MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Ukraine

ONE LAND · 8 ATLASES

Ukraine, on the map of history

What was Ukraine before it was Ukraine? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Scythia & Sarmatia (mod. Ukraine) · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Scythia and Sarmatia: the steppe corridor beyond every Roman category, ringed with Greek grain ports (Olbia, Chersonesus) that Rome garrisoned as clients. Every mounted people in this atlas — Sarmatians, Goths, Huns — crossed this land southwestward. When its gates opened in 370, the fifth century began (Ch. 10).

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The Rus’ & Cuman lands (mod. Ukraine) · The Crusades, 1095–1291

The Orthodox principalities of the Rus’ and the steppe of the Cuman nomads lay beyond the crusaders’ Mediterranean world — but not beyond its age. Kyiv, the great city of the Rus’, fell to the Mongols in December 1240, two decades after the Cumans had fled west with news of an enemy no one could stop; the cataclysm that would destroy Baghdad’s caliphate in 1258 thus overran Orthodox Europe first. Crusading brushed this world only at its edges — popes preached against the pagan Cumans, and the Baltic crusades pressed on the Rus’ from the north-west — but here the thirteenth century belonged to the horsemen of the steppe, not the cross.

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Kievan Rus (mod. Ukraine) · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

Kievan Rus’s southern heart — and the Golden Horde’s steppe. Kiev, the mother of Rus cities, refused surrender and was stormed in December 1240; a papal envoy counted two hundred houses standing six years later. The Pontic steppe stayed under direct Horde rule for generations, and the region’s history split from Europe’s along this map’s hatched belt.

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Ukraine · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

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Ukraine · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

The revolution’s central battleground and central tragedy. Rich in grain and open on the plain, Ukraine was fought over by Rada, Germans, Hetman, Directory, Whites, Poles, Makhno’s anarchists and Reds — Kiev changed hands more than a dozen times. It suffered the era’s worst pogroms (perhaps 100,000 Jews murdered) and, unlike Finland or Poland, was reconquered — becoming a founding Soviet republic in 1922.

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Ukraine (Russian Empire) · The Great War, 1914–1918

Ukraine declared independence in the empire’s collapse — then became the war’s eastern prize: occupied by Germany in 1918 as the “bread peace” granary (Ch. 9), fought over by Reds, Whites, Poles and its own republics until 1921. Between Brest-Litovsk and the Soviet victory, Kyiv changed hands more than a dozen times.

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Ukraine · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

Soviet Ukraine was the war’s central killing ground: overrun in 1941, site of Babi Yar and the Holocaust by bullets, fought over twice, and left with staggering losses. Its wartime experience — between two totalitarianisms — is key to understanding its history since.

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Ukraine · The Cold War, 1945–1991

The second Soviet republic — a quarter of the union’s people and industry, the breadbasket, and host to Chernobyl, whose lies helped kill the system (Ch. 11). Its 90% independence vote of 1 December 1991 made the USSR unrevivable arithmetic. Every post-Cold-War European crisis has run through the questions this map leaves open around it.

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