Ukraine

The name “Ukraine” means “borderlands”. There are  many ​borders here —cultural, religious, and political. The Independent Republic of Ukraine is barely 30 years old, but waves of conquerors and empires have been changing the borders in this region for about a thousand years, since the ​first hordes of pagan mongols swept in from the east.The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is just the latest conflict that has turned this fault line in Eastern Europe into a battleground once more.

Although their northern neighbours refer to Ukrainians as ‘little Russians’, historically it was Ukraine that was home to the first eastern Slavic stateand is the birthplace of Russia. Kyivan Rus, was founded in the 9th century by neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but by Vikings. Invaded by Mongols from the east, occupied by Poland and Lithuania from the west and requisitioned by Russia from the north, national identity was forged in the heartlands of Ukraine: the wild, Cossack-held steppes. Nationalism was a recurring theme – revisited in the 19th century by western Ukrainians under Austro-Hungarian rule. It was not untilthe 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union that Ukraine finally became the independent state it is today.

And that’s not all. Ukrainians invented the antibiotic, the first parallel-processing computer, built the space ship that put the first man in space, discovered X-rays, won the Olympics on behalf of the Soviet Union, and provided the inspiration for the character of James Bond.