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February 14, 2023

This is the history of the transformation of a tiny area occupied by Zaporozhian Cossacks into the largest country in Europe after Russia, larger than France or Germany. How did Ukraine pull off an expansion of this magnitude without a single conquest?

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The starting point of the history of Ukraine began is 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, leader of Cossacks living beyond the Dnieper Rapids, petitioned Russian czar Alexey to accept the Zaporozhian Host into Russia. The land inhabited by the Cossacks (the orange area on the map) was part of what Russians called the Wild Fields, or “u kraine,” which means in Russian “at the edge.” The term originated in the 12th century to describe lands populated by half-savage tribes on the outskirts of Russia.

Khmelnitsky was desperate to save his Cossacks from annihilation by the Poles. Initially, Alexey turned down the request. But eventually, the request was granted, and the Treaty of Pereyaslav was signed. According to the treaty, the territory was to be absorbed into Russia and named Malorossiya or Little Russia, administered by the Hetmanate with limited suzerainty.

During the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), the Russian Empire underwent a massive expansion, and new territories were added to Malorossiya, including the city of Kiev, where the land of the Rus began in the 8th century (yellow and orange areas on the map). In 1764, as Malorossiya had grown in size, Catherine, for administrative reasons, abolished the Hetmanate and created the Malorossian Governorate.

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In the same year, the Russian Empire conquered the Crimean Khanate and founded a new province, Novorossiya or New Russia (the blue area on the map). In a relatively short time, Russia turned the region from an undeveloped steppe with rare pastures into a powerful agricultural and later an industrial region that became the backbone of the economy of the first Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. 

In 1783, Catherine the Great wrested Crimea from the Ottoman Empire in a bloody war, securing access to the Black Sea and completing Peter the Great’s vision of making the Russian Empire the dominant European power.

In 1919, two years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin became the architect of Ukraine, combining Novorossiya and Malorossiya into the new Socialist State of Ukraine (the yellow, blue, and orange areas on the map).  In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed, and the Socialist State of Ukraine was inaugurated as the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, hereafter Ukraine, with the capital Kharkov. Novorossiya was renamed Eastern Ukraine, and the term Malorossiya was no longer in use. In 1934, the capital of the new republic was moved to Kiev.

Between 1939 and 1940 as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin annexed the eastern territories, including the Polish city of Lvov and Northern Bukovina from Romania. In 1945, he annexed Hungarian Carpathian Ruthenia, nowadays Zakarpattia. All those territories were merged with Ukraine and became known as Western Ukraine (the green area on the map).

By 1950, Ukraine’s territory exceeded that of any country in Europe other than Russia. But the territorial handouts to Ukraine did not end there. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from the Russian Federation to Ukraine. The status change was mainly symbolic since the transfer was within the Soviet Union, governed by a single set of laws, common defense, and total Moscow control. No one in the Kremlin could foresee that it would manifest as an unimaginable strategic error a few decades later.

The historical record demonstrates that contemporary Ukraine emerged from a mosaic of lands assembled by Russian conquests and paid for with Russian blood and treasure. Except for a small area of the Zaporozhian Host (the red area on the map), Ukraine has no historical connection to the land it occupies and is the product of Russian geopolitical engineering.