Prehistoric Ukraine, as a part of the Pontic steppe in Eastern Europe, played an important role in Eurasian cultural events, including the spread of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, Indo-European migrations, and the domestication of the horse.Matossian Shaping World History p. 43(Citation does not exist anymore)(Link does not exist anymore)
A part of Scythia in antiquity, Ukraine was largely settled by Greuthungi, Getae, Goths, and Huns in the Migration Period, while southern parts of Ukraine were previously colonized by Greeks and then Romans. In the Early Middle Ages it was also a site of early Slavic expansion. The hinterland entered into written history with the establishment of the medieval state of Kievan Rus', which emerged as a powerful nation but disintegrated during the High Middle Ages, and was destroyed by the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, present-day Ukrainian territories came under the rule of four external powers: the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. The latter two would then merge into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth following the Union of Krewo and Union of Lublin. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire emerged as a major regional power in and around the Black Sea, through protectorates like the Crimean Khanate, as well as directly-administered territory.
After a 1648 rebellion of the Cossacks against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky agreed to the Treaty of Pereyaslav in January 1654. The exact nature of the relationship established by this treaty between the Cossack Hetmanate and Russia remains a matter of scholarly controversy. The agreement precipitated the Russo-Polish War of 1654–67 and the failed Treaty of Hadiach, which would have formed a Polish–Lithuanian–Ruthenian Commonwealth. In consequence, by the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, signed in 1686, the eastern portion of Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) was to come under Russian rule, 146,000 rubles were to be paid to Poland as compensation for the loss of right-bank Ukraine, and the parties agreed not to sign a separate treaty with the Ottoman Empire. The treaty was strongly opposed in Poland and was not ratified by the Polish–Lithuanian Sejm until 1710. The legal legitimacy of its ratification has been disputed.Eugeniusz Romer, O wschodniej granicy Polski z przed 1772 r., w: Księga Pamiątkowa ku czci Oswalda Balzera, t. II, Lwów 1925, s. . According to Jacek Staszewski, the treaty was not confirmed by a resolution of the Sejm until its 1764 session.Jacek Staszewski, August II Mocny, Wrocław 1998, p. 100.
During the Great Northern War, Hetman Ivan Mazepa allied with Charles XII of Sweden in 1708. However, the Great Frost of 1709 greatly weakened the Swedish army. Following the Battle of Poltava later in 1709, there was a diminishment in Hetmanate power, culminating with the disestablishment of the Cossack Hetmanate in the 1760s and the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in the 1770s. Following the Partitions of Poland (1772–1795) and the Russian conquest of the Crimean Khanate, the Russian Empire and Habsburg Austria were in control of all the territories that constitute present-day Ukraine for over a hundred years. Ukrainian nationalism developed in the 19th century.
A chaotic period of warfare ensued after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as well as a simultaneous war in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria following the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy after World War I. The Soviet–Ukrainian War (1917–1921) followed, in which the Bolshevik Red Army established control in late 1919.Riasanovsky (1963), p. 537. The Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who had defeated the national government in Kyiv, established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which on 30 December 1922 became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. Initial Soviet policy on the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture made Ukrainian the official language of administration and schools. Policy in the 1930s turned to Russification. In 1932 and 1933, millions of people in Ukraine, mostly peasants, starved to death in a devastating famine, known as the Holodomor. It is estimated that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.
After the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Ukrainian SSR's territory expanded westward. Axis armies occupied Ukraine from 1941 to 1944. During World War II, elements of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for Ukrainian independence against both Germany and the Soviet Union, while other elements collaborated with the Nazis, assisting them in carrying out the Holocaust in Ukraine and their oppression of Poles. In 1953, Nikita Khrushchev, ethnic Russian former head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, succeeded as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and enabled more political and cultural freedom, which led to a Ukrainian revival. In 1954 the republic expanded to the south with the transfer of Crimea from Russia. Nevertheless, political repressions against poets, historians and other intellectuals continued, as in all other parts of the USSR.
Ukraine became independent again when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. This started a period of transition to a market economy, in which Ukraine suffered an eight-year recession. Subsequently however, the economy experienced a high increase in GDP growth until it plunged during the Great Recession.Inozmi, "Ukraine – macroeconomic economic situation" . June 2009.
A prolonged political crisis began on 21 November 2013, when president Viktor Yanukovych suspended preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union, instead choosing to seek closer ties with Russia. This decision resulted in the Euromaidan protests and later, the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych was then impeached by the Ukrainian parliament in February 2014. On 20 February, the Russo-Ukrainian War began when Russian forces entered Crimea. Soon after, pro-Russian unrest enveloped the largely Russophone eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, from where Yanukovych had drawn most of his support. An internationally unrecognized referendum in the largely ethnic Russian Ukrainian autonomous region of Crimea was held and Crimea was de facto annexed by Russia on 18 March 2014. The War in Donbas began in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine involving the Russian military. The war continued until 24 February 2022, when Russia launched a major invasion of much of the country.
Prehistory Paleolithic period
Settlement in Ukraine by members of the genus Homo has been documented into distant Paleolithic prehistory. The discovery of 1.4-million-year-old stone tools in Korolevo, located in western Ukraine, marks one of the earliest securely dated presences of hominins in Europe. These tools offer crucial insights into the behaviors and adaptive strategies of early members of the genus Homo, likely Homo erectus, as they expanded into the continent during the Lower Paleolithic period. The Neanderthals are associated with the Molodova archaeological sites (45,000–43,000 BC), which include a mammoth bone dwelling. The earliest documented evidence of modern humans are found in Gravettian settlements dating to 32,000 BC in the Buran-Kaya cave site of the Crimean Mountains.
Neolithic and Bronze Age In the late Neolithic times, the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture flourished from about 4,500–3,000 BC. The Copper Age people of the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture resided in the western part, and the Sredny Stog Culture further east, succeeded by the early Bronze Age Yamna ("Kurgan") culture of the Pontic steppes, and by the Catacomb culture in the 3rd millennium BC.
Iron Age and classical antiquity Scythian settlement, Greek colonization, and Roman domination
During the Iron Age, these peoples were followed by the Dacians as well as nomadic peoples like the Cimmerians (archaeological Novocherkassk culture), Scythians and Sarmatians. The Scythian kingdom existed here from 750 to 250 BC. In the Scythian campaign of Darius the Great in 513 BC, the Achaemenid Persian army subjugated several Thracian peoples, and virtually all other regions along the European part of the Black Sea, such as parts of nowadays Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia, before it returned to Asia Minor.Joseph Roisman,Ian Worthington. "A companion to Ancient Macedonia" John Wiley & Sons, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4443-5163-7 pp 135–138, pp 343–345The Oxford Classical Dictionary by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth,ISBN 0-19-860641-9,"page 1515,"The Thracians were subdued by the Persians by 516" Greeks colonized Crimea and other coastal areas of Ukraine in the 7th or 6th century BC during the Archaic period. The culturally Greek Bosporan Kingdom thrived until it was invaded and occupied by the Goths and Huns in the 4th century AD. From 62 to 68 AD the Roman Empire briefly annexed the kingdom under Emperor Nero when he deposed the Bosporan king Tiberius Julius Cotys I. Afterwards the Bosporan Kingdom was made into a Roman client state with a Roman military presence during the middle of the 1st century AD.
Arrival of the Goths and Huns
In the 3rd century AD, the Goths migrated into the lands of modern Ukraine around 250–375 AD, which they called Oium, corresponding to the archaeological Chernyakhov culture. The Ostrogoths stayed in the area but came under the sway of the Huns from the 370s. North of the Ostrogothic kingdom was the Kyiv culture, flourishing from the 2nd–5th centuries, when it was also overrun by the Huns. After they helped defeat the Huns at the battle of Nedao in 454, the Ostrogoths were allowed by the Romans to settle in Pannonia. Along with other ancient Greek colonies founded in the 6th century BC on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea, the colonies of Tyras, Olbia, and Hermonassa continued as Roman and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) cities until the 6th century AD. Gothic influence waned by the end of the 5th century AD, when the Eastern Roman Empire reaffirmed its control and influence over the region. The Hunnic king Gordas ruled the Bosporan kingdom in the early 6th century AD and maintained good relations with Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, but the latter invaded and occupied the country once Gordas was killed in a revolt in 527 AD. As late as the 12th century AD the Eastern Roman emperors claimed dominion over the territory of Cimmerian Bosporos.Gautier, Paul. "Le dossier d'un haut fonctionnaire byzantin d'Alexis Ier Comnène, Manuel Stra-boromanos". Revue des études byzantines, Paris, Vol.23, 1965. pp. 178, 190
Early Slavs
With the power vacuum created with the end of Hunnic and Gothic rule, Early Slavs, in the aftermath of the Kyiv culture, began to expand over much of the territory that is now Ukraine during the 5th century, and beyond to the Balkans from the 6th century. Although the origins of the Early Slavs are not known for certain, many theories suggest they may have originated near Polesia.