Anna Reid on Ukraine

“Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia.'”

“Ukraina is literally translated as “on the edge” or “borderland”, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders''', Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th, between Russia and Austria through the 19th, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it had never been an independent state.”

““What does Ukraine look like?”...it’s green and gently rolling, and dotted with medieval fortresses, romantically neglected baroque palaces and monasteries, and quiet, pretty towns and little cities, much like those of Austria or the Czech Republic. Kyiv itself is a grand Belle Époque metropolis with up-and-down cobbled streets and chestnut trees. There are funny little back alleys and courtyards full of coffee shops and art galleries, leafy parks with views over the sprawling river Dnipro, and an array of glorious churches, the grandest of them the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral.”

“But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.”