Ukraine

From the cradle of Kievan Rus' to a sovereign nation defending its borders against invasion.

Ukraine's history begins with Kievan Rus', the medieval federation centred on Kyiv that, under Volodymyr the Great, adopted Christianity from Byzantium in 988 and reached its height under Yaroslav the Wise. After the Mongol sack of Kyiv in 1240 the Rus' lands fragmented and were drawn into the orbits of Galicia-Volhynia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland. From the steppe frontier rose the Cossacks and the Zaporozhian Sich, whose great uprising under Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 created a Cossack Hetmanate that, by the 1654 Council of Pereiaslav, fell under Muscovite protection, dividing the Ukrainian lands between Russia and Poland and, after the partitions, between the Russian and Austrian empires. A modern national movement, voiced by the poet Taras Shevchenko, produced the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic of 1917-1921, which was defeated and absorbed into Soviet Ukraine, where the man-made famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, killed millions. After the devastation of the Second World War and the Holocaust on Ukrainian soil, Ukraine declared independence on 24 August 1991, confirmed by referendum on 1 December 1991, and gave up the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of 2022, together with the purported annexation of four oblasts, have been condemned by the United Nations General Assembly as without legal validity.