Partly a Greek, Roman and Byzantine colony along the shores of the Black Sea (where later the maritime republic of Genoa also created some colonies), in the Middle Ages the territory of today Ukraine it was divided among several Slavic tribal clans.
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In 988 the principality of Kiev under Vladimir I adopted Christianity as a religion and from this entity the so-called “Russia of Kiev” developed, considered the forerunner of modern Russia. But in 1249 the Mongol invasions completely destroyed Kiev, after which the Ukrainian territory was divided for centuries between various powers: the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, the Ottoman empire, the Cossacks of the Dnieper, Austria and the Russian empire, meanwhile affirmed. further north with Moscow and later St. Petersburg as the capital.
With the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, a civil war broke out in Ukraine, with two Ukrainian republics competing with each other, one in the western part and one in the eastern part, becoming the main theater of the conflict between “reds” (the Bolsheviks) and “whites. “(The anti-communist forces linked to the old Tsarist army). Only in 1922, with the victory of the “reds”, did Ukraine become part of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine became independent in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, or rather it returned to being independent after the brief existence of a Ukrainian republic during the 1917-22 civil war. Over the next thirty years to date it has had a succession of governments, alternately pro-Russian or pro-European.
The so-called Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Maidan uprising in 2013 reaffirmed the desire of the majority of the population to forge relations with the European Union.
In 2014, armed and Moscow-inspired militias proclaimed two pro-Russian republics in the regions of Donetsk e Lugansk, also known as the Donbass Mining Area, the eastern part of Ukraine bordering Russia and where the majority of the population is Russian-speaking; and the Russian army occupied the peninsula of Crimea, on the Black Sea, later formally annexed to Russia. Since then, a war has been going on in the Donbass up to now at a low intensity, which however has caused as many as 14 thousand deaths and tens of thousands wounded.
With this week’s announcement, Putin recognized the republics of Donetsk and Luganks, also sending Russian troops there and effectively annexing them to Russia.
Is the Ukrainian language different from the Russian language? Yes. Linguists differ on the era in which Ukrainian and Russian become two distinct languages, but there is no doubt about the fact that they are different languages, despite having the same Cyrillic alphabet. Influenced by Polish and Slovak, the Ukrainian language is similar to Russian, just as there are common roots for many Slavic languages, from Polish to Serbian. During the seven decades of the Soviet era, the use of Ukrainian was discouraged and in certain circumstances banned in Ukraine, but it still survived. According to the 2001 census, Ukrainian is spoken as a first language by 67 percent of the Ukrainian population, Russian by 29 percent of the population, although all Ukrainians know it.
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