Ukraine—the word means “borderland” in both Russian and Polish—belonged to the Russian empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to that, the same lands belonged to Poland, or rather the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which inherited them in 1569 from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Earlier still, Ukrainian lands lay at the heart of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval state in the ninth century formed by Slavic tribes and a Viking nobility, and, in the memories of the region, an almost mythical kingdom that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians all claim as their ancestor.
