people." Following each new uprising, the Polish government reduced the number of registered Cossacks and further restricted their rights.

Severyn Nalyvaiko, portrait, 17th century

The Liberation War of 1648-1657

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657) came from a noble Ukrainian family. During a battle in Muscovy, he did a favor for the Polish Prince Wladyslaw, who gave him a saber as an award and became sympathetic to him since that time.

Khmelnytsky stood out due to the combination of a lucid mind, sagaciousness, modesty in everyday life (a rare thing for nobility), determination and caution. A 1649 panegyric noted that Khmelnytsky became a knight under which "Volodymyr's Rus' rose to its feet". In contrast, the Poles called Khmelnytsky "the Scourge of God". A millennium earlier, this was the sobriquet of Attila, the ruler of the Huns who ravaged the Eastern and Western Roman Empire.

In 1647, the Chyhyryn assistant vicegerent D. Czaplinski looted Khmelnytsky's estate and his servants severely beat Khmelnytsky's small son Ostap, who soon died. Czaplinski also kidnapped Khmelnytsky's bride and became engaged to her. Khmelnytsky tried to go to court but to no avail. A person of Ukrainian origin, even a gentleman, was unable to obtain justice. The king hinted to him: you have a saber, so protect yourself.

Ukrainian Cossacks, painting, mid-17th century

Khmelnytsky went to Zaporizhia with a small detachment of Cossacks and his son Tymish. The colonel of the Polish garrison in the Sich fled in advance and the Cossack garrison let the insurgents in and joined them. A force of several thousand Cossacks gathered in the Sich. In April 1648, the Polish crown hetman sent part of the registered Cossacks on baidaky (large boats) on the Dnipro and a German infantry division to crush the rebellion. At Kodak they had to join a 5,000-strong detachment composed of the rest of the registered  Cossacks and Polish soldiers from the royal troops that

marched on land. Patriotic appeals swayed the registered Cossacks: they switched to the insurgents, drowned the traitors from among officers in the river and killed the mercenaries.

The Cossacks made earth banks in advance to block the path of retreat for the Polish army which advanced on land. In the Battle of Zhovti Vody on 5-6 May 1648 the Polish army was utterly defeated. Only 10 Poles were able to escape captivity.

On 16 May, a second Polish army, having learned about the defeat, began to retreat from Korsun. This decision was reinforced after the Cossack Mykyta Halahan, in retaliation for an insult, deliberately let Poles take him prisoner and under tortures told them lies about a huge Cossack-Tatar army, convincing the Poles to choose their way into a trap.

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The Poles entered a ravine thickly overgrown with trees and shrubbery. Seeing the trap, the Polish hetman killed Halahan. Many historians believe that this event was the basis for a legend, invented in Muscovy, about the Muscovite peasant Ivan Susanin who allegedly led a Polish army into a swamp to rescue the tsar. In the battle, the majority of Poles were killed, while others (more than 8,500) were taken prisoner, including both Polish hetmans, i.e. their highest military commanders, M. Potocki and M. Kalinowski. A mere 1,500 horsemen out of the entire army were able to avoid captivity and death. The Polish army in Ukraine essentially ceased to exist.

However, Poland was still the strongest power in Europe. Several months later, it put together a 100,000-strong army, including a 8,000-strong detachment of German mercenaries and more than 90 cannons.

The two armies met near the village of Pyliavtsi in Podillia. Unable to withstand the onslaught, the Polish troops began their retreat on the night of 14 September 1648, which soon grew into a disorderly flight. After the victory at Pyliavtsi, the Polish gentry in Ukraine was derisively called Pyliavchyky. It was at that time that Ukraine essentially gained independence. In Kyiv, people welcomed Khmelnytsky as "Moses, savior, the liberator of the Rus' people from Polish captivity ...the pre-eminent ruler of princely Rus'".

The Polish king suffered another defeat and barely escaped captivity in 1649 near Zbarazh in Podillia and

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Skirmish between Polish and Cossack cavalry near Kyiv in 1651, painting by the Dutch painter Abraham van Westerveld

thus started negotiations with the Crimean khan who was Khmelnytsky's ally. Ukraine was forced to sign the Treaty of Zboriv. The king recognized Ukraine's self-government within the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Bratslav voivodeships. The hetman had power over these lands. Only Orthodox nobility had the right to take governments positions at all levels in the territory of the Hetman State. The Polish army had no right to be in the territory of Ukraine controlled by the Cossacks.

The size of the Zaporozhian Host was limited to a roster of 40,000 persons. The metropolitan of Kyiv had to join the Senate of the Commonwealth.

The Polish government found a casus belli for a new  war: peasants did not let landlords into their estates in Ukraine, while the Cossacks asked to increase Ukraine's autonomy and have the peace treaty signed by the Polish Senate members.

In 1651, the Tatar cavalry suffered heavy losses from the Polish artillery and began to flee in the Battle of Berestechko in Volhynia. The hetman rushed after the khan to persuade him to return to the battlefield but was held hostage by the khan. The Poles demanded surrender, but the Cossacks refused. At night, the Cossacks under the leadership of the newly elected Hetman Ivan Bohun organized a crossing over the swamp, plunging carts into the bog and putting spears on top so that people could roll over them. However, the Polish forces attacked the retreating

Battle between Cossack and Lithuanian boats on the Dnipro, 1651, painting by Abraham van Westerveld

Cossacks. On one of the islands, several hundred Cossacks fought to the last man despite the enemy's calls to surrender and promises of life. The last Cossack fought from a boat and used a scythe when he ran out of bullets despite the king's personal promise of pardon.

The hetman was forced to sign the Treaty of Bila Tserkva under which the Cossack register was reduced to 20,000 and the territory of the Cossack state was limited to the borders of the Kyiv voivodeship. Moreover, Polish magnates and nobility were to recover their estates in Ukraine. Alarmed by the appearance of Polish troops, the population of Right-Bank Ukraine abandoned their homes and moved to Left-Bank Ukraine and Sloboda Ukraine. It was at this time that the main wave of Ukrainians came to settle in Sloboda Ukraine, even though the Ukrainian population had been in its western part since the time of Kyivan Rus'.

The Cossacks soon went on a successful expedition to Moldova where Khmelnytsky married his son to a local princess. In 1652, the Cossacks engaged in a several hours-long battle near Batih Hill, defeated the 30,000-strong Polish army and broke into the Polish camp. The Polish hetman ordered his men to shoot at Poles who were preparing to flee, but he was soon killed himself like all of the other senior Polish military leaders.

Battle of Berestechko (1651), bas-relief from the tomb of the Polish King John II Casimir in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Paris

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The Pereiaslav Treaty

In the fall of 1653 during a campaign against Ukraine a 50,000-strong Polish army led by King John II Casimir was encircled near the village of Zhvanets in Podillia. The Polish army began to suffer from hunger and epidemics. However, the position of the Crimean Khan once again saved Poland from a complete rout and the Polish king from captivity. This forced the hetman to sharply change his foreign policy orientation.

Muscovy, which had repeatedly suffered defeats from Poland (in 1569-1581, 1604-1618 and 1632-1634), was afraid to intervene in the conflict. Moscow wanted - Ukraine and Poland to exhaust each other.

However, the defeat of Poland and the threat of Khmelnytsky making an alliance with Turkey or Sweden encouraged Moscow to conduct new negotiations with the hetman. These ended in January 1654 with the signing of the Pereiaslav Treaty. Under this agreement, Ukraine entered into a military alliance with Moscow which pledged to fight against Poland. In their turn, the Cossacks promised military assistance to Moscow in regaining control over Smolensk and making campaigns against Belarus.

The agreement had two restrictions: even though taxes were to be collected by Ukrainian officials

Ivan Bohun, painting based on an old portrait, 19th century

in Ukraine, part of them had to go to Moscow. Moreover, Ukraine was not to negotiate with Turkey and Poland. Even though the original of the 1654 treaty was "lost" in Muscovite archives, the statements and letters of the then leaders clearly show that Ukraine fully preserved its sovereignty. The Ukrainian clergy and military commanders refused to pledge allegiance to the Muscovite tsar because they knew about the utter lawlessness and wild tyranny that reigned supreme in Muscovy. In the 15th through the 17th century, a father had the legal right to sell his children into slavery in Muscovy. Only after selling them three times and if they were bought out each time, did the father lose this right. In contrast, people in Ukraine were used to freedom. Even at the hardest of times under the Polish rule, only a minority of the population were serfs. Moreover, serfdom involved mandatory labor for the landlord; he did not have authority over the personal freedom of peasants.

The Cossack Colonel Ivan Bohun warned: "Most atrocious slavery reigns supreme in Muscovy. People do not and cannot have any property because everything is the property of the tsar. Muscovite boyars call themselves 'slaves of the tsar'. The entire Muscovite people are slaves. In Muscovy, people are sold on the market just like we sell cattle. To join these people is worse than to jump into a fire alive". Moreover, the Bratslav, Kropyvna, Poltava and Uman Cossack regiments, a number of Ukrainian

Negotiations between Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Polish ambassador Jakub Smiarowski near Zamosc in 1649, painting, 17th century

cities and the famous military commander Ivan Sirko refused to swear allegiance to the tsar.

Nevertheless, to fulfill its obligations, the Ukrainian army went into Belarus and seized Smolensk. The hetman's rule was established in one half of the modern territory of Belarus and Cossack regiments  were formed in the likeness of Ukrainian ones. As they fought for the Muscovites Ukrainians did not receive sufficient reinforcement. In Podillia, they desperately fought to keep the Poles away from Ukrainian castles and towns. The wife of the Cossack sotnyk (captain) Marian Zavysna blew up the gunpowder magazine in the Busha castle in Podillia, killing the attackers and herself.

Muscovy violated the Pereiaslav Treaty less than two and a half years after signing it. Poland promised to the Muscovite tsar that he would be elected king and the Muscovite government concluded the Truce of Vilna with Poland in October 1656.

It was at this time that, ignoring Moscow's protests, Khmelnytsky made an alliance with Sweden, which was at war with Muscovy, Semyhraddia (Transylvania) and Brandenburg. Khmelnytsky opted for Sweden as this remote country had no claim to Ukrainian lands. Khmelnytsky died on 6 August 1657 while making preparations for a new campaign.

The liberation war restored Ukraine's statehood — four centuries after the fall of the Kyivan Rus' and 178 years after the demise of the Kyiv principality.

The Ukrainian people suffered huge losses and scored a series of glorious victories, but the outcomes were not commensurate with the scale of victories. Ukraine's main problem was the disloyalty of its allies who tried to take advantage of its hardships.

The Treaty of Hadiach

Ivan Vyhovsky, a Ukrainian noble from the Kyiv region who was close to Khmelnytsky and served as the general chancellor, was elected hetman (1657-1659).

In an effort to subdue Ukraine, the Muscovite government started forming a "fifth column" by sending agents with money and promises and fueling a civil war. The threat of Muscovite aggression forced Vyhovsky to make an alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Crimea and Sweden. Under the Treaty of Hadiach of 1658, Ukraine as a sovereign state with the name "Great Principality of Rus'" joined the Commonwealth on an equal basis with Poland and Lithuania. The Ukrainian army was to have 30,000 Cossacks and 10,000 hired soldiers. The Polish troops were banned from the territory of the principality. The Kyiv Mohyla Academy was granted the same rights as Cracow University in Poland, which was well-known across Europe. A second academy or university had to be founded in another city in Ukraine. The Treaty of Hadiach was extremely beneficial for Ukraine and surpassed everything the Cossacks gained during the Liberation War.

In the spring of 1659, the 150,000-strong Muscovite army entered Left-Bank Ukraine. In Konotop (Sumy

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region), 4,000 Cossacks of the Nizhyn and Chernihiv regiments locked up the city. The two-month defense of Konotop under the command of the Nizhyn Colonel Hryhorii Hulianytsky engaged the bulk of the Muscovite forces. On 28-29 June 1659, the decisive Battle of Konotop took place on the Sosnivka River. Before the battle, the Cossacks went into the enemy's rear and dammed up the river, faking a retreat to lure the enemy and defeated the Muscovite army. Some 30,000 Muscovites were killed and many more thousands were captured. When the Muscovite tsar received the news about the defeat, he ordered an evacuation from Moscow.

However, Vyhovsky was unable to take advantage of the victory. Part of the Cossack officers, who had been secretly bribed and incited by Moscow, opposed him. Moreover, a union with Poland was not popular among the Cossacks after the Ukrainian-Polish wars. Poland made concessions too late. In order to prevent any unrest, Vyhovsky renounced the hetmanship in October 1659.

The Partition of Ukraine

Ukraine soon had five contenders for the hetman's mace at once. The period known as "the Ruin" began. Its main causes were the aggressive encroachments of Muscovy, Poland, the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate. Denunciations, plotting and careerist bickering were undermining the country. Offering positions and money, foreign governments bribed unworthy officers, Cossack officers and the dregs of society ready to sell the interests of the country.

In 1665, Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky was lured to Moscow and signed the Moscow Articles under pressure. These articles prohibited the hetman from pursuing his own foreign policy. The number of Muscovite troops in Ukraine was increased and the Ukrainian government pledged to provide them with food free of charge. General Chancellor Zakhar Shyikevych, who refused to sign the articles, was exiled to Siberia in shackles.

A short time afterward, Poland and Muscovy signed the Truce of Andrusovo, partitioning Ukraine along the Dnipro. The Cossacks perceived this as a treacherous betrayal on the part of Moscow. Muscovy managed Ukrainian lands as if they belonged to it

Battle of Monastyryska (1653) in which Ukrainians led by Ivan Bohun defeated a Polish army under the command of Stefan Czarniecki, painting by Henryk Pillati, 19th century

rather than entered into a union of their own volition. Khmelnytsky made an alliance with Moscow precisely to obtain its assistance in defense against Poland.

Muscovite boyars at war, engraving, 16th century

Petro Doroshenko

Outrage at the partition of Ukraine triggered an anti-Muscovite rebellion in Left-Bank Ukraine in 1667-1668. It started in Pereiaslav, the site of the Pereiaslav Council. The local Cossacks and city residents destroyed the Muscovite garrison and killed the voivode. Sensing the general outrage, Hetman Briukhovetsky decided to go against Muscovy himself rather than wait to be removed from power. In January 1668, a council of Cossack officers in Hadiach supported the abolition of Muscovite power in the Hetman State and Ukraine's acceptance of a Turkish protectorate. In the summer of 1668, Cossack regiments under the command of the Hetman of Right-Bank Ukraine Petro Doroshenko (1665-1676) entered Left-Bank Ukraine to support the insurgents. His forces defeated the Muscovite corps of Prince Shcherbatov, capturing the prince, and later freed the majority of towns and cities in Left-Bank Ukraine from Muscovite garrisons.

Ukraine's unity was restored. Alarmed at the strengthening of the hetman's power in Ukraine, the neighboring states set out to undermine it. The Crimean Tatars supported the Zaporozhian chancellor Petro Sukhoviienko for hetman. Doroshenko appointed

Demian Mnohohrishny as acting hetman in Left-Bank Ukraine and was forced to return to Right-Bank Ukraine. The hetman's opponents took advantage of his absence in Left-Bank Ukraine and declared Mnohohrishny (1669-1672) hetman in Hlukhiv in mid-March 1669. That same year, he signed the new Hlukhiv Articles with Moscow which repealed the Moscow Articles of 1665. Under the influence of the anti-Muscovite rebellion, Moscow limited the number of voivodes in Ukraine to five and prohibited them from interfering with Ukrainian affairs.

In an effort to stop the simultaneous aggression of the Crimea, Poland and Muscovy, Hetman Doroshenko concluded a union treaty with Turkey in the fall of 1669. The foundation for this treaty was an agreement signed by Khmelnytsky and the Turkish sultan in 1651. Under the treaty, the territory of the Ukrainian state included all Ukrainian lands from Peremyshl to Putyvl; the right to the free election of the hetman was confirmed; the Ukrainian population did not have to pay taxes or tribute to the Turkish treasury; Turks and Tatars did not have the right to build mosques and take people into captivity in Ukrainian lands; Turkey and the Crimean Khanate were not to make truces with Poland and Muscovy without the hetman's consent. The treaty was beneficial for Ukraine, but Turkish military commanders soon began to neglect it.

Seeing a failure to enforce the agreement and Turkish violence against the Ukrainian population, Doroshenko

The Cossack capital Chyhyryn, 1670s

decided to renounce the hetman's office in 1675 in favor of the Hetman of Left-Bank Ukraine Ivan Samoilovych in order to unite Ukraine this way.

Ivan Sirko

At the time of the Ruin, the Zaporozhian Sich re mained a de facto independent state with its own administration, army and navy. Thousands of refugees from evastated Ukrainian lands flocked there. The permanent military force of the Cossacks reached 12,000-20,000 first-rate warriors and tens of thousands of fighters were provided in exceptional cases by the farmers who lived in the lands of the Zaporozhian Host. The Zich Cossacks fought virtually all along the perils meter — against Turkey, the Crimea, Muscovy and Poland.

According to a legend, Cossack Kish Otaman Ivan Sirko (1610-1680) was born in Podillia and had teeth at birth, which scared the people present at the event. His father decided to calm the audience by saying that Ivan would "gnaw the enemies with his teeth".

After the Pereiaslav Treaty, Sirko refused to swear allegiance to the Muscovite tsar. He was extremely fortunate in battles. At least 55 victories which he won are in the historical records. Polish sources contain records of three defeats suffered by his units.

During the anti-Muscovite rebellion of 1667-1668 Sirko's unit seized a larger part of Sloboda Ukraine, routing the Muscovite troops at Okhtyrka and Poltava.

The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan, painting by Ilya Repin, 19th century

At one point, the Muscovite tsar invited Sirko to Kursk for a "meeting" and provided security guarantees, but the Muscovites treacherously put him in shackles on the way to Kursk and exiled him to Siberia. However, facing the Turkish threat, the Polish king persuaded the tsar to release Sirko from exile. Sirko famously said: "He who sits next to me

is a brother and he who sits higher be damned." Sirko said that he fought "with great love and a sharp saber". In 1709, the Muscovite forces, enraged by the resistance put up by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, began to destroy Cossack graves in the Sich. Sirko's grave was also ruined. It was restored 25 years later when the Zaporozhian Cossacks returned from the Oleshky Sich.

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Festive procession in Moscow's Red Square, painting by Augustin von Meyerberg, 1660s

The Restoration of Right-Bank Ukraine

The Polish government wanted to rapidly restore the country wrecked by the Ruin and build defenses against the Tatars and Muscovites. With this in mind, it recognized the self-government of the Cossack regiments in Right-Bank Ukraine and supported the election of hetmans. The Cossacks imposed simple, small taxes on ordinary people. There were no serfdom or Polish authorities in these lands. Colonel Semen Palii was the most authoritative Right-Bank Cossack leader. A native of Borzny (Chernihiv region), Palii chose Fastiv in the Kyiv region as his residence in the early 1680s. In 1683, his unit distinguished itself in the defeat of the Turks at Vienna, a fateful battle for Europe.

However, the restored Cossack lands soon found themselves in the crosshairs of their former owners and their descendants from among the Polish nobility. Poland saw the Right-Bank Cossacks as the restoration of the Khmelnytsky movement. Poland decided to abolish Cossack rule.

In 1702, a Cossack uprising swept across the Kyiv, Podillia, Bratslav and Volhynia regions. Insurgent units

appeared in Galicia. Palii's brothers-in-arms defeated the Polish army and seized the main fortresses in Polisia. After a prolonged siege and using deception, Palii captured Bila Tserkva, the main stronghold in Right- Bank Ukraine, and moved his residence there.

In 1704, the Muscovite government signed an agreement with the Polish king pledging to help Poland fight against the Ukrainian Cossacks. Tsar Peter I ordered Palii to leave Bila Tserkva but the colonel refused.

The Cossacks recognized the supremacy of Left-Bank Hetman Ivan Mazepa over Right-Bank Ukraine. After Mazepa's forces entered Right-Bank Ukraine in 1704, Moscow, fearing the authoritative colonel, ordered his arrest, accused him of negotiating with Sweden and exiled him to Siberia.

After the anti-Muscovite uprising led by Hetman Mazepa, regiments in Right-Bank Ukraine supported Hetman Pylyp Orlyk. In punishment for this, the Muscovites drove the population of Right-Bank Ukraine to the left bank of the Dnipro en masse, burning and ravaging numerous towns and villages. However, these people began to return home after receiving protection from the Cossacks.

The rapid restoration of Right-Bank Ukraine under Cossack rule showed how rapidly Ukraine could have developed if it had managed to preserve its independence.

Theodosiia, the wife of Semen Palii, with a grandson, painting, 18th century. Theodosiia replaced Palii as the commander of the fortress and regiment when he was away on military expeditions

Ivan Mazepa and the "Mazepists"

After the Ruin, people would say "From Bohdan to Ivan (Mazepa), there was no hetman". Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709), born in Mazepyntsi (Kyiv region), studied in the Kyiv Mohyla College, studied artillery and engineering and mastered seven languages. He was the general chancellor, i.e. the head of the diplomatic department, in the government of Hetman Doroshenko and general osaul, i.e. the head of the military headquarters, under Hetman Samoilovych.

More big churches were built and restored in Ukraine under Mazepa in 20 years than in all the centuries under the rule of Muscovy. These majestic buildings have common features which art critics call the Mazepa baroque.

With Mazepa's support, the Zaporozhian Cossacks successfully stormed Turkish fortresses on the Dnipro in 1691. In 1695-1696, the Cossack fleet attacked Ochakiv, seizing dozens of Turkish galleys, while Mazepa's regiments seized Islam-Kermen (now Kakhovka in Kherson Oblast).

However, Peter I returned all the fortresses along the Dnipro to the Turks. The tsar wanted to make peace with Turkey and start a war against Sweden.

Ivan Mazepa, portrait, second half of the 17th century

Peter I was remarkably energetic and cruel at the same time. He single-handedly tortured his son to death, participated in sadistic tortures and executions and introduced blasphemous rituals.

Taking advantage of Semen Palii's rebellion, Hetman Mazepa took over Right-Bank Ukraine and restored the unity of the Ukrainian lands in the Dnipro region. In 1700, the Muscovite kingdom in union with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark started the Northern War (1700-1721) against Sweden. Ukraine was forced to fight for foreign interests. In the unusually wet climate, the Ukrainian troops that worked at construction sites suffered from epidemics. Meanwhile, Mazepa learned that the tsar and his magnates had decided to abolish the Cossacks, appoint their vicegerent to rule over Ukraine, move Ukrainians out and settle Ukraine with Muscovites.

"Brothers, we are standing on the edge of two cliffs that are ready to devour us," Mazepa said speaking to Cossack officers. Eventually, the hetman opted for a Ukraine- Sweden union. The Swedes did not have a common border with Ukraine but had common enemies.

The Swedish army quickly grew accustomed to a victor's role. In the battle at Lisove in Belarus in September 1708, the Muscovite army started to flee, but the tsar ordered the Cossacks to kill everyone who was retreating regardless of rank. It was the first battle won by the Muscovites.

Charles XII of Sweden

In September 1708 Swedish troops entered the territory of Ukraine. Hetman Mazepa joined them with several thousand men. His plans were thwarted by the absence of a majority of Cossack regiments in Ukraine, which were fighting far away in the north. Moreover, the population lost trust in the hetman, as it did not receive support from him when complaints were made about extortions by Muscovite voivodes. The hetman evidently kept his plans to liberate Ukraine in deep secret.

After unsuccessfully storming Baturyn, the capital of the Hetman State, the Muscovite troops used the help of a traitor to enter the city, which they then razed. They burst into the city through a secret passage at night and killed its entire civil population. According to Istoriia Rusov (The History of the Rus' People), the main Ukrainian chronicle of the 18th century, "they killed all the townspeople with no mercy for the sex, age, or infants... The usual punishment was to quarter and impale a person alive and then they invented new forms of executions that frightened the imagination." The Seim River was red with the blood of tortured townspeople; rafts with crosses from which the swaying bodies of the executed hung floated down the river. At the site of the Baturyn fortress there is now a mound with a monument in the form of a cross with a crucifixion. Attached to the cross is an icon which was found during excavations in Baturyn on the skeleton of a woman who was holding a little baby.

St. Nicholas Military Cathedral, built at the bidding of Hetman Ivan Mazepa. The Muscovites tried to rename it, and the Soviets blew it up in 1934

Similar atrocities took place in many other Ukrainian cities — Romny, Lebedyn etc. Seeing them, the Zaporozhian Sich switched to the Swedish side — the entire Zaporozhian Host led by Kish Otaman Kost Hordiienko. In April 1709, the Muscovites massacred the entire population of the Zaporozhian town Perevolochna. The same fate befell other Zaporozhian settlements. In May 1709, the Muscovites besieged the Zaporozhian Sich. A thousand elderly Cossacks under the command of Acting Otaman Yakym Bohush defended the Sich for nearly a week. Part of the Cossacks were able to escape into the flooded fields near the Dnipro, but over 200 wounded Cossacks were captured and subjected to fierce tortures: they were skinned alive, quartered and impaled. Their bodies were sent down the Dnipro on rafts to frighten other Cossacks. Peter I issued an ukase to have every Zaporozhian Cossack executed.

The Sich was restored near the old town of Oleshky in territory controlled by Turkey.

Some 17,000 Swedes and 42,000 Muscovites clashed in the Battle of Poltava of 1709. The Swedish king counted on the Ukrainian artillery but nearly all of it had been captured in Baturyn — up to 315 cannons, according to various estimates. As a result, the Swedes had six cannons in the battlefield against 102 cannons operated by the Muscovite army. The Swedes launched a desperate attack on the Muscovite positions but lost.

Commemorative cross with an icon at the site of atrocities committed by the Muscovites in Baturyn

The Muscovites held hostage the relatives of many of Mazepa's officers. Priests anathematized the hetman from fear of opposing the infamously sadistic tsar. Under the pain of death they had to declare an anathema on the hetman even in the churches he had built.

Those Ukrainians who did not follow their hetman never received a reward. According to the History of the Rus' People, Ukrainians who captured Swedes and brought them to the tsar's camp were "rewarded" with a shot of vodka and the words "Thanks, khokhlenok!" (a derogatory name for Ukrainians). Ukrainians began to be disparagingly called Mazepyntsi (Mazepists, Mazepa followers). They had limited access to official offices in Ukraine itself and foreigners began to appear among the Cossack officers.

Only the Mazepa followers in emigration were left there to fight for Ukraine. The most prominent of them included Pylyp and Hryhorii Orlyks, the Myrovych family and Andrii Voinarovsky, who was kidnapped by the Muscovites from Hamburg in 1716. In 1711, Pylyp Orlyk wrote the first Ukrainian Constitution — a compendium of the rights of the Cossacks and people of Ukraine. Conceptually advanced, this document envisaged, among other things, the separation of powers, intolerance to corruption and the protection of veterans, widows and their children.

The Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk

The Curtailment of Ukraine's Rights

The Muscovite tsars directly emphasized, even in their ukases, that the objective of Muscovy's policy in Ukraine was to obliterate Ukrainians as a people. In 1721, Muscovy was officially proclaimed the Russian Empire. By using the Greek name Rossiya, imposed on Muscovy by a Peter I ukase, Muscovy tried to appropriate the glory and heritage of the medieval Kyivan Rus' and the great Kyiv princes.

The Russian government increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of Ukraine. The Cossack artillery was moved to Muscovy. Muscovy also deployed its troops in Ukraine on a permanent basis to be maintained at the expense of the local population.

In 1722, Peter I founded the Little Russian Collegium, a body to control Ukraine. Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky was struck by the news and died soon afterwards.

Prior to this, Ukraine's affairs were managed by the hetman and Cossack officers, while the Little Russian Office, part of the Embassy Office (i.e. the ministry of foreign affairs), monitored their activities in the interests of Moscow. This setup recognized that Ukraine was a foreign state.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Cossacks were sent to remote construction sites where they died en masse

A Cossack chancellor in traditional Cossack dress— zhupan (short caftan) and kontusz (outer garment), painting, 1786

from the harsh climate and diseases. Under Peter I, a building of an old library in the Kyiv Cave Monastery where the chronicles from the princely era were kept, caught fire while a delegation of the Ukrainian clergy was in Moscow to defend the ancient rights of the Ukrainian church. The chronicler believed it was arson. As an energetic and patriotic man Acting Hetman Pavlo Polubotok kept pressing for permission to elect a new hetman and complained about the violent disturbances caused by the Muscovite troops. He prohibited the Cossack officers, under pain of severe punishment, to use Cossacks for their construction and household needs and set out to eradicate bribery. Peter I summoned Polubotok and leading Cossack officers to Petersburg and had them arrested. At this time, in order to avoid a rebellion, the tsar ordered the Cossack army to be moved to the southeastern border allegedly to protect Ukraine against the Tatars.

In December 1724, Polubotok died in the Peter and Paul Fortress. His death deeply moved the Ukrainian people and he started to be glorified as a martyr hero who died for Ukraine. Peter I died one month later.

A short time before another war was to take place Ukraine's right to elect the hetman was restored, but the pressure on Ukraine never stopped.

In 1755, direct trade between the Hetman State and Western Europe, countries in the Black Sea area and Zaporizhia was banned. The Russian government

Acting Hetman Pavlo Polubotok

supported foreign merchants, especially Muscovites, in Ukraine in every way.

In 1764, Catherine II forced Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky to renounce his office and abolished the hetmanship, even though 110 years earlier Ukraine entered into a union with Muscovy on the condition of strict preservation of all the rights of Ukraine and the Cossack Host. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, the Russian and Zaporozhian armies together fought against the Ottoman Empire. The Cossack fleet played the main role in naval warfare. Zaporozhian Kish Otaman Petro Kalnyshevsky (1690-1803) and Cossack officers received awards from the empress. Russian nobles considered it an honor to enlist in Zaporozhian units — Grigory Potemkin joined the Kushchiv kurin, Mikhail Kutuzov the Irkliiv kurin etc.

Nevertheless, as the Russian troops were on their way back from the Russo-Turkish War, they encircled the Zaporozhian Sich and palanka centers (fortified settlements) in 1775. The Russians had a total of over 100,000 men. The majority of the Zaporozhian Cossacks spoke in favor of putting up resistance to the enemy and it was only the strong urging of the kish otaman that dissuaded them from this idea.

All of the buildings in the Sich, a total of more than 500, were destroyed. Ammunition, insignia, flags, the archive and treasury were removed from the Sich's depositories.

Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky, portrait by Jean Louis Tocque

Kalnyshevsky was imprisoned on the Solovets Islands, where he was kept in a cold pit so small that he was unable to stand up straight. He spent 26 years in prison, reaching the age of 113. Constant darkness and cold blinded him and rotted his clothes.

In her manifesto, Catherine II accused the Zaporozhian Cossacks of "violent rule", meaning freedom, and that serfs from across Russia fled to the Sich. These slaves believed that "violent rule" was precisely where they were born.

Last Council at the Sich, painting by Viktor Kovalov, 19th century

The Haidamakas

Haidamakas was the name for Ukrainian insurgents in the 18th century. The word comes from the Turkish "daredevil, troublemaker". In 1734-1735 and 1750, Russia helped Poland suppress the uprisings of the Ukrainian haidamakas. The biggest haidamaka rebellion — Koliivshchyna — broke out in February 1768. Prior to this event, units of the Polish nobles (the so-called "Confederates") began to persecute civilian Ukrainians and ruining Orthodox churches instead of fighting for the freedom of Poland. In the spring of 1768, the Zaporozhian Cossack Maksym Zalizniak gathered a detachment of insurgents in Kholodnyi Yar near Chyhyryn (in Cherkasy Oblast). The nobles sent against them a Cossack regiment led by the Uman Captain Ivan Honta. However, instead of fighting his compatriots, Honta himself joined the attack on Uman. The liberation of Uman by the haidamakas was marked by the destruction of a bigger part of its Polish and Jewish population. The main reason for attacks on the Jews was that Polish landlords often leased their estates with Ukrainian peasants and even Orthodox churches to rich Jews, which led to exactions and humiliation and triggered interethnic conflicts.

Ivan Honta, painting, 18th century

Right-Bank Ukraine was freed from the Polish nobles, who fled to Poland, and the Polish troops remained only in Bila Tserkva.

A council of the insurgents elected Zalizniak "Hetman and Prince of Smila" and Honta "Colonel and Prince of Uman". This was essentially a step toward the restoration of the Hetman State in Right-Bank Ukraine.

However, Russia decided to crack down on the rebellion. The tsar was afraid of the restoration of the Ukrainian hetmanship in any form. In July 1768, Russian troops treacherously captured the leaders of the insurgents during negotiations. The Russians attacked sleeping insurgents in their camp, capturing nearly 900 men whom they handed over to Poland. The Poles punished the insurgents in an extremely cruel manner. The executioner first cut out stripes from Honta's skin and then cut off his extremities. Before the execution, a Polish guard asked Honta for his belt, which Honta promised to give him. When the Pole asked him to make good on his promise, Honta said that it would be a belt made from his skin. The Russians were no less cruel as they branded insurgents with hot iron, cut out their noses and exiled those from Left-Bank Ukraine to Siberia.

Maksym Zalizniak, portrait, 18th century

The Introduction of Serfdom

In 1783, peasants in Left-Bank and Sloboda Ukraine were turned into serfs, i.e. completely deprived of the right to leave their landlord. However, the most horrible thing was that a landlord could freely sell his serfs, exchange them for any property and separate spouses and parents and children. This was essentially the kind of slavery that had existed in Muscovy for a long time but was unheard of in Ukraine. It should be noted that the khan abolished slavery in the Crimea in 1771, and the Austrian Empire outlawed corvee in 1780.

Serfdom obliterated the social achievements of Khmelnytsky's Liberation War, which Ukrainian society had enjoyed for 135 years. Until 1783, serfdom law in Ukrainian lands was limited to the payment of quitrent or corvee. Even under Polish rule, entire estates changed hands without affecting peasants and their feudal service.

In 1783, the regiment system was scrapped in Left-Bank Ukraine and the Cossacks were transferred to hussar regiments without any liberties or self-government.

At the same time, Russia totally destroyed Ukrainian schools and education. According to the 1740-1748 census, seven regiments in the Hetman State (now three

Haidamakas listening to a kobzar before a campaign, illumination, 19th century

oblasts in Left-Bank Ukraine) had 866 schools, almost one per each town or village of any significance. None of these schools survived until 1800.

Nearly the entire Ukrainian population was literate in the Hetman State in the 17th and 18th centuries, while the 1897 census in the Russian Empire revealed that a mere 15% of Ukrainians were literate. There are not many examples of such a steep decline as the one that followed Muscovy's takeover of Ukraine.

The Danubian Sich

After the destruction of the Sich, the majority of the Cossacks secretly gathered and sailed in boats to lands under Turkish rule. The Zaporozhian Cossacks first settled near Hadzhybei (now Odesa) and then moved to the Danube, founding the Danubian Sich (1776-1828). It continued the military traditions of the Zaporozhian Sich for another half a century and let tens of thousands of escapees from Ukraine find a life without serfdom.

The Danubian Cossacks kept the customs and system of the Zaporozhian Sich, particularly the same kurins as in Zaporizhia. Every kurin bore the name of the locality from which its Cossacks came — Poltava, Uman, Kaniv, Korsun, Baturyn etc.

The older Cossacks did not want to return under Russian rule at any cost, but more recent arrivals wanted back home. Winning over the Danubian Cossacks to its side during the Russo-Turkish war, the tsarist government had them settled on the coast of the Sea of Azov as the self-governed Azov Cossack Host.

Initially recruited from the former Zaporozhian Cossacks, the Azov Host and the Boh Cossack Host preserved, albeit in a limited fashion, the traditions

Black Sea Freebooters, painting by Ilya Repin, early 20th century

of Cossack self-government in the ancient lands of the Zaporozhian Sich (until 1864 and 1817, respectively), strengthening Cossack presence in these ethnic Ukrainian lands. The Russian tsar never dared introduce serfdom in the former lands of the Zaporozhian Sich, unlike the rest of Ukraine's territory. Fearing rebellions, the government divided peasants into landlords' peasants and state peasants. The latter were largely descendants of the militant Cossacks and they could not be sold, while the former suffered from cruel treatment.

The Karmaliuk Rebellion

Ukrainian peasants resisted serfdom and joined rebel groups. One of the leaders was Ustym Karmaliuk (1787-1835). His rebel group operated across Podillia, where it looted landlords' estates and government institutions. Thousands of insurgents were in his groups at different points in time. Karmaliuk escaped from prison multiple times by breaking through the bars, using a hanging bridge woven from the shirts of his cellmates and taking apart brickwork in his cell's ceiling. After each successful escape, he made an incredibly complicated journey to his motherland from far-away Siberia which few exiles were able to leave until the end of their lives. Documents and legends contain stories about Karmaliuk willing to give the shirt off his back to ordinary people.

Ukrainian, painting by Vasilii Tropinin. According to one version, the painting depicts the peasant rebel leader Ustym Karmaliuk whom Tropinin saw in Podilia

The Opryshoks and Oleksa Dovbush

Despite all efforts and military expeditions to the West, the Cossack state did not succeed in establishing control over Western Ukraine. Weakened by wars, Poland did not put as much pressure on Western Ukrainians. However, Polish magnates owned the majority of the lands in the region. Their exploitative practices in Galicia caused multiple rebellions of the opryshoks (separate, independent people).

The opryshoks were active in haidamaka groups in Right-Bank Ukraine. The most legendary was the movement led by Oleksa Dovbush (1700-1745). He gathered a large group of the opryshoks and started attacking landlords and tenants in the Kolomyia region and later in Bukovyna and Transcarpathia. Dovbush's brother and another opryshok group were active in the Boiko region. Folk stories depict Dovbush as the Ukrainian Robin Hood — he took money and property from the rich and gave them to the poor.

Oleksa Dovbush, painting, 18th century

The National Revival in Galicia

As a result of the first partition of Poland in 1772, Galicia was attached to the lands of the Habsburg rulers under the name the "Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria". In 1775, the Habsburgs took control over Bukovyna and before that, in 1690, over all of Transcarpathia, part of which previously belonged to Transylvania. In this way, Western Ukrainian lands, which had been scattered among different states, began to be gradually united. The Austrian government did not consider Ukrainians its enemies, in stark contrast to the situation in former Poland and Eastern Ukraine.

After Habsburg rule was established in Galicia, the Austrian government abolished serfdom in the late 18th century, reduced corvee, introduced new court procedures and set up a number of educational institutions for the Ukrainian population. The remains of feudalism in the countryside in Western Ukraine were eliminated with the abolition of corvee in 1848.

After the second partition of Poland in 1793, Volhynia and Right-Bank Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire. Hostilities with Ukraine, provoked by the private interests of greedy magnates and religious fundamentalists, undermined Poland's

strength, and it disappeared as a state for over a century. The next generation of Polish fighters for independence learned a lesson from history.

After the fall of the Cossack State in Left-Bank and Right-Bank Ukraine in the early 18th century, a massive conversion of the Ukrainian population to the Greek Catholic Church began in Galicia. This church preserved Ukrainian Orthodox rites and quickly became the national church for the Ukrainian population of Galicia.

A stratum of the cultural elite emerged in Galicia and the Ukrainian national revival began. Members of the Ruthenian Triad, a literary group that functioned in 1834-43, recorded and published folk songs, popularized culture and history and asserted the unity of Galicia and Greater Ukraine. The literary collections Vinok rusynam na obzhynky (A Wreath to the Ruthenians for a Harvest Feast, 1846-1847) became popular among the elite and the common people.

The leaders of the Ukrainian community in Lviv formed the Supreme Ruthenian Council in 1848. It aspired to represent the interests of all Western Ukrainians, which meant the restoration of Ukrainian political aspirations. The Council proclaimed the idea of the unity of Ukrainian lands and proposed forming a separate province in the Austrian Empire composed of Ukrainian lands in Eastern Galicia, Bukovyna and Transcarpathia.

Markiian Shashkevych (1811-1843), a leader of the national revival of Galicia Ukrainians

Austria made the southeastern lands of Poland (from 1846, also Cracow) part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria so as to keep Poles and Ukrainians in constant conflict. Power in Galicia was largely concentrated in the hands of large Polish landowners, who were hostile to Ukrainians. Social liberation and the absence of brutal ethnic repressions led to the growth of national consciousness among the Ukrainian population of Galicia. While Polish landlords ruled over the province, the leading role in reviving the Ukrainian idea was played by the intelligentsia — priests, teachers, doctors, lawyers etc. Their activities made the desire for national self-determination almost universal among the Ukrainian population of Galicia. Ukrainian national cultural institutions, such as the Prosvita society (1868), the Taras Shevchenko Literary Society (1873), the Sich and Sokil military and sports associations, evolved in Galicia. Ukrainian culture and public life saw the emergence of such prominent figures as the poet Ivan Franko, poet and translator Mykhailo Pavlyk, composer and teacher Anatol Vakhnianyn and others. Outstanding figures from Greater Ukraine worked in Galicia. For example, the renowned Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky worked in Lviv in 1894 after he had been forced to leave the Dnipro region under pressure from Russian gendarmes.

Galicia was turning into the Ukrainian Piedmont. (Piedmont was a kingdom in northern Italy where

the revival and unification of the country began in the 19th century.)

Western Ukraine had a higher density of the population than in the majority of densely populated European countries. There was a shortage of land and jobs, which caused several hundred thousand migrants to leave Western Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century. Most of them went to the United States, Canada, Argentina and Brazil, where there was a lot of vacant land.

Ukrainian Sich Riflemen celebrate an anniversary of the poet Taras Shevchenko, 1915

Sloboda Ukraine

At the time of the Kyivan state there were several fortresses in Sloboda Ukraine controlled by the principalities of Chernihiv and Novhorod-Siverskyi and inhabited mainly by the descendants of the Siverianians. The territory was also populated by the Alans, Pechenegs and later the Cumans. After the Mongol invasion in the mid-13th century, most of Sloboda Ukraine became the Wild Fields. The massive settlement of these lands by Ukrainians took place in the mid-17th century. At this time, Krasnokutsk was founded by the Korsun Cossacks, Ostrohozk by the Nizhyn and Chernihiv Cossacks, Sumy by the Cossacks from Stavyshche (now in Kyiv Oblast), Balakliia by the Chernihiv Cossacks, Vovchansk and Merefa by the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Settlers from Right-Bank and Left-Bank Ukraine jointly founded the city of Kharkiv (1654), Izium, Zmiiv and Okhtyrka.

Ukrainian Cossack regiments (Kharkiv, Sumy, Izium, Okhtyrka and Ostrohozk) were formed in Sloboda Ukraine. Of these, the Zmiiv and Balakliia regiments were short-lived. The colonel wielded all the power within the confines of a regiment.

Ukrainians on a map by Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan, mid-17th century

The Muscovite government hoped to use Ukrainians to protect itself against the Crimean Tatars. In the late 16th century, the Crimean Tatars stormed Moscow and Muscovy's defense line against the Tatars was less than 200 km from Moscow (near Tula). However, after Ukrainian regiments were formed in Sloboda Ukraine, the number of Tatar incursions into Muscovy sharply declined.

For a long time, Moscow did not impose taxes on the Sloboda Cossacks and did not prevent them from taking vacant land into possession. They had the right

to freely distill and sell vodka, whereas it was a monopoly in Muscovy. The Muscovite government tried to move its own military settlers to Sloboda Ukraine, but the Muscovite streltsy (guardsmen) often fled and participated in riots.

However, as Muscovy grew stronger, it put increasing pressure on Sloboda Ukrainians. In 1732, the Cossack regiments were turned into regular army regiments and a poll tax introduced. The government briefly restored autonomy to the Sloboda regiments in 1743, in the anticipation of another war, but shortly thereafter, in 1749, the Cossacks were forbidden from leaving the territory of their regiment. In 1765, Catherine II issued a decree abolishing Cossack regiments in Sloboda Ukraine and placing Cossacks among uhlans (cavalrymen) and hussars, who had no self-governance and were forced to pay a poll

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tax. Sloboda Ukraine gubernia (later called Kharkiv gubernia) was formed on the territory of the Cossack regiments and directly subordinated to the tsarist government. Those who wanted to remain Cossacks were given the option of moving to the Kuban. When the government tried to give the status of military settlers to peasants and former Cossacks, they started several rebellions in Sloboda Ukraine. The government used troops and artillery to crush them.

The freedom which the Cossacks enjoyed for an extended time led to a cultural explosion in Sloboda Ukraine. This region became the main cultural center for all the Ukrainian lands in the 18th century. Ukraine's first literary journals were published there and outstanding Ukrainian writers, historians and ethnographers worked there. In 1891, Kharkiv and Kyiv students created the Brotherhood of Taras with the goal of achieving an "independent sovereign Ukraine: united and indivisible, from the San to the Kuban, from the Carpathians to the Caucasus."

Mykola Mikhnovsky, the ideologist of the Brotherhood of Taras, died at the hands of the Bolsheviks

The Donbas

Attempts to add the territory of the Donbas to Ukraine began with the campaigns of the great Kyiv princes Sviatopolk II Iziaslavych and Volodymyr Monomakh in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. The process dragged on for half a millennium with long breaks in between. The lands of the Zaporozhian Sich in the 16th and 17th centuries reached the Don River in the east. Hetman Khmelnytsky asserted this in his Universal of 15 January 1656 where the Zaporozhian lands were described as extending from "the Samara lands through the steppe and all the way to the Don River, where the Zaporozhian Cossacks had their winter settlements even before Hetman Przedaw Lanckoronski". The Universal also declared: "All of that should forever be the inviolable property of the Zaporozhian Cossacks". A Zaporozhian winter settlement which arose around 1500 near the mouth of the Kalmius River, north of the Sea of Azov, later became the city of Mariupol. In addition to what is now Donetsk Oblast, the Kalmius palanka included parts of Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Luhansk and Rostov oblasts and had over 300 Cossack permanent settlements and several fortresses. It was the biggest administrative territorial

unit in Zaporizhia. In the 17th century, the Cossack winter settlements and hamlets in Oleksander gave rise to a Cossack sloboda (self-governing settlement) where the city of Donetsk is now located.

In the 1770s, Russia moved the Crimean Greeks to the Donbas in order to undermine the economy of the Crimean Khanate. The resettlement to the new, colder locations was forced and many Greeks died.

In the early 19th century, industrial coal mining was launched in the Donbas. Its economy was geared toward mining. In 1869, the British industrialist John Hughes founded iron works near the village of Oleksandrivka. A city named Yuzivka (now Donetsk) later developed at the site and its iron works became one of Ukraine's biggest industrial centers. Due to the industrial revolution, the ancient Ukrainian Cossack population of the Donbas saw the massive arrival of people from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus etc. in the 19th and 20th centuries. As a result of these migrations, Ukrainians made up a mere 67% of the population in the Donbas in 1897.

South

Part of southern Ukraine belonged to the Zaporozhian lands and the rest to the Crimean Khanate (several fortresses belonging to Turkey) before 1775. Hordes of Nogai Tatars began to move here from the Volga region and the Caspian steppes in the late 16th century. The Yedisan (Ochakiv) Horde and the Budzhak (Bilhorod) Horde were the most powerful ones, while the Yedychkul and Dzhambuiluk (Perekop) Hordes were smaller.

After the Crimean Khanate was abolished and its lands joined to the Russian Empire, the majority of the Nogai Tatars were moved to the Northern Caucasus and Turkey.

Odesa (named Khadzhybei in 1415-1795) became Ukraine's main port and its biggest city in the mid-19th century, outstripping both Lviv and Kyiv. (Prior to that, Lviv was the most populous city in Ukraine since the time of the Mongol invasion. Kyiv took the lead over Odesa in the early 20th century.)

Odesa was declared a free port, which had the right of import and export free-of-charge. The economy needed ports for exporting crops. Sea trade spurred the growth of other port cities — Kherson and Mykolaiv — which also became important shipbuilding centers.

Odesa, photo, late 19th century

The Awakening of Greater Ukraine

Over the three centuries that the Cossack State existed Ukrainian culture made a significant contribution to the Slavic and European cultural traditions. Ukrainian was first recorded in print in 1490, soon after book printing was invented.

In the first half of the 17th century, hundreds of books were printed in Ukraine, while Muscovy had just a handful. Back in the 16th century, militant ignoramuses forced Ivan Fedorov, a book printer from Moscow, to flee from Muscovy to Ukraine where he founded two printing houses.

Lexicon compiled by Pamvo Berynda (died 1632) was considered an exemplary textbook for teaching Church Slavonic in schools for several centuries. A grammar by Meletii Smotrytsky (1577-1633) was described as "a gate to scholarship" by first Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov.

The world's first entire Bible in Church Slavonic, the so-called Ostrih Bible, was published in Ukraine in 1581 in the printing house of Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky. The first Ukrainian-language Gospel — the Peresopnytsia Gospel — was published in Volhynia in 1561. Other Orthodox peoples received translations

Burial of a Kish Otaman, painting by Oleksander Murashko, 1900. Murashko died at the hands of the Bolsheviks

of the Gospel in their languages later: Bulgarians in 1820, Serbs in 1847 and Russians in 1876.

The most remarkable Ukrainian chronicle was Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People, 18th century). The author concealed his name and the book was never published in his lifetime due to censorship, but it  circulated in numerous handwritten copies and became a general Ukrainian view on history. Written in a lively and gifted manner, History opposed imperial concepts, emphasizing the Ukrainian character of the Kyivan Rus' and the originality of the Ukrainian people. The first East Slavic higher education institutions were founded in Ukraine — the Ostrih Academy in 1576 and the Kyiv Brotherhood School (later Kyiv Mohyla Academy) in 1615. The latter had some 2,000 students at its peak, providing a constant supply of educated individuals for cultural and ecclesiastic pursuits and for military and state administration.

After the Pereiaslav Treaty the Muscovite government began to bring numerous Ukrainian religious and cultural figures to Muscovy to introduce education there.

A native of the Kyiv region, the writer Yepifanii Slavynetsky (died 1675) founded Muscovy's first Greek and Latin school and was its first rector. The Monk Danylo Tuptalo (1651-1709), the son of a Cossack captain from the Kyiv region, was appointed metropolitan in Rostov, where he engaged in religious

Hryhorii Skovoroda, portrait 19th century

and educational activities for which he was canonized as Dimitrii Rostovskiy after his death.

The philosopher Teofan Prokopovych (1681-1736), who was a student, professor and rector of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, developed the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The best-known painters in the 18th-century Russian Empire were Ukrainian — Dmytro Levytsky, Volodymyr Borovykovsky and Anton Losenko. The same goes for composers, for example, Dmytro Bortniansky, Maksym Berezovsky and Artem Vedel. Their masterpieces of sacred music became classic. The tsarist authorities banned the works of Berezovsky and destroyed many of his manuscripts. Vedel was imprisoned based on a spy's denunciation for a caricature of the tsar's family.

Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-1794) proved with his own life his humanistic philosophy. His works were never published in his lifetime due to censorship.

All of these successes were made possible by mass education and the Cossacks' spirit of freedom. In the mid-17th century, foreign travelers who came to Ukraine noted that the majority of Ukrainian men and some women were literate.

Composer Dmytro Bortniansky (1751-1825), portrait by Mikhail Belsky, 1788

The Destruction of Ukrainian Identity

Repressions against Ukrainian culture began before the annexation of Ukraine by Muscovy. Moscow viewed Orthodox Kyiv as its ideological rival. Ukrainian books were repeatedly burned on the orders of tsars and Moscow patriarchs. After the abolition of the Hetman state, the Zaporozhian Sich and the Cossack regiments, almost no large churches were built in Ukraine and nearly all Ukrainian schools were closed. The Russian government ordered to have Ukrainian primers removed from schools in 1758 and banned the construction of churches in the Cossack baroque style and the baptism of children using Ukrainian names in the 19th century.

The Kyiv Mohyla Academy was closed in 1817, while new universities opened even in ordinary cities in Europe.

In 1863, the Internal Affairs Minister of the Russian Empire Petr Valuev issued the Valuev Circular banning the publication of textbooks, literature and religious books in Ukraine. In 1876, the Russian emperor issued the Ems Ukase which prohibited the importation of any Ukrainian-language books and brochures from abroad, the staging of plays, the printing of lyrics and the performance of Ukrainian-language musical works

A history of Ukraine. A short course

and public recitals in Ukrainian. Ukrainian historical classics could only be published   following the rules of Russian orthography.

In the early 1900s, censors were given orders to expunge from all works such words as Cossack, Ukraine, Ukrainian, Sich, Zaporizhia and other words with Ukrainian national and symbolic meaning. When an archeological congress was held in Kyiv in 1889, all languages were allowed for presentations except Ukrainian. The Senate declared Ukrainian-language culture and educational activities harmful to the empire in 1908. In 1910, all Ukrainian cultural societies and publishing houses were closed down; lecturing in Ukrainian and forming any non-Russian clubs was prohibited. The tsarist government forbade festivities to mark Taras Shevchenko's centennial birth anniversary and banned all Ukrainian periodicals which appeared after the 1905 revolution.

One scholar was fired for translating just one sentence from the Gospel into Ukrainian.

The goal of the authorities was to drain Ukrainian culture dry, destroy it as the foundation of Ukrainian identity and to channel the efforts of Ukrainians into building the Russian empire.

Russian gendarmes by the grave of Taras Shevchenko, 1914

Taras Shevchenko

The activities of Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) are of unique significance for Ukraine. Of the 47 years of his life, he was a serf for 24 years, spent 10 years in exile and the rest under gendarme surveillance. Shevchenko was an active member of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, a secret political organization founded in early 1846. Its main ideas are formulated in the Knyha bytiia ukrainskoho narodu (Book of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People) which stated that despots, landlords and serfs were unnatural for freedom-loving Ukrainians and were imposed by foreign invaders. The goals of the society included the national and social liberation of Ukraine; the abolition of Russian tsarism, serfdom and class privileges; the declaration of the freedom of conscience and a union of Slavic peoples with Ukraine as its moral leader.

In March 1847, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood was uncovered. By personal order of the tsar Shevchenko was sent as a private to the Orenburg Special Corps "under strictest supervision with a prohibition to write, draw and paint". After returning from his military exile, Shevchenko paid out of his own pocket for the publication of his Bukvar (Primer) for

Cossack Mamai, Ukrainian folk painting, 18th century

teaching literacy to adults in Ukrainian. The majority of Ukrainians consider Shevchenko Ukraine's greatest poet. Shevchenko considered himself a kobzar (kobza player or minstrel) and used this designation as the title of his main collection of poetry Kobzar. In medieval times, a kobzar in Ukraine would call his people to battle. Shevchenko's works are extremely rebellious and anti-authoritarian. Russian tsars, before whom the entire empire groveled, were merely "bears" and "well-fed boars" to Shevchenko. The roar of cannons and the Cossacks who knew how to rule were his favorite topics. The poet also directed his anger against his fellow Ukrainians who were traitors: "slaves with a cockade on their foreheads", "lackeys in golden adornments", "swineherds", "Pharisees" and "nurses of an alien motherland".

Having a connection to Shevchenko could spell major trouble for a person, as was the case with Mykola Myklukha, the director of the Moscow Train Station in Petersburg. He was a descendant of a Zaporozhian Cossack who was the first to climb the walls of the Turkish Ochakiv fortress during the 1788 storm for which exploit he was awarded a noble title. Myklukha sent 150 rubles to Shevchenko, who was in exile at the time, and got himself fired and nearly arrested. He soon died and his son, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, was expelled from university for his father's patriotism and connections with Shevchenko. At the age of 18, he left the Russian Empire forever and became a world-renowned explorer.

Taras Shevchenko, photo, 1859

Taras Shevchenko claimed that Ukrainian songs were "without gold, without stones, without intricate language but loud and truthful as the Lord's word". Following the poet Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769-1838), Shevchenko forged the Ukrainian literary language out of the vernacular. Until then, literary Ukrainian had an excessive number of Church Slavonic words. In 1794-1798, Kotliarevsky wrote Eneida (Aeneid) in the Ukrainian vernacular, mixing ancient Roman motifs with stories about the Zaporozhian Cossacks who founded a new Sich beyond the Danube after the Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed.

The vernacular established itself in Ukrainian literature several decades earlier than the same happened in Russian literature, which also had an excess of Church Slavonic vocabulary.

A serf, i.e. a slave, could rise as high as to be a "puppet" in a landlord's or court's theater in Russia. Meanwhile, the words of Shevchenko, an autodidact and second-generation serf, became much more powerful than the words of the empire's tsars.

In the 19th century, great literature was created in Ukraine amid the persecutions of all things Ukrainian.

Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian folk dress with friends, photo, 1859

The Abolition of Serfdom

The events of the 19th century showed that Russia had failed to bridge the gap with leading European countries. It was only due to its remoteness and invulnerable rears in the east and north that Russia was able to play a noticeable role in Europe.

In the Crimean War of 1853-1855, the large but backward Russian army was crushed by Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey. A truce was signed under which Russia lost the right to have a navy in the Black Sea and to build fortresses and naval bases and returned Southern Bessarabia and the Kars fortress in the Caucasus to Turkey.

At least one half of the "popular" heroes of Sevastopol's defense hailed from Ukraine, including Petro Kishka. He made a name for himself after he ventured out all alone almost every night and took enemy soldiers and officers captive. Admiral Pavel Nakhimov, the commander of Sevastopol's defense, was from a Ukrainian Cossack family.

The defeat forced the tsar to abolish serfdom and introduce reforms. In 1861, peasants finally obtained personal freedom and farmsteads but arable land was to become available to them only 20 years later, after they bought it out from their landlords.

An announcement in a Moscow newspaper about the sale of serfs, 1800

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In Ukraine, the Russian Empire decided to strip peasants of their land and to divide up expensive Ukrainian lands under the guise of peasant emancipation. The plots of land for peasants were sharply reduced in size in all gubernias in Ukraine after the reform. For example, peasants lost 40% of the land they previously had in Poltava and Katerynoslav gubernias and 31% in Kharkiv gubernia. Nevertheless, the abolition of serfdom freed millions of Ukrainians from the barbaric dependence on landlords which the Russian Empire had introduced back in 1783.

Seaman Petro Kishka

The First World War

The First World War broke out in 1914. The Russian Empire fought Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Russia's allies were Britain and France. Russia wanted to conquer Galicia to stop the Ukrainian movement there. Moreover, following its ideology of the "Third Rome", Russia sought to capture Istanbul, the former capital of the Byzantine Empire. During the war Russia was able to seize Galicia for a brief period at the price of great losses. The arrival of Russians was accompanied by looting, anti-Ukrainian repressions, imprisonment, executions and deportations of the Greek Catholic clergy and intellectuals. The Russian conservator Pavel Milyukov called Russia's actions in Western Ukraine "a European scandal". While Russophile sentiments were popular in Galicia before the war, they completely disappeared after Russia's invasion.

For the purposes of the war against Russia, Austria- Hungary allowed Ukrainians to create "Sich Riflemen" units but registered a mere tenth of those who volunteered. The Sich Riflemen fought on the front, hoping that their struggle would lead to the restoration of the Ukrainian state.

Russia's defeats on the front, famine and soaring prices caused numerous soldier and worker revolts. In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The Provisional Government assumed state powers until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

The Ukrainian Central Rada was founded in Kyiv on 17 March 1917. It was composed of representatives of all the Ukrainian political parties, the military, workers, clergy, students and civic and cultural organizations. The prominent historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky was elected Chairman of the Central Rada. On 23 June 1917, the Central Rada issued its first Universal proclaiming Ukraine's autonomy and elected the General Secretariat, which was the government of Ukraine.

Participants of the Ukrainian Military Congress in Kyiv, 1917. Symon Petliura and Mykhailo Hrushevsky are in the center

The War with Bolshevik Russia

After the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow and Petrograd as a result of a coup in 1917, the Central Rada issued its Third Universal on 20 November 1917 proclaiming the Ukrainian National Republic. Ukrainian parties received 75% of votes and the Bolsheviks 10% in the general election on 25 November 1917.

Russia could not accept the loss of Ukraine's resources. In December 1917, the Bolshevik government issued an ultimatum to Ukraine and started a war.

On 4-6 December 1917, the First Congress of Councils of Peasants', Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies voiced its support for the Central Rada and rejected the Bolshevik ultimatum. The Bolshevik minority of the Congress moved to Kharkiv where these deputies declared the establishment of the "UNR People's Secretariat" and "extended" the decrees of the Soviet Bolshevik government to Ukraine on 11-12 December 1917. This was, in fact, a cover for Russia's invasion.

On 22 January 1918, the Central Rada issued the Fourth Universal which proclaimed: "From now on, the Ukrainian National Republic shall be an independent, subject to no one, free, sovereign state of the Ukrainian people".

Participants of a congress of Free Cossacks in Chyhyryn, 19 October 1917

As the Bolsheviks were advancing toward Kyiv, a contingent was sent to stop them. It included a volunteer Student Kurin composed of students from St. Volodymyr's University (now Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University), the Ukrainian People's University and students from Kyiv gymnasiums. The Battle of Kruty took place near a railroad station on 29 January 1918. Nearly 300 Ukrainians and several thousand Bolsheviks were killed in the battle.

The students stood their ground while they still had ammunition; 35 of them were captured and executed.

Eyewitnesses reported that they sang the anthem "Ukraine Is Still Alive" as they were executed by the Bolsheviks. The Battle of Kruty enabled the Ukrainian troops to suppress the January Uprising in Kyiv started by Bolshevik agents at the height of the attack on the Ukrainian capital.

From the left bank of the Dnipro the Bolsheviks subjected Kyiv to massive shelling, targeting, among other things, a number of churches and cultural monuments. The Ukrainian elite was decimated by the terror of the Russian Empire and lulled by leftist ideas. The Chairman of the Central Rada Hrushevsky admitted that he began to understand the meaning of Russian policy on Ukraine only when his own house was destroyed.

When Bolshevik troops entered Kyiv the Red Terror began. They shot Kyivans for their neat appearance, for

a side glance and for any Ukrainian word they uttered. According to various estimates, the Bolsheviks killed a total of 10,000 to 30,000 Kyivans in less than a month of occupation. (Kyiv had a population of no more than 300,000 at the time). The Bolsheviks committed mass murders of residents in other cities and villages, including Odesa. However, during their military expedition to Odesa, a Bolshevik detachment of several thousand men was defeated at the Bobrynska railroad station (now the Taras Shevchenko station in Cherkasy Oblast) by Ukrainian Free Cossacks who supported Ukraine's independence.

Ukraine's independence was acknowledged by Germany, which wanted Russia to withdraw from the First World War. On 23 February 1918, the Bolsheviks agreed to accept the German ultimatum. Later, to conceal

the shame of surrender, the Bolsheviks called this day "Soviet Army Day". With the support of the German army the Ukrainian troops cleared the entire territory of Ukraine from the Bolsheviks in a month and a half.

Shortly after the Bolsheviks retreated, General Pavlo Skoropadsky was elected Hetman of the Ukrainian State. Hetman Skoropadsky declared Crimea part of the Ukrainian state, established the Ukrainian fleet in the Black Sea and founded the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. But he did not support Ukrainian military self-organization (Free Cossacks) and appointed monarchist officers to various positions.

Ukrainian troops entering Bakhmut in the Donbas, April 1918

In November 1918, revolutions took place in Germany and Austria, leading to their capitulation to France, Britain and the U.S. Skoropadsky began to hint at a possible rapprochement with the "white", non-Bolshevik, Russia. In response, Ukrainians staged an armed uprising. Near the railroad stations of Motovylivka and Vasylkiv the rebels defeated Skoropadsky's troops and soon established the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic. It was a government formed by Ukrainian independentist political parties and organizations led by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura.

Captain Ivan Kompaniiets of a haidamaka regiment in Kholodnyi Yar

The Western Ukrainian National Republic

After suffering a defeat in the war Austria-Hungary disintegrated into several independent states. The main rivals of Ukrainians in Galicia were Polish chauvinist organizations which hoped to join Galicia to Poland. They recalled former Polish rule over Galicia, even though Ukrainian princes much earlier founded not only Lviv but also Chelm, Jaroslaw and Przemysl, now located in Poland. On 19 October 1918, the Ukrainian National Rada decided to proclaim a Ukrainian state in the entire ethnic Ukrainian territory of Galicia, Bukovyna and Transcarpathia, draft a democratic constitution and elect a president. Yevhen Petrushevych was won the election.

On 31 October 1918, Lviv became aware of the arrival of the Polish "liquidation commission" which was supposed to take control over Galicia from its Austrian governor and join Galicia to Poland. On the night of 1 November 1918, infantry units led by Captain Dmytro Vitovsky occupied all the major government agencies and key bridgeheads in Lviv. The Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) emerged on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Western Ukrainians remembered that ZUNR was part of a large Ukrainian state and the concept of "United Ukraine" emerged in Galicia.

Hryts Kossak, commander of a regiment of the Sich Riflemen

As Western Ukrainians fought the Poles, Romania seized the territory of Northern Bukovyna. This area belonged to the princely Kyivan state and the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia even before the Wallachian and Moldovan principalities were formed. Even earlier, these lands belonged to the ancestors of Ukrainians — the Slavic tribes of Tivertsians and White Croatians. Polish troops seized Lviv after bloody street fighting in late November 1918. However, much of the country continued to be controlled by the Ukrainian government. The area of the ZUNR was more than 70,000 square kilometers with a population of six million people.

Western Ukrainians were able to organize a regular army, although military service was strictly voluntary. On 22 January 1919, the Act of Unity between the ZUNR and the UNR was solemnly proclaimed in Kyiv. The two entities were united into the Ukrainian National Republic. The ZUNR assumed the official name Western Province of the Ukrainian National Republic (WPUNR).

These two parts of the Ukrainian people belonged to a common Ukrainian state nearly seven centuries earlier when Danylo Romanovych's Voivode Dmytro defended Kyiv against Mongols and Tatars in 1240.

Despite a constant shortage of weapons and ammunition the WPUNR's army, which assumed the name the Ukrainian Galician Army, gradually drove out the Polish army from the territory of Galicia in January- May 1919. However, an 80,000-strong Polish army,

formed and armed in France, was sent to the Ukrainian front in Galicia and Volhynia. The Entente demanded that this army be used exclusively to fight the Bolsheviks, but the Polish government reneged on its promises, while the Entente did not particularly press its demand, either.

In early June 1919, Polish troops seized nearly all of Galicia except for the territory between the Dniester and the Lower Zbruch. The WPUNR government placed all of the power in the hands of Petrushevych, who received the title of Dictator of the WPUNR. The Ukrainian Galician Army had 100,000 fighters at the time. On 7-28 June 1919, the WPUNR's army, led by General Oleksandr Hrekov, born in the area along the Dnipro, launched the desperate Chortkiv offensive, liberating a large part of Galicia from the Poles, including the cities of Chortkiv, Ternopil, Buchach etc. However, Ukrainians suffered from a shortage of weapons and ammunition and after a new Polish offensive in July 1919 the entire territory of the WPUNR was occupied by the Polish troops.

The Ukrainian Galician Army crossed the Zbruch River and joined the UNR's army, adding 50,000 men, 603 machine guns and 187 cannons to it.

The WUNR's population and army fought against the prevailing forces of Poland supported by the Entente countries, which won the First World War. The statehood and military experience gained in fighting for the WUNR nurtured subsequent generations that fought for the Ukrainian state.

The Course of War

Numerous Bolshevik armies led by Vladimir Antonov, Joseph Stalin and Volodymyr Zatonsky invaded Ukraine in December 1918 without declaring war. As a result of fighting in December 1918 until January 1919, Bolshevik troops occupied Left-Bank Ukraine and seized Kyiv in February 1919.  In August 1919 the army of the UNR and the Ukrainian Galician Army organized a joint campaign against the Bolsheviks. The united armies with a total of 85,000 soldiers and 15,000 Ukrainian insurgents took control of Right-Bank Ukraine and reached Kyiv.

After defeating the army of Russian General Denikin in October 1919 the Bolsheviks sent their main forces to attack Ukraine. At this time, the Red Army had five million men. In contrast, the UNR's army had some 40,000 men in October 1919 as it fought along the perimeter of its territory, having sustained great losses from an epidemic of typhus. It had, however, the support of tens of thousands of insurgents.

In the First Winter Campaign (6 December 1919 — 6 May 1920), the UNR's army, led by General Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko, went behind enemy lines

Ukrainian servicemen and the British-made Austin armored vehicle seized from the Russian army in 1918

in the Yelysavethrad region. Part of the Ukrainian troops crossed the Dnipro.

The government, led by Symon Petliura, found itself in an impasse and was forced to sign the Treaty of Warsaw and agree to the Polish occupation of the WPUNR. Under the pact, Poland pledged not to conclude international treaties aimed against Ukraine and guarantee the national and cultural rights of the Ukrainian population in Galicia.

The Polish Army, two Ukrainian divisions and the army that returned from the Winter Campaign went on the offensive. On 7 May 1920, the Ukrainian division under the leadership of Marko Bezruchko together with Polish units entered Kyiv. However, the Bolsheviks had large reserves, which enabled them to soon go on the offensive. On 15 August 1920, the Red Army commanded by Semyon Budyonny was defeated only in the suburbs of Warsaw.

Contrary to the Treaty of Warsaw between Poland and Ukraine which prohibited agreements without the consent of the other ally, Poland signed the Peace of Riga with Bolshevik Russia. Poland received Volhynia. Ultimately, the struggle of the Ukrainian troops in 1920 did not lead to victory but allowed the population of Volhynia to avoid the Holodomor (Famine-Genocide) of 1932-1933.

Ukraine was forced to fight on several fronts at the same time, without weapons or ammunition, led

One of the few aircraft of the UNR army

by an elite which was exhausted by the empire, without rear or outside support. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians rose up to fight for an independent Ukraine.

The objective of the Second Winter Campaign in November 1921 was to organize a nationwide uprising. The Volhynian insurgent group captured Korosten and Zhytomyr and reached the Kyiv region. However, surrounded by superior Bolshevik forces, the Volhynian group was defeated in a fierce battle near the village of Mali Mynky. The Bolsheviks captured 359 Ukrainian soldiers and proposed they switch allegiance. After the Ukrainians unanimously refused, the Bolsheviks shot them on 21 November 1921 near the village of Bazar in the Zhytomyr region.

As a result of the defeat of the 1917-1923 liberation movement, the Ukrainian people no longer had their own state which could protect it from destruction by Soviet Russia, which continued the expansionist policy of the Russian Empire by using the same methods of mass terror. Some 1.5 million people died from Bolshevik terror in 1918-1923. Cheka agencies killed hundreds of Ukrainian cultural figures, including Mykola Leontovych, a classic of spiritual music and the composer of the Christmas carol "Shchedryk" (known worldwide as "Carol of the Bells"), and many others.

Kyiv residents welcome the entry of Ukrainian troops, led by Symon Petliura, into Kyiv, May 1920

Ukrainian Insurgents

One or more insurgent units operated in nearly every Ukrainian village in 1918- 1923. The insurgencies had the slogans of national liberation: for a free Ukraine, against foreign rule and against commissars and their terror.

In the summer of 1919, the peasant army of otaman Danylo Zeleny alone exceeded 30,000 men. This army fought against the "white" and the "red" Russians at the same time.

On 15 July 1919, 265 years after the Treaty of Pereiaslav, otaman Zeleny solemnly proclaimed the denunciation of the union with Moscow in Pereiaslav. A number of self-governed insurgent republics emerged in the territory of Ukraine. Peasants formed armed detachments, sometimes numbering several thousand fighters, and kept the Bolsheviks away from their territory. The Republic of Kholodnyi Yar, centered around the Motronynskyi Trinity Monastery near Chyhyryn, was one of the most powerful formations of this kind. The insurgents there were led by the brothers Vasyl, Petro and Oleksa Chuchupaks and other otamans fought against the Bolsheviks after their deaths until 1922. When the Kholodnyi Yar otamans were thrown into a Kyiv prison, they neutralized the guards and captured arms, but died in battle.

Bolsheviks: Red Army Soldiers Taking Bread Away from a Child, painting by Ilya Repin. It was purchased in 2007 by an oligarch who is close to the Russian special services

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The 1919 rebellion led by otaman Matvii Hryhoriev spread to thousands of cities, towns and villages: Katerynoslav, Cherkasy, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Kremenchuk and Odesa were liberated within days.

Even more grandiose was the anarchist insurgent movement led by Nestor Makhno. He had up to 60,000 troops under his command in various periods. Makhno was a very successful commander and won numerous victories over stronger enemies. In desperate raids, he tried to secure peaceful life for his countrymen. Initially, Makhno viewed the "white" Russian generals as his main enemy. He played a decisive role in the defeat of Anton Denikin's and Petr Wrangel's armies. On numerous occasions, he fought against the Russian Bolsheviks, increasingly leaning in favor of an independent Ukraine.

Ukrainian insurgents acted autonomously, without communication or more or less centralized supply, surrounded by the enemy and often fighting while underground. In addition to mass executions and imprisonment, the Bolsheviks carried out mass deportations of "unreliable" population groups that supported the insurgents. In the early 1920s, the USSR had some 700 active concentration camps set up on Vladimir Lenin's personal orders.

The Bolsheviks were preparing for a big war in Europe, so they abandoned prodrazverstka (organized seizure of foodstuffs from peasants) and introduced Ukrainianization. As a result, insurgent activity began

Otaman Zeleny with Ukrainian insurgents, 1919

to decline. These steps were taken in order to disarm the population, detect unreliable individuals, lull Ukrainian society into a sense of security and then resume terror on a larger scale.

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Symon Petliura

Symon Petlura was born in Poltava in a family of small entrepreneurs. He was expelled from the seminary in Poltava for organizing a student meeting with the famous Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko. He later moved to the Kuban where he studied the archives of the Kuban Cossack Host and became a staunch Ukrainian patriot.

His name became a symbol of resistance to Russian rule. On 25 May 1926, the Soviet agent Shalom Schwartzbard treacherously killed Petliura in Paris. Schwartzbard's lawyers argued in court that this was revenge for Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. However, the biggest persecutors of Jews (second only to Denikin's White Guard Army) were the thugs in Kotovskiy's gang to which Schwartzbard belonged.

The humane attitude of the Ukrainian army and Petliura personally to different population groups in Ukraine did not become callous in extremely cruel wartime conditions. Petliura issued numerous appeals demanding to strictly punish pogromists, even execute them by shooting. A country that needed weapons and ammunition spent money on compensations to those who had suffered injustice from gangs. The UNR was

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the only country in the world that had a Ministry for Jewish Affairs.

The Soviet Regime

The war against the Bolsheviks lasted much longer in Ukraine than in most regions of the USSR. The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky remarked that during the 1917-1923 Liberation Struggle Ukrainian insurgents, who were deprived of an elite, organization and communication, faced three times more Bolshevik troops than the Entente. Therefore, after the establishment of Soviet rule the Soviet leadership directed the main blow against Ukrainians. Ukraine was the largest non-Russian part of the Russian Empire and thus posed the biggest threat to it. Ukraine undermined imperial identity. The fact that Kyiv and nearly all major cities in Kyivan Rus' were originally Ukrainian forced the empire to return to its own roots.

The aim of the Bolsheviks was to destroy any opportunities for national self-determination. To this end, the Bolsheviks set out to urgently eliminate the nationally conscious part of the population and undermine the human foundation for restoring national consciousness. Eradicating national identity and the Ukrainian language among tens of millions of Ukrainian peasants was impossible without genocide.

Painting with an image of the Ukrainian emblem, which was forbidden in the USSR, 1920s-1930s

Cities had to become melting pots in which Ukrainian national consciousness was to be gradually destroyed and supplanted first by Soviet and then Russian-Soviet identity.

To be successful or just to survive, Ukrainians had to reject their motherland, culture, native language and history.

The Soviet Union began to fight against Ukrainianization in 1926. Those party and government

officials who had sincerely believed in the slogans of Ukrainianization, the Internationale and the equality of nations were shot or tortured to death.

Terror was increasingly directed against ordinary citizens. In the early 1930s, Soviet punitive agencies resumed the practice of taking people hostage. This practice was used by the Bolsheviks during the prodrazverstka in 1918-1921. In the early 1930s, thousands of village residents, usually children or teenagers, were taken hostage. Their parents and relatives gave their last to bring them back, thus dooming their families to death from starvation. Those hostages who were not bought out by relatives disappeared. They were typically executed.

Troikas were introduced in the USSR to speed up executions. A troika would include the head of a state security directorate, a prosecutor and the first secretary of the Regional Communist Party Committee. It often happened that these troikas

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never saw the accused and sentenced them, already tortured nearly to death, without witnesses or defense. Executions were typically carried out in the yard of any institution of the Cheka/GPU/NKVD. Those who were sentenced to execution were led out of the basement at night, blinded by the headlights of trucks and shot to death. Alternatively, they were tortured and then shot one by one. Russian punitive bodies widely used the method of killing prisoners with exhaust fumes by directing them into a closed cabin in which prisoners were transported. Executions took place even in the middle of cities: car engines were revved up to block out the sound of shots. The wives of those repressed on political charges were also arrested. The quotas for arrests came down from above: Moscow specified exactly how many "counterrevolutionaries" and "nationalists" had to be arrested and convicted under such and such articles.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, founded in 1920, suffered an especially devastating blow. By 1937, repressions had affected all its priests without exception and spread to the parishioners. The UAOC Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky (1864-1937) was tortured to death.

The Bolshevik regime needed an economic basis to prepare for wars for world domination. With the help of Western engineers, the country began the construction of industrial giants and the energy production system.

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Dniprohes, a powerful hydroelectric station, was built in Zaporizhia on the Dnipro River in 1927-1932. General education was introduced in order to train workers for the production of weapons. The emphasis on technical education yielded its result — the Soviet Union had many prominent scientists, including of Ukrainian background.

Despite this, the Soviet population had an extremely low standard of living, except for the party nomenklatura and secret police.

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The Holodomor of 1932-1933

In 1932, the Soviet Union began to organize the Holodomor in Ukraine under the pretext of destroying private farms and forming collective farms. Back in 1921-1922 the Bolsheviks used man-made famine to weaken insurgents in southern Ukraine. The famine covered the entire territory of what was then the Ukrainian SSR without affecting the neighboring regions of Russia and Belarus. Special teams forced their way into households and took away or destroyed all the food. This was done on a special order which targeted only Ukraine and did not extend to other areas of the Soviet Union.

In 1932-1933, entire regions of Ukraine, settlements, Ukraine's border and the mostly Ukrainian-populated Kuban were surrounded by troops that prevented people from leaving these territories, thus dooming them to death from starvation. None of this was observed in other regions of the USSR.

The corpses of people who were starved to death lay in the streets of towns, cities and villages of Ukraine and were picked up and buried by special services on a daily basis. In an effort to save at least children, many peasants took them to cities and just left them in the streets.

"Dekulakization" of a peasant woman — confiscation of her cattle, 1930s

The majority of those who died of starvation were Ukrainians, residents of areas with predominantly Ukrainian population in Ukraine and the Kuban. However, there were some non-Ukrainian victims — unless they worked in government bodies, which were supplied with foodstuffs. The government viewed representatives of other nations who died of starvation as "chips" that could fly when "Ukrainian trees" are hewed. On 17 March 1933, at the peak of the Holodomor, a resolution was adopted which allowed withdrawal from a collective farm only with the permission of the authorities. As a result, people in rural areas died of starvation, unable to escape from the areas where the Holodomor was organized. The Holodomor was carried out in parallel with the mass extermination of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the banning of Ukrainian schools and newspapers in the Kuban.

While famine spread to more areas and millions of people starved to death, the USSR intensively exported grain in large amounts.

The government provided no aid in connection with the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, even though it was much worse than the famine in the Volga region in 1921-1922.

If someone in the USSR uttered the word "famine" with reference to Ukraine and it came to the attention of the authorities, this person would certainly have been thrown into prison, despite the fact that the entire adult

Confiscation of grain from farmers by Soviet punitive agencies, 1930s

population of Ukraine remembered the Holodomor. It should be noted that Ukraine has always produced far more food than it consumed since ancient times.

Soviet society was under the total control of the party. The party knew the details of the private lives of individuals. It would have been impossible for millions in Ukraine to starve to death in the course of nearly two  years without Moscow's approval.

The 1932-1933 Holodomor of the Ukrainian people

was the biggest genocidal action ever committed by the USSR and one of the most massive genocides in the history of humankind.

During the 1932-1933 Holodomor, the USSR could not kill all Ukrainians because Moscow did not have control over a fourth of the Ukrainian population, which resided in Western Ukraine, outside of Soviet borders.

Moreover, the world was heading for a new war in the early 1930s. Ukraine would lose its economic significance if it had no population. Therefore, the Kremlin wanted to "break the back" of Ukraine and turn Ukrainians into "genetic material" that would blindly serve the empire rather than to wipe out the entire Ukrainian people.

According to the 1937 official census in the USSR, the number of Ukrainians was 10,844,000 lower than expected based on the previous census and the average rate of demographic growth across the USSR. Persons responsible for organizing this census were executed.

Bolsheviks driving dekulakized Ukrainian peasants out of the village of Udachne in the Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, early 1930s

The 1939 census data showed that the gap was 8,075,000 people. According to modern research, 2-4 times more people died in an average Ukrainian village in the Holodomor than in the Second World War, which took the lives of some seven million Ukrainians.

The government moved population from other regions of the USSR, primarily from Russia, to settle them in place of the deceased in Ukraine. In 1934 alone, over 240,000 families from Russia and Belarus were moved to Ukrainian villages decimated by the Holodomor.

Red Army soldiers moved into the houses of Kuban Ukrainians in stanitsas (villages) whose population had been deported to Siberia. The new arrivals were supplied with foodstuffs, while the indigenous Ukrainian population was dying of starvation en masse. As a result of the Holodomor, arrests and forced deportations, the number of Ukrainians in the Kuban fell from 61.5% in 1926 to 4%.

In the early 20th century, Ukraine was compared to China in terms of the demographic growth rate. After several holodomors, Ukraine was near the top in terms of its depopulation rate. In Western Ukraine, which was badly hit by wars, deportations and repressions but was spared the Holodomor, the demographic situation is much better than in the rest of Ukraine.

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The Soviet-Nazi Alliance

The USSR and German Nazis, who came to power in Germany in 1933, were interested in a Great War in Europe. Germany wanted to conquer Lebensraum for Germans, whom Hitler considered "a nation of masters". The Soviet leadership believed that the conflict between Germany and Britain and France would enable the USSR to conquer the maximum possible number of countries in Europe, use their resources and move closer to world domination.

On 23 August 1939, the German and Soviet Ministers of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov signed a Nazi-Soviet non- aggression pact and a secret protocol to it, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Germany agreed to the Soviet occupation of Finland and the Baltic States (Latvia and Estonia), Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. The rest of the territories in Eastern Europe were to be controlled by Nazi Germany.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was ratified on 31 August 1939 simultaneously by the Soviet Union and Germany. The Second World War began the next day.

On 17 September, violating the Soviet-Polish non- aggression agreement of 1939, the Soviet army entered

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Poland. A joint parade of Soviet and German troops was held on the same day in Brest-Litovsk (now Brest in Belarus) to commemorate the victory over Poland. In 1939-1940, the Soviet Union, following the agreement made with Hitler, attacked Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Only Finland put up fierce resistance and managed to avoid occupation, but not without losing some of its territory.

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Caricature of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States

The Soviet-German War

The lands divided with Stalin were not enough for Hitler and Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941.

Soviet policies led to the outbreak of the Second World War, but the Soviet leadership failed to protect Ukraine's territory from German occupation. During the war, the brunt of German ground troops was borne by the Soviet Union, while the UK and the USA drew the attention of most of Germany's navy and aviation.

German troops quickly occupied the western part of the Soviet Union — Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, part of Ukraine and Moldavia.

Before retreating from Ukraine, Soviet punitive organs carried out mass executions of prisoners. Ahatanhel Krymsky, an outstanding Ukrainian orientalist who knew 65 languages, was among those victims who were tortured to death.

The defense of large Ukrainian cities (Kyiv, Odesa and Sevastopol) began. The staff of the Southwestern Front, including its commander Colonel General Mykhailo Kyrponos (1892-1941), died in a fierce battle in the Poltava region. The heroic defense of Odesa lasted for 73 days and ended in October 1941 when the troops evacuated to the Crimea. In December 1941, Germany

Soviet soldiers on Khreshchatyk, the main street in Kyiv destroyed by explosions in 1941 and street fighting in 1943

suffered its first major defeat near Moscow. The Red Army launched a counterattack, throwing the German troops 400 kilometers back.

In May 1942, hundreds of thousands of Soviet fighters died or were captured near Kharkiv. The Soviet counterattack in the Crimea failed with great losses. The army was not yet ready for offensive action. In the occupied territories, the Germans preserved collective farms as a convenient means of extracting

grain out of the country. Nearly 2.4 million residents of Ukraine were moved to labor camps in Germany. The Nazi authorities carried out a campaign to totally exterminate the Jewish population according to the Nazi misanthropic racial theory. Jews were driven into ghettos and had to be killed. The biggest executions took place | in Babyn Yar in Kyiv. In 1941-1943, nearly 40,000 Jews and over 60,000 Ukrainians and people of other ethnic backgrounds were killed there. In particular, the Nazis shot about a thousand leading members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, including leaders of the OUN "expeditionary groups", artists, journalists, poets etc.

A pro-Soviet partisan movement was launched in Ukraine in late 1942. The USSR sent professional commandos and arms, helping create partisan units numbering from several hundred to several thousand fighters.

In 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad took place on the Volga River; 100,000 encircled German soldiers surrendered on 2 February 1943.

Battle during the assault crossing of the Dnipro by the Soviet Army, Soviet photo, 1943

The victory near Kursk let the Soviet army approach the Dnipro. The battle over the river lasted from August until December 1943. It ended with a breakthrough of the German defense complex, known as the Eastern Wall, the liberation of Kyiv on 6 November 1943 and the beginning of the liberation of Right-Bank Ukraine. From 24 January until 17 February 1944, the First and Second Ukrainian Fronts carried out the Korsun-Shevchenkivsky offensive in which the two fronts united and then encircled and destroyed a 70,000-strong enemy force. The Crimea was cleared of enemy troops by May 1944.

The USA and Great Britain provided extremely important aid to the USSR. They organized a land lease program to supply weapons and material resources.  The USA provided the USSR with 350,000 trucks, some 20,000 planes, 12,000 tanks, half of all its powder and explosives, 80% of its steel for the production of tanks, nearly 100% of the aluminum for planes and countless other supplies. The American-British troops defeated the German and Italian armies in Northern Africa in 1942 and liberated a bigger part of Italy in 1943-1944. They landed in Normandy, France, in the summer of 1944 and opened the "second front" against Germany.

In October 1944, the territory of Ukraine was completely cleared of German troops. After fierce battles in April-May 1945, Soviet troops seized Berlin. The war was over in Europe.

Ukrainian Ivan Kozhedub, the top scoring fighter pilot of the Allied forces (credited with 64 air victories)

As a result of the war, the majority of Ukrainian ethnic lands were united within the Ukrainian SSR and Ukraine became a UN founding state. However, Soviet totalitarianism, which replaced Nazism, established a bloodthirsty order in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

American trucks bringing aid to the USSR under the land lease program via the Persian corridor, Iran, early 1943

The Ukrainian Contribution to the Victory

Out of the 7 million Ukrainian who fought in the Soviet armed forces, some 3 million were killed and a significant portion became disabled. Meanwhile, victories in the war were sometimes won by a handful of regiments. This suggests that the Soviet victory in the Second World War would have been impossible without Ukrainians.

During the war, 2,072 Ukrainian were awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union. Enterprises that had been evacuated from Ukraine to the east supplied ammunition and military equipment. Ukraine lost 7-8 million people of its population in the war. Ukraine found itself in the center of the war and suffered more damage than Russia, Germany, France, or even Poland.

Despite the Ukrainian contribution to the defeat of Nazism, the Soviet authorities planned to deport all Ukrainians from Ukraine. Itis known that Stalin "probed" the possible reaction of the US to such a deportation. CPSU Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev publicly admitted: "Ukrainians have escaped this fate because there are too many of them and there was no place to which they could be deported. Otherwise, he (Stalin) would have deported them."

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The OUN and UPA

On 30 June 1941, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Banderites), known as OUN(B), proclaimed the Declaration of Ukrainian Independence. The OUN leadership rejected a demand from the German command to repeal it. As a result, 300 OUN leaders were executed or sent to the concentration camps Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. The OUN(B) leader Stepan Bandera was also sent to a camp; his brothers were killed there.

With the outbreak of war OUN expeditionary groups began agitation against both the USSR and Germany. Germans shot a number of OUN leaders, including the Ukrainian poet Olena Teliha, in Kyiv in 1941-1942. The Ukrainian poet and archeologist Oleg Olzhych (Kandyba) was thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and died there.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was officially created on 14 October 1942, and remained the biggest insurgent force in Ukraine throughout the war. The UPA included not only Ukrainians but also people of other ethnic backgrounds who had found themselves in an encirclement at the beginning of the war or had escaped from German captivity.

Female Lviv residents are shocked to see prisoners tortured to death after the German occupation authorities opened up Soviet prisons for identification purposes, 3 July 1941

In late 1943, Roman Shukhevych (nom de guerre Taras Chuprynka, 1907-1950) became the commander of the UPA. The UPA was divided into territorial groups that operated in Volyn and Polisia, Galicia, Transcarpathia, Bukovyna and in the central, southern and eastern regions of Ukraine. A total of 300,000 fighters were in the UPA ranks over the period of its existence and their actions were supported by several hundred thousand underground activists.

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were interested in the mutual weakening of the Ukrainian and Polish peoples and in 1943 they helped trigger Ukrainian-Polish hostilities in Volyn in which the civilian population suffered on both sides. To fight the insurgents, the Soviet authorities burned down forests, sometimes together with surrounding villages, poisoned wells and lakes etc. In 1945, there were 156 fake "UPA groups" in Western Ukraine. Created by the Soviet authorities, they committed crimes to cast a shadow on the UPA and identify UPA supporters.

In 1945, the USSR gave Poland the ethnic Ukrainian lands of the Lemko, Podlachia, Nadsiannia and Chelm regions with a total area of some 20,000 square kilometers. This was done in order to divide the Ukrainian insurgent movement, increase Poland's loyalty to the USSR and engage Poland in a more active fight against the UPA.

In the spring of 1947, a UPA detachment in the Lemko region carried out a guerrilla operation killing Poland's

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Postcard of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army stating that the UPA was fighting against Hitler and Stalin

Deputy Defense Minister Karol Swierczewski. This was used as a pretext by the Polish leadership for the total deportation of Ukrainians in Operation Vistula.

The USSR continued a series of terrorist murders of Ukrainian leaders. Yevhen Konovalets was killed in 1938, Lev Rebet in 1957 and Stepan Bandera in 1959.

By the mid-1950s, the insurgency movement was suppressed as a whole. The striking disparity of forces, the scale of repressions applied by the USSR, the almost complete absence of external support for the insurgents and a lack of weapons and ammunition were contributing factors. Nevertheless, the insurgency movement in western Ukraine in 1942-1956 saved these lands from man-made famines and added to the tradition of armed struggle for Ukraine's statehood.

The Ukrainian people staged armed resistance to one of the most powerful countries in the world for more than a decade. This happened at a time when only part of the Ukrainians fought, while other nations of Europe and the USSR did not dare put up physical resistance to totalitarianism.

NKVD detachment dressed in UPA uniforms in order to identify insurgents and commit crimes, Stanislav Oblast, 1950. A Soviet officer in an NKVD uniform is in the foreground

Post-war USSR

The Soviet Union was the leader of dependent regimes with a claim to world domination. It developed nuclear weapons and had the biggest army in the world at the time. However, the Soviet regime was built on people's dependence and the suppression of initiative and active human features. Society was demoralized by the discrepancy between official propaganda and reality. An especially high proportion of morally degraded people was among its leaders. People in the USSR often renounced their relatives because of fear.

Stalin called Ukraine "a hostile country" in conversations with Soviet leaders. The entire territory of Ukraine, except for its western areas, was swept by a new Holodomor in 1946-1947. The authorities reduced the number of people receiving bread tickets by four million, imposed exorbitant taxes on homestead farms and took foodstuffs out of Ukraine. Starving, people had to eat grass, tree leaves, the meat of dead animals, rodents etc. The 1946-1947 Holodomor killed up to one million people. This was done in order to break people morally. The region that was struck by the man-made famine especially severely was Southern Bessarabia, a region of Odesa Oblast joined to the USSR shortly before.

Ruins of the 11th-century Dormition Cathedral of the Kyivan Cave Monastery blown up by the Soviets, 1941

The government deliberately developed a colonial type of economy in Ukraine. The republic produced primarily raw materials and parts but few finished products.

Ukrainian culture faced increased persecution. Stalin personally threatened the film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko over the script of the film Ukraina v ohni  (Ukraine in Flames) which highlighted Ukrainian patriotic ideas. He was banned for life from his homeland, Ukraine. Before his death, Dovzhenko expressed his wish that his heart be buried in Ukraine. Volodymyr Sosiura was subjected to persecutions for his poem "Liubit Ukrainu" (Love Ukraine). In 1959, he clandestinely wrote the heroic poem "Mazepa" and sent it abroad, asking that it be published after his death.

The post-war country needed specialists, so higher education become common among the population, which had a positive impact on Ukraine's development.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev released a large portion of political prisoners and introduced the development of virgin lands and the restructuring of industry and agriculture management. The welfare of the population significantly rose during his tenure. However, peasants no longer had any desire to work after the Holodomors and destruction inflicted by the regime. Planting corn and wheat in regions not favorable for these crops did not solve the problem of food supply and the USSR began to purchase grain abroad, particularly from the USA. However,

Ukrainian rocket scientist Serhii Korolev. He was in charge of the successful projects to launch the first intercontinental ballistic missile, the first artificial satellite of the Earth and the first human being into space. The NKVD broke his jaws in a torture chamber to force him admit membership in an anti-Soviet organization. He was spared only due to the outbreak of the Second World War

the deficit of basic foodstuffs was liquidated under Khrushchev for the first time since the October coup of 1917. Peasants were released from what was essentially serfdom — previously, they had no right to leave their rural areas without the permission of the authorities. Residential buildings for ordinary people, known as khrushchyovka, began to be constructed on a massive scale, allowing at least some comfort to tens of millions who previously did not have even that.

Although Khrushchev himself was an accomplice to many crimes of Stalinism, he had the courage to proclaim a struggle against Stalin's "personality cult" in his report at the 20th Communist Party Congress in June 1956. Monuments to Stalin were demolished across the country overnight and his body was removed from the mausoleum in Moscow. In particular, Khrushchev admitted that Stalin had been preparing the deportation of all Ukrainians to Siberia, but that this was not feasible due to their large number.

The highest Soviet government bodies adopted decisions to transfer the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. The reason was that the peninsula had to be restored after wartime devastation and the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

The termination of mass arrests triggered a progressive movement of intellectuals called the Sixtiers. In 1963, the police brutally beat to death Ukrainian poet Vasyl Symonenko (1935-1963), one of the most prominent

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev

Sixtiers. Earlier, Symonenko and other human rights activists had discovered the burial sites of people shot by NKVD. Symonenko was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and his works were banned. The regime would occasionally imprison or kill Ukrainian activists, such as the poet and composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk, to instill fear. The rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982) is now called "stagnation". At the time, the USSR fell further behind the West, relying on increased mining for its development.

It was a challenge for ordinary people to buy quality clothing, footwear and food, while party and government leaders received special supplies. Foreign goods purchased by the government abroad with hard currency were in short supply; their quality was far superior to Soviet-made goods, which undermined the prestige of the regime.

In Ukraine, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Petro Shelest (1963-1972) promoted Ukraine's economic interests before those of the central government and supported granting more rights to Ukraine, defended the rights of the Ukrainian language and protected certain Ukrainian culture activists from persecution. For this, he was fired and banned from living in Ukraine. To make a career, a person had to abandon all things Ukrainian. When the delirious Shelest spoke in Ukrainian on his deathbed, his child

Poet, composer and singer Volodymyr Ivasiuk (1949-1979)

said: "Dad is speaking a foreign tongue."

The Soviet leadership moved quickly to make Russian the language of instruction in the education system. A lot of students were subjected to repression for their desire to study or to take exams in their native Ukrainian language. In 1972-1974, a new wave of repression swept across Ukraine and some 2,000 people were arrested on political charges. The main reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was that that it was based on slave-like labor and lacked incentives; the Soviet economy was extremely inefficient.

Vasyl Symonenko (1935-1963), a Ukrainian poet, one of the Sixtiers

The Independence of Ukraine

In 1976, a group of Ukrainian dissidents founded a Ukrainian civic group to promote the implementation of the Helsinki Accords which were aimed at the implementation of formally proclaimed civil rights and the norms of international law. Between 1977-1979, nearly all of the members of the group received prison terms.

The Soviet authorities continued to persecute writers, historians and cultural activists whose works had the marks of Ukrainian patriotism. In 1984-1985, human right activists Yurii Lytvyn, Valerii Marchenko, Vasyl Stus and Oleksa Tykhy were tortured to death in Soviet camps.

In Ukraine, an inferiority complex, as well as ignorance and falsification of Ukraine's history, were cultivated. The ugliest Soviet-made car was called Zaporozhets, even though the Zaporozhian Cossacks have always been paragons of dignity and valor for Ukrainians.

In 1974, the Central Committee of the Communist Party declared a course towards creating a "new historical community, the Soviet people". The authorities officially set out to destroy and dissolve the peoples of the USSR, including the Ukrainian people.

Huge defense spending, the defeat of the USSR in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) and the loss of faith in proclaimed slogans weakened the USSR. The main role in the collapse of the Soviet Union was played by the crisis of the Soviet economy and a shortage of goods. Raised on the ideology of the priority of material values, Soviet society turned out to be very susceptible to "the temptations of capitalism". In addition, three aged leaders of the country died one after another.

In 1985, the younger Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He sought to save the Soviet Union in the face of falling oil prices and the US's superior defense and civilian technologies. He introduced self-government for labor collectives, stopped political repressions, allowed freedom of conscience and speech (so-called glasnost) and launched an anti-alcohol campaign.

On 26 April 1986, an accident happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, releasing a large amount of radioactive substances into the air. The accident was caused by an experiment: the government wanted to know how a nuclear reactor would behave under bombardment and with its capacity falling. People first learned about the disaster from foreign radio stations banned in the USSR. The festive May Day demonstration in Kyiv was held with the participation of school students, although party bosses moved their children out the capital. All of this stoked anti-Soviet sentiment in Ukraine.

Exhumation of bodies of the victims of Soviet repressions during perestroika, western Ukraine, 1989

The Soviet Union was finally destroyed by national liberation movements.

In 1989, a number of patriotic activists and former dissidents founded the People's Movement of Ukraine, a civil and political organization which rallied people united by the idea of Ukraine's independence. Under pressure from the opposition and popular demonstrations, the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty on 16 July 1990. This document proclaimed the independence of Ukraine in all spheres of public life, the supremacy of the Constitution of Ukraine over the laws and Constitution of the USSR, the right of Ukraine to have its own armed forces, internal forces, security bodies and so forth.

In October 1991, Ukraine was shaken by a student hunger strike in a tent encampment on Independence Square in Kyiv. The starving students achieved the resignation of the government and withdrawal from the USSR.

The Soviet authorities organized a series of attempts to suppress popular demonstrations using the army in Georgia in 1990 and in Lithuania and Latvia in early 1991.

On 18 August 1991, Soviet party and military leaders, the KGB and the Interior Ministry resorted to a coup. They created the State Committee on a State of Emergency. The Committee was not supported by

Levko Lukianenko, a Ukrainian dissident who spent 27 years in Soviet prisons and in exile and the author of Ukraine's Declaration of Independence, at a rally calling for Ukraine's withdrawal from the USSR, 1991

the population of Ukraine and other republics. Local Ukrainians actively participated in confrontations with the troops that had entered Moscow. The blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was raised over a group of tanks that had switched to the protesters' side.

Under the pressure of mass demonstrations the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine on 24 August 1991. The proclamation of independence restored Ukraine's full-fledged statehood and prevented the destruction of the Ukrainian nation, restoring its place in the world and creating a major precondition for the Ukrainian people to become masters of their own land.

The Act of the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine was confirmed by a popular referendum on 1 December 1991. Ukraine's independence was supported in all regions of Ukraine without exception, including the Crimea and Sevastopol. Ukrainians elected President Leonid Kravchuk, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party who supported independence. Two dissidents, Viacheslav Chornovil and Levko Lukianenko, together received half of Kravchuk's votes.

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Photo from a Ukrainian newspaper dated August 1991 in which a tank with a Ukrainian national flag is helping to stop the GKChP coup

Post-communist Problems

Great opportunities were opening before Ukraine, but the main problem was the extremely poor quality of the elite, which had been educated in the Soviet Union with the aim of subjugating Ukraine and bleeding it dry. The elite was not capable of good governance but immediately began to exploit opportunities for corruption that arose in the independent state. Ukraine has not carried out the lustration of party leaders and Soviet secret service agents of the kind that took place in several Eastern European countries. Moreover, Ukraine's industry was deliberately formed in a way as to hinder its independence — a number of end production facilities were located abroad. There was a lack of competitive enterprises that would produce consumer goods.

With a reluctance to show initiative deeply inculcated over the years, citizens were afraid of sudden changes, even though what was to be feared was no change. Eastern European countries that were not afraid of "shock therapy" achieved much better results. Meanwhile, Ukraine received shock without therapy for decades. The post-communist elite was content with this state of affairs, because these people took possession of people's property for next to nothing.

Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus. The KGB destroyed his notes with poems, and only some were carried out of the prison. He died behind bars at the beginning of perestroika in 1985

Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) won the early presidential elections in 1994. His rule was marked by a sharp increase in corruption and the redistribution of state property among individuals close to the government.

The new Constitution of Ukraine granted the president the main powers, but the relatively independent and influential parliament prevented the establishment of a completely authoritarian regime in the country. After the journalist Georgy Gongadze went missing in 2000, the so-called "cassette scandal" erupted: secretly made recordings of conversations between the president and senior officials relating to Gongadze's disappearance were made public.

A mass protest movement unfolded in response to these revelations and the severe sociopolitical and economic situation in Ukraine.

The presidential campaign of 2004 was characterized by massive fraud, blatant pressure on voters and Russia's interference.

The announced results of the elections were perceived by most people as rigged. The Orange Revolution (named for the color chosen by one of the presidential candidates for his election campaign) started the day after the election, on November 22. The revolution thwarted an attempt to bring a twice convicted Russian puppet to power and undermine Ukraine's statehood. People took to the streets and did not leave then until an additional round was scheduled to take place under a new, fairer law.

However, the elite again let the country down. Corruption, scandals, the pursuit of private gain at the expense of national interests persisted. Political strife cost the country NATO membership, which eventually opened the door to bloody aggression. Frustration brought Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian puppet, to victory in the 2010 presidential elections. The Constitutional Court unlawfully gave Yanukovych much broader powers than those with which he was elected: the right to dismiss the entire government, fill key offices in all the ministries and agencies, the Prosecutor General's Office etc. Yanukovych's regime took over businesses and TV channels across the country. One of Yanukovych's sons quickly assumed control of a lion's share of the economy. Justice was nearly impossible to achieve. Law enforcement agencies blended in with criminal structures.

Corruption and the theft of state and public property became the modus operandi of those in power. According to the expert Anders Aslund, Yanukovych's criminal "family" took at least USD 10 billion from the energy sector and public procurements alone on an annual basis. The economy was quickly exhausted. The year Yanukovych came to power, it grew by inertia, but growth halted in 2012 and a decline started in 2013. Under Yanukovych's rule, Ukraine's foreign debt grew from USD 24.3 billion to USD 36.9 billion in March 2014. The idea of bringing Ukraine into the Customs

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Union and the Eurasian Union, both created by Russia, was a great threat. Russia's leaders sought to restore their empire and needed Ukraine's material and labor resources for this purpose. Russia supported thieves who were in power in Ukraine, because this sapped Ukraine's strength, made Ukrainian companies cheaper to buy and enabled the joint embezzlement of the country's assets. A degraded country is much easier to subjugate.

The majority of heads of the security agencies under Yanukovych, including the ministers of defense, chiefs of intelligence, internal forces, the Security Service etc. were Russian agents working to harm Ukraine's interests. Thanks to relations with the European Union, Yanukovych hoped to gain recognition in the West and receive more support from voters in Ukraine, who aspired to European standards of living and human rights protection.

The Association Agreement with the EU was an expression of this policy and it included cooperation in reforms, visa-free travel to the EU and so on. The Association Agreement was a tool with which to reform the country and a source of hope for development.

An integral part of the Association Agreement was the Free Trade Zone Agreement. This agreement provided that Ukraine would be able to increase the sales of its products to the EU, while continuing to lift duties from European goods. However, following Yanukovych's surprise visit to Moscow, the Ukrainian government decided to refuse

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to sign the Association Agreement, even though it had praised it for years. Many Ukrainians agreed to tolerate the corrupt and dysfunctional government in exchange for the expectations of future evolution, however gradual. Now their hopes were dashed.

The refusal to sign the Association Agreement was perceived by many Ukrainians as a threat to the very existence of Ukraine. Yanukovych's complete dependence on Russia became evident. Many people realized that Russia's subjugation of Ukraine could mean the physical destruction of the Ukrainian people, as was the case in the 20th century.

The Revolution of Dignity

On 21 November 2013, several journalists came to Maidan Nezhalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv and spread an appeal via social networks calling on everyone who cared about Ukraine's future to join them. Initially, the protesters demanded only the signing of the agreement with the EU, which is why the protest was called the Euromaidan.

Later, the protest was supported by the opposition. Similarly to the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity began on the day of Archangel Michael who has been considered the protector of Kyiv since ancient times.

Although the Euromaidan was not prohibited by court, several days later the Berkut riot police attacked, at night, the students who were spending the night at Maidan Nezalezhnosti. The young people were beaten with truncheons, chased down the streets and kicked when they were down. Nearly a hundred people were injured. Some of the protesters found refuge in St. Michael's Monastery.

The country was shocked by this unprecedented brutality and the fact that the victims were mostly young people with sincere aspirations. A day later, from several hundred thousand to 1.5 million people, according to various estimates, gathered in Kyiv for a protest rally.

Break-up of a student tent village, 30 November 2013. UNIAN photo

A camp resembling the historical Zaporozhian Sich was set up in downtown Kyiv. Alcohol was banned from the camp and food and medical treatment were provided free of charge by volunteers. Millions of people across the country donated money and necessities for the needs of the protesters. For two months the protesters did not commit any offences at the Maidan, despite the fact that several million people protested there during this time. Starting on 8 December numerous statues of Lenin were demolished across the country in a process dubbed Leninopad (literally, Leninfall) by Ukrainians. This was perceived as a farewell to the empire and dictatorship.

Almost immediately, the authorities resorted to individual intimidation both in the capital and in the regions. Political activists were beaten, arrested and fired from their jobs. Hired thugs (titushky, so called after the last name of a goon who attacked journalists) were involved in these assaults. Similar Maidans emerged in all regions of Ukraine. People often had to muster more courage to join protests in the regions than in the capital.

The ruling regime decided to create a counterpart of the Euromaidan — the Anti-Maidan — in order to simulate wide public support for the government. It had to pay Anti-Maidan participants, because few, if any, people were willing to come to its defense free of charge.

Russia saw the Euromaidan as a threat to Yanukovych's puppet regime that could thwart the Kremlin's plans for the final conquest of Ukraine. Moreover, the Russian

After toppling a Lenin monument in Kyiv, 8 December 2013. UNIANphoto

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government feared that the Ukrainian example in the fight for freedom and against corruption would be attractive to Russians. The Kremlin decided to link the provision of a loan to Yanukovych's regime with the destruction of the Maidan.

At a meeting with diplomats, Yanukovych said that the government would not use force against peaceful demonstrations. However, that same night, on 11 December 2013, security units attacked the Euromaidan from three sides. The bells of St. Michael's Cathedral called Kyiv residents to the Maidan. It was only in the morning that the attack was repulsed. After this attempt at storming, the Maidan began to turn into a kind of fortress surrounded by barricades.

In general, protesters often break windows and loot shops, while the authorities prevent this from happening. That winter in Kyiv, it was the other way around — the government itself organized attacks on law-abiding citizens and their property.

The authorities brought thousands of titushky to Kyiv and had them burn cars, destroy property and brutally beat passers-by in order to destabilize the situation and justify repressions. In January 2014, Kyiv experienced a threefold increase in arsons, robberies and car theft. The police did next to nothing to investigate these crimes. In response, Kyiv residents formed units to patrol the city and protect property. When caught, titushky were forced to publicly repent of the crimes they had committed.

Attack in the early hours of 11 December. UNIANphoto

In order to protect the protesters from the attacks of the police and the titushky, the Maidan Self-Defense, composed of volunteers, was created. It soon grew to 40 sotnias (hundreds), up to 150 people in each. One of the sotnias consisted of Afghan war veterans, while another one was women-only. The Euromaidan helped society get rid of fear.

The regime was looking for ways to restore it. On 16 January 2014, the authorities approved the so-called "dictatorship laws". The punitive provisions of these laws were copied from oppressive Russian legislation but were made even tougher: arrest for organizing a rally, prison terms for group protests, wearing a protective helmet or setting up a tent, arrest for up to 15 days for donations to protesters. Activists who blocked the houses of high-ranking officials faced up to six years in prison. The production and distribution of materials deemed extremist by the authorities in the mass media or on the Internet was punishable by a prison term of up to 3 years. "Extremist activities" were defined so vaguely that any social, political or human rights activities could be subsumed under this definition.

Yanukovych's regime decided to hand out firearms not only to police officers, judges and prosecutors but also their relatives.

Since the Constitution of Ukraine prohibits curtailment of existing rights and freedoms, the protesters marched to the Verkhovna Rada demanding

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the abolition of the dictatorship laws on 19 January. Residents brought car tires to Hrushevsky Street so that the protesters could use a smokescreen to hide from shots fired by the security units. However, dozens of people lost their eyesight and hundreds sustained other wounds from plastic bullets fired at the crowd.

The confrontation on Hrushevsky Street came to a head on 22 January when live bullets killed three persons — Sergey Nigoyan, a Ukrainian of Armenian origin, Belarusian Mikhail Zhiznevski and Ukrainian Roman Senyk. This crime was committed on Unification Day, which is highly revered by Ukrainians, immediately after Yanukovych's ministers made public statements on the legality of the use of live ammunition against demonstrators. The same day, the body of a Maidan activist was found in the woods near Kyiv with signs of torture — he had been kidnapped from a hospital, tortured and left to die in the cold.

Until then, for two long months, hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators prevented any offenses. The adoption of the dictatorship laws and especially the killing of protesters, put an end to the peaceful phase of the conflict.

The traditional divisions in society — ethnic, linguistic etc. — were losing their meaning. The main division on the Maidan was about whether the regime had the right to despise and abuse citizens.

Yanukovych was trying to buy time, hoping that the Maidan would fizzle out or at least become mired

in internal disputes. In contrast, senior Russian officials publicly called on Yanukovych to use force to immediately suppress the protests. Agents of the Russian special services came to Kyiv to coordinate plans for the destruction of the Maidan and aircraft brought explosives and special ammunition from Russia. According to the plan of Operation Boomerang, more than 22,000 fighters of special task force units were to obliterate the Maidan. On 18 February, thousands of protesters marched to the parliament building on Hrushevsky Street demanding the restoration of the 2004 Constitution in order to cut Yanukovych's unlawfully assumed powers and enable the punishment of those responsible for beatings and killings. Dozens of people were killed and wounded during a surprise attack by the Berkut riot police and the titushky on protesters in Instytutska Street and Mariinsky Park. In the evening, special task forces began to storm the Maidan, using stun and gas grenades, firearms and armored personnel carriers. Law enforcement officers deliberately set fire to the tent encampment and the House of Trade Unions, where the headquarters of the Maidan was located. The protesters fought back using rocks and Molotov cocktails. The continuous assault on the Maidan lasted for 17 hours. It sometimes seemed that the attackers were about to win. However, the next morning the protesters received support from Lviv and Ternopil at a crucial moment.

On 20 February pro-government snipers opened fire aiming at both the protesters and some police officers. Berkut began to retreat and the authorities announced the evacuation of the Verkhovna Rada and the Cabinet of Ministers. The likely purpose of these actions was to provoke the looting of the parliament building by the Maidan protesters which could be used as a pretext for large-scale shooting of the Maidan and paralysis of parliament — it was the only highest authority that could (and eventually did) oppose the dictatorship of Yanukovych. The Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda even published the news that the demonstrators had burned the parliament building. The provocation failed: although pained by the loss of its activists, the Maidan did not go to the parliament building to destroy it. A small number of protesters went up Instytutska Street following the retreating Berkut police but found themselves in an ambush and under the fire of snipers and submachine guns. The images of unarmed people in plastic helmets covered with aluminum or wooden shields being shot at and killed were seen by people across the world. On 18-20 February, a total of 77 Euromaidan protesters were killed and over 700 were wounded. In the course of the Revolution of Dignity, 3,500 citizens were injured, and over a hundred, later called the "Heavenly Hundred", were killed or died of wounds.

The same day, the Verkhovna Rada condemned the killing of citizens, banned the use of firearms by

Makeshift hospital for protesters in St. Michael's Cathedral of Kyiv, 19 February 2014. UNIANphoto

security units and ordered them to return to their locations. The next day, Yanukovych held negotiations with the opposition with the participation of the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland. Yanukovych agreed to have the powers of the president limited within 48 hours, restore the Constitution in the redaction valid at the time of his election and hold early presidential elections by the end of December 2014.

However, Yanukovych fled the country that evening, violating the agreement he had just made and failing to sign amendments to the Constitution. His henchmen left for Russia and Belarus even sooner and those who remained began to denounce Yanukovych and accuse him of murders, theft, corruption and despotism.

Yanukovych departed in haste, leaving many valuable items and documents with records of received bribes in his residence in Mezhyhiria. He managed to take even more with him. In connection with Yanukovych's escape, the Verkhovna Rada passed a vote by a constitutional majority recognizing that he withdrew from the post of the President of Ukraine. Parliament also restored the Constitution in the 2004 redaction which limited the powers of the president.

Yanukovych initially went to Kharkiv, but seeing the demoralization of his supporters, secretly fled from there to Southern Ukraine where he was picked up by Russian security services and taken to Crimea and later to Russia. The Kremlin

Killed Maidan protesters, 20 February 2014. UNIAN photo

soon began using statements of the former "guarantor of the sovereignty and territorial integrity" to justify its aggression against Ukraine.

According to sociologists, 5% of the population were involved in the Euromaidan in Kyiv, 6% in other cities and villages, and another 9% of the population helped the protesters with food, things, money etc. Thus, 20% of Ukraine's adult population, or nearly 10 million people, were directly or indirectly involved in the events of the Maidan.

The Revolution of Dignity had the following consequences:

•   The imminent danger of Russia's destruction of Ukraine was avoided.

•   Basic civil liberties, which had been violated by the dictatorship laws, were restored.

•   The exploitation of national resources by Yanukovych's clan was discontinued.

•  Opportunities for reforming the country were restored.

•  Ukraine was put back on the European track.

•  Ukraine's image in the eyes of the world community was further shaped as that of a state with its own identity, history and dignity.

•  The self-respect, patriotism and solidarity of Ukrainian citizens grew. The Maidan demonstrated Ukrainians' capacity for self-organization, mutual aid and self-sacrifice.

The Occupation of the Crimea by Russia

The Russian government took the victory of the Maidan and Yanukovych's escape as its personal fiasco. The plan to absorb Ukraine and use its resources for the purposes of the empire fell through. Ukraine's successful modernization put an end to Russia's imperial ambitions and exposed the ineffectiveness of its sociopolitical system. Moreover, the Kremlin fell into the trap of its own propaganda, which denied it room for maneuver. Thus, the Kremlin decided to use a premeditated plan for the military occupation of the Crimea. Its purpose was twofold. On the one hand, Moscow wanted to rally the support of the chauvinistic part of Russia's population by seizing foreign territory and thus diverting attention from corruption, inefficiency, poverty and the humiliation of people in Russia. In addition, Russia sought to "punish" Ukraine for the Revolution of Dignity by undermining the country's viability and humiliating it in order to eventually subjugate and destroy it.

Additional special task units of Russian troops and numerous members of Russian nationalist organizations were sent to the Crimea in advance. A rally in Sevastopol elected a Russian citizen "mayor" without voting.

Russian soldiers without insignia in Simferopol, Crimea, March 2014. UNIAN photo

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However, a Crimean Tatar rally held in Simferopol with the slogans of Ukraine's unity turned out to be bigger than the one organized by the separatists.

On the night of 27 February 2014, the parliament and government buildings in the Crimea were treacherously seized by military without insignia who raised a Russian flag on the roof. The Russian military were dubbed "green men" because they were dressed in green uniforms without insignia. Holding Crimean MPs at gunpoint, the attackers brought them to a session of the Crimean parliament. The invaders declared that the majority of MPs brought together by force allegedly voted for a referendum. Russian aggression was originally called a "hybrid war", given Russia's refusal to admit its involvement and the widespread use of non- military means of aggression — propaganda, agents and others. On 1 March, the State Duma of the Russian President allowed President Vladimir Putin to launch a military aggression against Ukraine. Even before that, Russian troops began to block Ukrainian troops, roads and other strategically important objects in the Crimea.

All the while, Putin misled the international community by repeatedly saying that Russian forces were not involved in the events on the peninsula and that the attackers had purchased the firearms and ammunition in a "military goods store". Only a year later, Putin admitted that he had lied. On 18 March

"Green men"— Russian invaders in the Crimea without insignia. UNIAN photo

a Ukrainian serviceman was killed during an attack on a Ukrainian military unit in Simferopol. Overall, dozens of Ukrainian servicemen were wounded during the annexation of the Crimea.

As Russian aggression in the Crimea unfolded, the new Ukrainian leadership hoped that Russia would stop. Ukrainian troops were instructed to exercise restraint and keep their positions. The moment for a decisive armed counteraction was wasted. Under

the presidency of Yanukovych, Ukraine's Armed Forces were systematically destroyed; the military service was becoming non-prestigious; the property, land and even firearms of military units were sold or stolen. Ukraine had only 5,000 battle-ready troops after Yanukovych's treacherous reign. Moreover, the capacity of the Ukrainian units on the peninsula was weakened by betrayal. As a result, part of the Ukrainian military remained loyal to the oath they had pledged and went to mainland Ukraine; many servicemen retired, while others switched sides and joined the invaders.

On 16 March, an unlawful "referendum" was held in the Crimea and it was announced that 97% of voters supposedly "voted" for joining Russia. The results were clearly rigged. The majority of the 300,000 Crimean Tatars and over 700,000 Ukrainians living in the Crimea did not want to join Russia. Within a year after the occupation more than 20,000 Crimean residents moved from the Crimea to mainland Ukraine.

Russian soldiers attacking an unarmed Ukrainian soldier in the Crimea, March 2014

After the annexation, the Crimea witnessed a drastic curtailment of civil liberties. First of all, it concerned ethnic Ukrainians and the Crimean Tatar community. Peaceful activists began to be thrown into prison; some were kidnapped or killed. The peninsula faced a number of economic problems, because it depended on Ukrainian transport, energy supply and food and because it suffered from international sanctions.

Because of its aggression in the Crimea, the US, EU countries, Japan, Australia and other countries imposed sanctions on Russia. The world saw it as an aggressor country. The UN General Assembly supported the territorial integrity of Ukraine and recognized the Crimea and Sevastopol as Ukrainian territory.

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Line for mobilization into the Ukrainian army on the second day after Russia's Federation Council "allowed" military invasion of Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk, 2 March 2014. Photo by espreso.tv

Aggression in the Donbas

The Russian government intended to seize as much Ukrainian territory as it could. Russian propaganda promoted the slogans of Novorossiya (New Russia) and the "Russian world", similar to the German Nazi Lebensraum (living space). These slogans were used in an attempt to justify aggression against the Ukrainian people and stripping it of a right to its own state, culture and history. Most of the lands Russia called "Novorossiya" belonged to the Kyiv principality and the Zaporozhian Host. At present, their residents consider Ukraine their motherland and do not seek to become separated. Hoping that everything would go as with the annexation of the Crimea, Putin miscalculated how determined Ukrainians were to defend their country.

In March 2014 pro-Russian separatists with the support of Russian special services launched street protests in the Donbas and in some other regions under the slogans of federalization, joining the Customs Union and so on.

Many local residents were under the influence of Russian propaganda. Some counted on receiving higher social security payments in the event of Russia's occupation. Criminals hoped to head up the coup and loot with impunity. However, the core of the separatists were Russian saboteurs.

Pro-Russian protesters burning books about the Holodomor in Ukraine, Donetsk, April 2014

Thanks to the actions of law enforcement officials, local elites and civil society activists, Russian plans for stirring up separatism failed in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa oblasts. In Kharkiv the timely and decisive actions of the Jaguar special task force quickly stopped the separatists.

However, pro-Russian militants seized some government agencies in Donetsk, Luhansk and other cities in the Donbas starting from March 2014. They began killing supporters of a unified Ukraine. The separatists proclaimed "republics" having just a few thousand supporters in the streets at the most. Groups of Russian commandos arrived in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions unimpeded as the border was not closed.

In mid-April a detachment of armed Russian terrorists led by a Russian intelligence officer seized the city of Sloviansk and the nearby area. Just like in Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukrainian patriots began to be killed. Among the first victims tortured to death by the terrorists were students and a member of the Horlivka city council who wanted to keep the Ukrainian flag on top of the city council building. Terror soon became massive.

Pro-Russian militants killed thousands of people and looted public and private property with abandon. Thousands of local residents went missing or have been tortured.

Ukraine responded to the terror by launching a counter-terrorist operation (ATO), which essentially became a Russian-Ukrainian war.

Pro-Russian separatist in a building seized in the Donbas, April 2014

The Ukrainian army had to restore its combat readiness directly in action. In mid-April, Ukrainian paratroopers cleared the airfield in Kramatorsk and Karachun Hill, giving a start to the liberation of the land. However, the terrorists began to receive new units from Russia, armed with tanks, armored vehicles, air defense systems and other heavy weapons. In April 2014, Russia signed an agreement with the US, the EU and Ukraine in Geneva under which the militants had to disarm and free the premises they had seized in exchange for amnesty. However, Putin neglected to implement this agreement.

In May 2014, the separatists staged illegal "referendums" on "independence" in the self-proclaimed "Luhansk People's Republic" and "Donetsk People's Republic". Polling stations were set up here and there in the occupied cities and lines of people were arranged to create the desired propaganda "picture" for the Russian mass media, suggesting that the local population supported the separatists. Ballots for the "referendum" were made using copiers, which precluded any kind of control. Most separatists were forced to declare that the referendum did not mean separation from Ukraine, because the majority of the Donbas residents did not support secession. The "LPR" and the "DPR" signed an agreement on the formation of a "union" of the "Novorossiya" republics. However, the project failed, because the Ukrainian army was muscling up and

Volodymyr Rybak, a member of the Horlivka City Council, tortured to death by Russian terrorists for wanting to keep the Ukrainian flag on top of the city council building

the historical memory of the population had no place for "Novorossiya".

In early May 2014, pro-Russian fighters armed with submachine guns and handguns attacked several thousand people who joined a peaceful pro-Ukrainian rally in Odesa, killing several participants. After that,  pro-Russian citizens, some with handguns and Molotov cocktails, hid in the House of Trade Unions. The building was soon ablaze, set on fire either from the inside or from the outside. More than 40 people died as a result of the shooting and the fire.

Ukraine managed to hold presidential and parliamentary elections which were recognized worldwide. Petro Poroshenko and a pro-European coalition won these elections. In June, Ukrainian troops defeated Russian mercenaries multiple times — near Krasny Liman, Yampil and Mykolaivka. The Russian military and local collaborators, who previously promised to "make Sloviansk another Stalingrad", fled.

The leader of the Russian saboteurs in Sloviansk said that 5,500 fighters were under his command. According to the Russian terrorists themselves, more than 35,000 Russian "volunteers", not counting local collaborators, were involved in their units over a period of just six months.

Cities liberated by the Ukrainian army (Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol and other cities) remained largely

unharmed, unlike Debaltseve and Vuhlehirsk which had been seized by the Russian troops and mercenaries.

The Ukrainian army and volunteer units gained combat experience. Mariupol, a large city on the coast of the Sea of Azov, was freed from the Russian terrorists. The territory under their control kept shrinking. Aggression against Ukraine was accompanied by military propaganda in the Russian media. To stir up hatred, they reported fictional stories of a "crucified boy", the "slaves" allegedly given to every Ukrainian soldier, bullfinches supposedly killed by Ukrainian school students and other nonsense. They cynically used sick children for their videos, manipulated video sequences etc.

In July 2014, Ukrainian troops attempted to cut off the territory seized by the terrorists from the Russian border in order to stop the flow of military equipment and fighters from Russia. However, due to massive artillery fire from the territory of Russia, the Ukrainian units were forced to abandon these attempts.

On 17 July, using a Russian air defense complex, the Russian military shot down a Malaysian civil Boeing aircraft over the Ukrainian Donbas with nearly 300 people on board. This event led the US, the EU and their allies to impose new sanctions on Russia.

By August 2014, the terrorists controlled one third of the territory they originally seized. Their leaders acknowledged that they were one to two weeks away from defeat.

Pro-Russian separatist shows a child's toy from the downed MH-17 plane, July 2014

Putin feared that the fiasco of his puppets could undermine his own position in Russia. From mid-August 2014, Russia, which already had its units in Ukraine, launched an additional massive invasion in the rear of the Ukrainian army's positions. Russia hypocritically called these military "vacationers", suggesting that they took a break from their military service and brought heavy military equipment (tanks, cannons and air defense systems) to fight against Ukraine.

In heavy fighting, part of Ukrainian troops were blocked near the city of Ilovaisk. Despite promises given by the Russian President Putin and Russian officers that he Ukrainians would be allowed to leave the encirclement, both columns of the Ukrainian troops were shelled by Russian artillery. Several hundred Ukrainian soldiers were killed and several hundred more were taken prisoner and subsequently subjected to inhumane treatment.

In other areas, offensives by the Russian army were repulsed. In Mariupol, local residents volunteered to build fortifications for Ukrainian soldiers who defended the city. On 5 and 19 September in Minsk, Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE signed an agreement under which the parties had to cease fire and withdraw heavy weapons from the front line. Nevertheless, Russia sent thousands of items of military equipment to the Ukrainian Donbas, allowing the separatists to organize a series of attacks on several fronts. Despite another peace agreement on 12 February 2015, Russian troops attacked a Ukrainian

Ukrainian girl receiving a medal "For Bravery and Courage" awarded to her father who was killed in the war against Russia, 2015

bridgehead near Debaltseve. The aim was to encircle Ukrainian soldiers and take them captive, demoralize Ukrainian society and cause internal disturbances. However, Ukrainian units retreated from Debaltseve, with hundreds of soldiers killed and wounded, while causing the separatists, as one of their leaders put it, "huge losses that we would never acknowledge".

Despite the peace agreements, Russia continued to conduct sabotage in Ukraine through its agents. Russian agents blew up railway tracks, offices of government agencies, volunteer organizations etc. And killed civilians in a vain attempt to create an atmosphere of fear and insecurity in society.

Back in May 2014, Russian saboteurs tried to capture Donetsk Airport for the first time but were repulsed by the Ukrainian military and suffered heavy losses. The enemies, and later Ukrainians themselves, called the Ukrainian defenders of Donetsk Airport "cyborgs". Although completely destroyed and abandoned by Ukrainian troops in January 2015, Donetsk Airport became a symbol of resistance.

The resistance put up by the Ukrainian army and the support of the Ukrainian people were the main factors which, along with pressure from the West, forced Russia to "freeze" its aggression.

Ukrainians' resistance forced developed countries to increase international pressure on Russia, sending the Russian economy into crisis.

Residents of Mariupol dig trenches and make fortifications with sandbags as they assist Ukrainian troops in organising their defence on the outskirts of the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on August 30, 2014. UNIAN photo

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Ukraine's economy shrank by 20% as a result of Russian aggression and the corrupt activities of Russian puppets. However, unlike the early 1990s, this time Western countries were willing to provide some economic support to Ukraine.

A majority of Ukrainians realized that reforms were needed and themselves demanded reforms for the purpose of development and restoring Ukraine, a large and promising European country, to its place in the world.

Ukrainian soldiers near Donetsk Airport, 2014, photo by Ivan Yasnii