Ukrainians (, ) are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine. Their native tongue is Ukrainian, and the majority adhere to Eastern Orthodoxy. At around 46 million worldwide, Ukrainians are the second largest Slavic ethnic group after Russians.
Ukrainians have been given various names by foreign rulers, which have included Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian Empire, and then Austria-Hungary. The East Slavic population inhabiting the territories of modern-day Ukraine were known as Ruthenians, referring to the territory of Ruthenia; the Ukrainians living under the Russian Empire were known as Little Russians, named after the territory of Little Russia.
The ethnonym Ukrainian, which was associated with the Cossack Hetmanate, was adopted following the Ukrainian national revival of the late 18th century. The Cossacks are frequently emphasised in modern Ukrainian identity and symbolism, such as in the Ukrainian national anthem. Citizens of Ukraine are also called Ukrainians regardless of ethnicity, and many identify themselves as a civic nation.
Ethnonym
The modern name Ukraintsi (Ukrainians) is derived from Ukraina (Ukraine), a name first documented in the Kievan Chronicle under the year 1187. The terms Ukrainiany (first recorded in the Galician–Volhynian Chronicle under the year 1268), Ukrainnyky, and even narod ukrainskyi (the Ukrainian people) were used sporadically before Ukraintsi attained currency under the influence of the writings of Ukrainian activists in Russian-ruled Ukraine in the 19th century. From the 14th to the 16th centuries, the western portions of the European part of what is now known as Russia, plus the territories of northern Ukraine and Belarus (Ruthenia), were largely known as Rus, continuing the tradition of Kievan Rus'. People of these territories were usually called Rus or Rusyns (known as Ruthenians in Western and Central Europe).
The Ukrainian language is, like modern Russian and Belarusian, a descendent of Old East Slavic.Yermolenko S. Y. (2000). History of the Ukrainian literary language // Potebnia Institute of Linguistics (NASU). In UkrainianRusanivsky V. M. (2000). History of the Ukrainian language // Potebnia Institute of Linguistics (NASU). In Ukrainian In Western and Central Europe it was known by the exonym "Ruthenian". In the 16th and 17th centuries, with the establishment of the Zaporozhian Sich, names of Ukraine and Ukrainian began to be used in Sloboda Ukraine.Wilson, Andrew. Ukrainian nationalism in the 1990s: a minority faith. Cambridge University Press, 1997. After the decline of the Zaporozhian Sich and the establishment of Imperial Russian hegemony in Left Bank Ukraine, Ukrainians became more widely known by Russians as "Little Russians", with the majority of Ukrainian elites espousing Little Russian identity and adopting the Russian language, as Ukrainian was outlawed in almost all contexts.
This exonym—regarded now as a humiliating imperialist imposition—did not spread widely among the peasantry, which constituted the majority of the population. Ukrainian peasants still referred to their country as "Ukraine" (a name associated with the Zaporozhian Sich, with the Hetmanate and with their struggle against Poles, Russians, Turks and Crimean Tatars) and to themselves and their language as Ruthenians/Ruthenian.
With the publication of Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneyida (Aeneid) in 1798, which established the modern Ukrainian language, and with the subsequent Romantic revival of national traditions and culture, the ethnonym Ukrainians and the notion of a Ukrainian language came into more prominence at the beginning of the 19th century and gradually replaced the words "Rusyns" and "Ruthenian(s)". In areas outside the control of the Russian/Soviet state until the mid-20th century (Western Ukraine), Ukrainians were known by their pre-existing names for much longer. The appellation Ukrainians initially came into common usage in Central Ukraine and did not take hold in Galicia and Bukovina until the latter part of the 19th century, in Transcarpathia not until the 1930s, and in the Prešov Region not until the late 1940s. "A historic name for Ukrainians corresponding to the Ukrainian rusyny"
The modern name Ukraintsi (Ukrainians) derives from Ukraina (Ukraine), a name first documented in 1187. Several scientific theories attempt to explain the etymology of the term. According to the traditional theory, it derives from the Proto-Slavic root *kraj-, which has two meanings—one being the homeland as in "nash rodnoi kraj" (our homeland), and the other being "edge, border"—and originally had the sense of "periphery", "borderland" or "frontier region".; Russian translation: According to another theory, the term ukraina should be distinguished from the term okraina: whereas the latter term means "borderland", the former has the meaning of "cut-off piece of land", thus acquiring the connotation of "our land", "land allotted to us".
In the last three centuries, the population of Ukraine experienced periods of polonisation and russification, but preserved a common culture and a sense of common identity.
Geographic distribution
Most ethnic Ukrainians live in Ukraine, where they make up over three-quarters of the population. The largest population of Ukrainians outside of Ukraine lives in Russia where about 1.9 million Russian citizens identify as Ukrainian, while millions of others (primarily in southern Russia and Siberia) have some Ukrainian ancestry.Ethnic composition of the population of the Russian Federation / Information materials on the final results of the 2010 Russian census The inhabitants of the Kuban, for example, have vacillated among three identities: Ukrainian, Russian (an identity supported by the Soviet regime) and "Cossack". in: Roman Senkus et al. (eds.), The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, revised and updated content based on the five-volume Encyclopedia of Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 1984–93) edited by Volodymyr Kubijovyc (vols. 1–2) and Danylo Husar Struk (vols. 3–5). Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) (University of Alberta/University of Toronto). Approximately 800,000 people of Ukrainian ancestry live in the Russian Far East in an area known historically as "Green Ukraine".Ukrainians in Russia's Far East try to maintain community life . The Ukrainian Weekly. 4 May 2003.
In a 2011 national poll of Ukraine, 49% of Ukrainians said they had relatives living in Russia.
According to some previous assumptions, an estimated number of almost 2.4 million people of Ukrainian origin live in North America (1,359,655 in Canada and 1,028,492 in the United States). Large numbers of Ukrainians also live in Brazil (600,000); Kazakhstan (338,022); Moldova (325,235); Argentina (305,000); (Germany) (272,000); Italy (234,354); Belarus (225,734); Uzbekistan (124,602); the Czech Republic (110,245); Spain (90,530–100,000) and Romania (51,703–200,000). There are also large Ukrainian communities in such countries as Latvia, Portugal, France, Australia, Paraguay, the UK, Israel, Slovakia, Kyrgyzstan, Austria, Uruguay and the former Yugoslavia. Generally, the Ukrainian diaspora is present in more than 120 countries of the world.
The number of Ukrainians in Poland amounted to some 51,000 people in 2011 (according to the Polish census). Since 2014, the country has experienced a large increase in immigration from Ukraine. More recent data put the number of Ukrainian migrant workers at 1.2–1.3 million in 2016.
In the last decades of the 19th century, many Ukrainians were forced by the Tsarist autocracy to move to the Asian regions of Russia, while many of their counterpart Slavs under Austro-Hungarian rule emigrated to the New World in search of work and better economic opportunities. According to some sources in the first decade of the 2000s, around 20 million people outside Ukraine identify as having Ukrainian ethnicity; however, the official data of the respective countries calculated together does not show more than 10 million. In any event, Ukrainians have one of the largest diasporas in the world.
Origin
The East Slavs emerged from the undifferentiated early Slavs in the Slavic migrations of the 6th and 7th centuries CE. The state of Kievan Rus united the East Slavs during the 9th to 13th centuries. East Slavic tribes cited as "proto-Ukrainian" include the Volhynians, Derevlianians, Polianians, and Siverianians and the less significant Ulychians, Tivertsians, and White Croats.Compare: The Gothic historian Jordanes and 6th-century Byzantine authors named two groups that lived in the south-east of Europe: Sclavins (western Slavs) and Antes. Polianians are identified as the founders of the city of Kiev and as playing the key role in the formation of the Kievan Rus' state.
At the beginning of the 9th century, Varangians used the waterways of Eastern Europe for military raids and trade, particularly the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks. Until the 11th century these Varangians also served as key mercenary troops for a number of princes in medieval Kiev, as well as for some of the Byzantine emperors, while others occupied key administrative positions in Kievan Rus' society, and eventually became slavicized. Besides other cultural traces, several Ukrainian names show traces of Norse origins as a result of influences from that period.
Differentiation between separate East Slavic groups began to emerge in the later medieval period; and an East Slavic dialect continuum developed within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, with the Ruthenian language emerging as a written standard. The active development of a concept of a Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian language began with the Ukrainian National Revival in the early 19th century in times when Ruthenians (Русини) changed their name because of the regional name. In the Soviet era (1917–1991), official historiography emphasised "the cultural unity of 'proto-Ukrainians' and 'proto-Russians' in the fifth and sixth centuries".
A poll conducted in April 2022 by the polling organisation Rating found that the vast majority (91%) of Ukrainians (excluding the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine) do not support the thesis that "Russians and Ukrainians are one people".
Genetics and genomics
Ukrainians, like most Europeans, largely descend from three distinct lineages: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, descended from populations associated with the Paleolithic Epigravettian culture; Neolithic Early European Farmers, who migrated from Anatolia during the Neolithic Revolution 9,000 years ago; and Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists, who expanded into Europe from the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Ukraine and southern Russia in the context of Indo-European migrations 5,000 years ago.
In a survey of 97 genomes for diversity in full genome sequences among self-identified Ukrainians from Ukraine, a study identified more than 13 million genetic variants, representing about a quarter of the total genetic diversity discovered in Europe. Among these, nearly 500,000 were previously undocumented and likely to be unique for this population, medically relevant mutations whose prevalence in the Ukrainian genomes differed significantly compared to other European genome sequences, particularly from Western Europe and Russia. Ukrainian genomes form a single cluster positioned between the Northern European populations on one side, and Western European populations on the other. There was a significant overlap with Central European populations as well as with people from the Balkans. In addition to the close geographic distance between these populations, this may also reflect the insufficient representation of samples from the surrounding populations.