Ukraine
The great eastern European nation of the black earth and the Dnipro, a proud, resilient, deeply rooted people of Cossack heritage and Orthodox faith, of the embroidered shirt and the painted egg, of borscht and the bandura. The complete guide.
Ukraine is a large country in eastern Europe, the second-largest on the continent by area, a land of vast fertile plains, of the great Dnipro river, and of the Black Sea coast, with its capital at Kyiv, one of the oldest cities of the Slavic world. Before the war that began in 2022 it was home to about forty million people, an East Slavic nation with its own ancient language, a deep Orthodox Christian faith, and a proud heritage reaching back through the freedom-loving Cossacks to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus. Long ruled by larger empires and for most of the twentieth century part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became independent in 1991 and has since fought hard to secure its own democratic, European future, distinct from Russia. Since February 2022 it has endured a full-scale Russian invasion. This guide describes the enduring land, identity, faith, folk culture, food, and history of Ukraine, ending with the war and the nation today.
Overview
Ukraine is a large country in eastern Europe, the second-largest on the continent after Russia, bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, by Belarus to the north, by Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west, by Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and by the Black Sea to the south. It is a land of vast fertile plains, of the great Dnipro river that flows through its heart, and of a long Black Sea coast. Its capital and largest city is Kyiv, one of the oldest and most storied cities of the Slavic world. Before the war that began in 2022, Ukraine was home to about forty million people, though the conflict has since displaced many millions.
Ukraine is a republic, with an elected president, currently Volodymyr Zelensky, as head of state, alongside a prime minister and parliament. After centuries under foreign rule and seventy years as part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, and it has since worked to build a democratic, European nation of its own. The people are an East Slavic nation with their own language, Ukrainian, and a deep Orthodox Christian faith. Since February 2022, the country has been fighting a full-scale Russian invasion. The currency is the hryvnia.
A few deep forces shape life in Ukraine. There is the rich black-earth land and its role as a breadbasket of the world. There is the distinct Ukrainian identity, separate from Russia, reaching back to medieval Kyivan Rus. There is the Cossack heritage and the love of freedom. There is the Orthodox faith and the wealth of folk culture. And there is the resilience of a people forged by a long and hard history. The sections that follow trace these and walk through the customs, ending with the war and the nation today.
The land of black earth
Ukraine is a vast country, the largest lying wholly within Europe, a land of immense open plains stretching from its western forests and mountains to the Russian border in the east, and from the marshes of the north to the warm Black Sea coast in the south. Most of the country is a great rolling plain, the steppe, an endless expanse of fields and grassland under a wide sky, broken by river valleys and threaded by the mighty Dnipro, the great river that flows down the centre of the land and through the capital, Kyiv, to the sea.
The land has its variety. In the far west rise the green Carpathian mountains, a world of forested ridges, wooden churches, and highland villages; along the south lies the Black Sea coast, with the great port of Odesa and, on its peninsula, Crimea; and across the centre and east spread the fertile plains and the old industrial and mining regions of the Donbas. The major cities, beyond Kyiv, include Kharkiv in the east, Odesa on the coast, Dnipro on the great river, and Lviv, the elegant cultural heart of the west.
Above all, Ukraine is defined by its soil. Much of the country lies on chernozem, the famous deep black earth, among the most fertile soil on the planet, and this rich land has made Ukraine one of the great farming countries of the world for centuries. The wide fields of wheat and sunflowers under the blue sky are the very image of the nation, echoed in its blue and yellow flag, the blue of the sky above the gold of the ripening grain. The black earth and the open plains are the foundation of Ukrainian life and identity.
The breadbasket of Europe
Thanks to its rich black soil and its vast plains, Ukraine has long been known as the breadbasket of Europe, one of the most important farming nations in the world and a great grower and exporter of food, whose harvests help feed countries far beyond its borders. For centuries the fertile Ukrainian land has produced grain in abundance, and in modern times the country became one of the world's leading exporters of wheat, maize, barley, and, above all, sunflower oil, of which Ukraine is among the very greatest producers anywhere.
This agricultural wealth has shaped the nation deeply. The image of the wheat field stretching to the horizon, and of the sunflower turning its golden face to the sun, are beloved national symbols, woven into Ukrainian art, song, and identity, and the sunflower in particular has become a sign of the country known around the world. Bread itself holds an almost sacred place in Ukrainian culture, honoured in custom and ceremony, and the round ceremonial loaf, the korovai, is central to weddings and to the old tradition of welcoming guests with bread and salt.
The role of breadbasket has also been the source of great suffering, for control of this rich land and its harvests has drawn conquerors and brought tragedy, above all in the famine engineered under Soviet rule. In recent times, the importance of Ukraine's grain to the wider world has been shown again, as war disrupted its harvests and exports and raised fears of hunger in distant lands that depend on Ukrainian wheat. The fertile land and its harvests remain central to what Ukraine is, and to its place in the world.
Not Russia
One of the most important things to understand about Ukraine is that it is a distinct nation, with its own language, history, culture, and identity, separate from Russia, however much the two peoples share a common origin and however often outsiders have confused them. Ukrainians are an East Slavic people, kin to the Russians and Belarusians, but they are their own nation, and the assertion of that distinct Ukrainian identity, long suppressed under Russian and Soviet rule, lies at the centre of the country's modern story.
The roots of Ukraine reach back more than a thousand years to Kyivan Rus, the great medieval state centred on Kyiv that was the first major civilization of the eastern Slavs, from which Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians all trace descent, and which Ukrainians regard as the cradle of their nation. Over the centuries that followed, the lands of Ukraine were ruled and divided among larger powers, the Mongols, Poland and Lithuania, the Russian Empire, and the Austrian Empire, and the Ukrainian people lived long under foreign rule, yet kept their language and identity alive.
Under the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian language and national feeling were often suppressed, and Ukraine was treated as a junior branch of the Russian world rather than a nation in its own right, a view that has shaped the conflict of recent years. Yet through all of this the Ukrainian nation endured, and since gaining independence in 1991, and ever more strongly since 2014, Ukrainians have asserted their distinct identity and their wish to chart their own course as a European nation. The truth that Ukraine is its own nation, not a part of Russia, is the deepest fact of its modern life.
The Cossack spirit
At the heart of Ukrainian identity lies the heritage of the Cossacks, the free warrior horsemen of the steppe who, from the fifteenth century onward, formed self-governing communities of fighters and farmers in the wild borderlands of Ukraine, and who have become the great symbol of Ukrainian freedom, courage, and independence. The Cossacks were renowned warriors and a law unto themselves, electing their own leaders and living by their own code, and they loom large in the Ukrainian imagination as the embodiment of the nation's love of liberty.
The most famous of these were the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who built a fortified stronghold below the rapids of the Dnipro river and formed a remarkable self-governing brotherhood, a kind of warrior republic that fought against the empires and powers around it and at times ruled much of Ukraine. The Cossack age was a time when Ukrainians governed themselves and stood as a power in their own right, and it left a deep and proud mark on the national memory.
The Cossack spirit, of freedom, defiance, self-rule, and martial courage, runs through Ukrainian culture to this day, celebrated in song, poetry, and art, and cherished as an emblem of the nation's love of liberty. The Cossack figure, with his distinctive shaved head and long forelock, his horse and his sabre, is a beloved national emblem, and Cossack songs and traditions are treasured. In times of struggle, Ukrainians have looked back to the Cossacks as the model of a free people defending their land, and the Cossack heritage remains a powerful source of national pride and identity.
The Ukrainian language
Ukraine has its own language, Ukrainian, an East Slavic tongue related to Russian and Belarusian but distinct from them, with its own sound, vocabulary, and literature, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and this language is one of the central pillars of Ukrainian national identity. Though close enough to Russian that the two are partly mutually understandable, Ukrainian is a separate language, often described as soft and musical, and it is the heart of the nation's culture and self-understanding.
The Ukrainian language has a long history of suppression under foreign rule, for both the Russian Empire and, at times, the Soviet Union restricted or discouraged its use, promoting Russian as the language of advancement and treating Ukrainian as a mere peasant dialect, so that for generations many Ukrainians, especially in the cities and the east, came to speak Russian in daily life. The survival and revival of the Ukrainian language has therefore been bound up with the survival of the nation itself.
Today Ukrainian is the single official language and a powerful symbol of national identity, and since 2014, and even more since 2022, many Ukrainians who once spoke mainly Russian have deliberately switched to Ukrainian as an act of national feeling, so that the language has been strengthening and spreading. Russian is still widely understood and spoken, especially in the east and south, and a mixed everyday speech blending the two, called surzhyk, is common. But the Ukrainian language stands at the centre of the nation's identity, a treasured mark of who Ukrainians are.
The golden domes
Ukraine is a deeply Christian country, and the faith that has shaped it for more than a thousand years is Eastern Orthodoxy, whose beautiful churches, crowned with golden domes, rise over every city and village and stand among the great glories of Ukrainian culture. Christianity came to the land in the year 988, when the ruler of Kyivan Rus was baptised and brought the new faith to his people, and Orthodox Christianity has been woven into Ukrainian life, art, and identity ever since.
The Orthodox faith has given Ukraine some of its greatest treasures, above all the ancient golden-domed cathedral of Saint Sophia in Kyiv and the holy Monastery of the Caves, the Lavra, a thousand-year-old centre of Orthodox devotion carved into the hills above the Dnipro. The Orthodox tradition, with its richly decorated churches, its icons, its incense and chanting, and its solemn, beautiful liturgy, lies at the heart of Ukrainian religious life and the marking of the great festivals and the milestones of birth, marriage, and death.
Ukrainian Christianity has its own divisions, bound up with the nation's history. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, and in recent years a Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow has been established and recognised, an act of deep national meaning, while another Orthodox church long tied to the Russian patriarch has come under strain amid the war. In the west of the country, many Ukrainians belong to the Greek Catholic Church, which follows the Orthodox form of worship while recognising the Pope in Rome, a faith that has long anchored western Ukrainian identity. Through all its forms, the Christian faith and its golden-domed churches remain central to Ukrainian culture.
The embroidered shirt
Ukraine has one of the richest folk cultures in Europe, a treasury of traditional crafts, costume, and decoration that Ukrainians cherish as a precious link to their roots and a powerful sign of national identity. The most beloved emblem of this heritage is the vyshyvanka, the traditional embroidered shirt, worn by both men and women, whose intricate patterns, stitched in red and black or many colours, vary by region and carry old meanings of protection and belonging. The embroidered shirt is treasured across Ukraine, worn with pride on festivals and special days, and has become one of the most powerful symbols of the nation.
Equally famous is the Ukrainian Easter egg, the pysanka, a hen's egg decorated with astonishingly intricate patterns in wax and dye, made by an ancient method and covered in symbols drawn from nature and old belief. The making of pysanky, passed down through generations, especially at Easter, is one of the most distinctive and beautiful of all Ukrainian folk arts, and the painted eggs are treasured as small masterpieces.
Ukrainian folk culture is rich in much more: the flower wreath with its trailing ribbons, the vinok, worn by young women; the bright, swirling folk painting of villages such as Petrykivka, honoured by the world; traditional pottery, weaving, and woodcarving; and the decorated home and the embroidered cloth, the rushnyk, used in ceremony and welcome. This deep heritage of folk art and costume, kept alive in village and city alike, is a source of great pride and a living expression of Ukrainian identity, treasured all the more in times of trial.
Borscht and the Ukrainian table
Ukrainian food is hearty, generous, and deeply tied to the rich farmland that produces it, a cuisine of good bread, vegetables, grains, and meat, made with care and served with warmth, at the centre of family and hospitality. The most famous Ukrainian dish of all is borscht, the beloved beetroot soup, deep red and richly flavoured, made in countless family versions with vegetables, sometimes meat, and a spoon of sour cream, a dish so central to the culture that Ukraine has had its borscht-making honoured by the world as part of its heritage.
The Ukrainian table is rich with beloved dishes. There are varenyky, the plump filled dumplings stuffed with potato, cheese, cabbage, cherries, or other fillings; holubtsi, cabbage rolls filled with rice and meat; deruny, potato pancakes; and salo, the cured pork fat that is a much-loved national delicacy. Good bread is sacred, dark and white loaves baked and honoured, and the round ceremonial korovai marks weddings and welcomes. Sour cream, garlic, dill, and pickled vegetables flavour the cooking, and the harvest of the black earth fills the table.
Food in Ukraine is bound up with hospitality and celebration. A Ukrainian host will set a generous table and press food on guests with warmth, for feeding a visitor well is a deep point of honour, and the great festivals each have their special foods, above all the rich meatless dishes of the Christmas Eve feast and the decorated breads and eggs of Easter. Hearty, homely, and generous, Ukrainian cooking reflects the richness of the land and the warmth of the people, and it is one of the great pleasures and comforts of Ukrainian life.
Songs, the bandura, and the hopak
Ukraine is a nation of song, with one of the richest folk music traditions in Europe, and singing runs through Ukrainian life, from the lullaby and the village choir to the great body of folk songs that carry the nation's history, sorrows, and joys. Ukrainian folk singing, often in rich, soaring harmony, is treasured as a deep expression of the national spirit, and the old songs, of love, of the Cossacks, of the seasons, and of the land, are loved and sung across the generations.
The signature instrument of Ukraine is the bandura, a beautiful many-stringed instrument, part lute and part harp, on which traditional musicians accompany their singing. In times past, the wandering minstrels known as kobzars, often blind, travelled the land singing epic songs of the Cossacks and the nation's past to the sound of the bandura, keeping the people's history and spirit alive, and the bandura remains a cherished national instrument and symbol.
Ukraine is famous, too, for its folk dance, above all the hopak, the thrilling, athletic dance of the Cossacks, full of high leaps, spins, and squatting kicks, performed in bright traditional costume, which has become a dazzling emblem of Ukrainian culture on stages around the world. Folk dance, song, and music, performed at festivals, weddings, and celebrations and kept alive by countless choirs and ensembles, are a vivid and beloved part of Ukrainian life, and a proud expression of the nation's identity and resilience.
Shevchenko and the word
Ukraine holds the written and spoken word in deep reverence, and its literature, above all its poetry, has played a central part in the survival and awakening of the nation, for in times when Ukrainian statehood was lost and the language suppressed, it was the poets and writers who kept the national spirit alive. No figure stands higher in Ukrainian culture than the poet Taras Shevchenko, who is revered as the father of the modern nation and its language.
Shevchenko, born a serf in the nineteenth century and freed from bondage, became the great national poet, whose powerful verse in the Ukrainian language gave voice to the suffering and the longing for freedom of his people, championed the dignity of the Ukrainian nation, and inspired generations to come. He is honoured across Ukraine as a prophet and a hero, his statue standing in towns throughout the country, his words known by heart, and his memory bound up with the very idea of the Ukrainian nation.
Ukraine's literary tradition runs wide beyond Shevchenko, including the powerful poet and playwright Lesya Ukrainka, the writer Ivan Franko, and many more, along with a rich heritage of folk tale, legend, and song. The writer Nikolai Gogol, born in Ukraine, drew on its life and folklore even as he wrote in Russian. Through long years without a state of their own, Ukrainians kept their nation alive in words, and the love of poetry and the written word, and the towering figure of Shevchenko, remain at the heart of Ukrainian culture and national feeling.
The memory of the Holodomor
No event lies heavier on the Ukrainian national memory than the Holodomor, the catastrophic famine of the early 1930s, in which millions of Ukrainians starved to death in one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, a wound that still shapes how Ukrainians understand their history and their relationship with Russia. The word itself means death by hunger, and the memory of it is a defining national trauma.
The famine struck in 1932 and 1933, under the rule of the Soviet leader Stalin, when the state seized the grain and food of the Ukrainian countryside, leaving the people of one of the most fertile lands on earth to die of hunger in vast numbers. Ukrainians, and many others in the world, regard the Holodomor as a deliberate act aimed at the Ukrainian people and their resistance to Soviet rule, and it is widely recognised as a genocide. The scale of the death, with millions perishing in the villages of the black earth, is almost beyond comprehension.
For decades under Soviet rule the famine was denied and hidden, its very mention forbidden, and only with independence could Ukrainians openly mourn and remember it. Today the Holodomor is solemnly commemorated each year, its victims honoured, and its memory taught as a central part of the national story. The remembrance of this immense suffering, long silenced and now openly grieved, is bound deeply into Ukrainian identity and into the nation's fierce determination to control its own fate.
Maidan and the road to freedom
The modern history of Ukraine has been a long and hard road toward independence, democracy, and the freedom to choose its own future, marked by moments when the Ukrainian people rose up to defend that future. After centuries under foreign rule and seventy years within the Soviet Union, Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence, beginning the difficult work of building a nation of their own.
The decades that followed saw Ukrainians twice take to the streets in vast numbers to defend their democratic and European path. In 2004, the Orange Revolution overturned a rigged election through peaceful mass protest. Then, in the winter of 2013 and 2014, came the great uprising on Kyiv's central square, the Maidan, when hundreds of thousands gathered, and many died, to reject a turn back toward Russia and to demand a European, democratic future, in what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity. These were defining moments of national will.
The Maidan uprising was followed at once by conflict, as Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and backed an armed separatist war in the eastern Donbas region, beginning years of fighting that would lead, in 2022, to a full-scale invasion. Through these trials, Ukrainians have clung ever more firmly to their wish to be a free, democratic, European nation, in control of their own destiny. The long road to freedom, with its revolutions and its sacrifices, is central to the modern Ukrainian story and to the nation's sense of who it is.
The Orthodox year
The Ukrainian year is shaped by the festivals of the Orthodox Christian calendar, blended with old folk customs reaching back to pre-Christian times, and these celebrations, kept with deep feeling, are among the warmest expressions of Ukrainian culture and family life. The two greatest festivals are Christmas and Easter, both celebrated with rich tradition, special foods, and cherished rituals.
Ukrainian Christmas is a beautiful and solemn family festival, centred on a meatless Christmas Eve supper of twelve symbolic dishes, beginning when the first star appears, and including the special sweet wheat dish kutia. Carol singing is a beloved tradition, with groups going from house to house, sometimes carrying a star, and the season is filled with old customs. In recent years many Ukrainians have moved their Christmas from early January to the twenty-fifth of December, a change of deep meaning as the nation distances itself from the Russian church calendar.
Easter, Velykden, the greatest feast of the Orthodox year, is celebrated with even deeper joy, its rituals among the most cherished in Ukrainian life: the decorating of the beautiful pysanky eggs, the baking of the tall sweet Easter bread, the paska, and the carrying of baskets of food to the church to be blessed, before the family feast. Other festivals mark the turning year, such as the midsummer night of Ivana Kupala, with its bonfires, wreaths, and old customs by the water. These festivals, blending Orthodox faith and ancient folk tradition, fill the Ukrainian year and bind families and communities together.
The village and the home
Family is at the centre of Ukrainian life, and family ties are close, warm, and enduring, reaching across the generations to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who remain deeply involved in one another's lives. The family is the first source of support, belonging, and identity, and family gatherings, above all around the table for the great festivals and celebrations, are central to Ukrainian life. Respect for parents and elders runs deep, and the bond between the generations is strong.
Much of Ukrainian culture and identity is rooted in the village and the countryside, for though Ukraine is now a largely urban nation, the traditions, crafts, songs, and customs of rural life remain the wellspring of the national culture, and many Ukrainians keep a strong connection to a family village, a grandmother's home, or a country garden plot. The figure of the grandmother, the babusya, keeper of the family's traditions, recipes, and faith, is especially cherished, and the village home, with its garden, its embroidered cloths, and its icons, holds a deep place in the Ukrainian heart.
Hospitality is a treasured Ukrainian value, and a guest is received with great warmth and generosity, welcomed, in the old custom, with bread and salt, and pressed with food and drink at a laden table, for to feed and care for a guest is a deep point of honour. The home is kept with pride and care, often adorned with embroidered cloths, folk art, and the icons of the faith. The family, the village roots, and the warmth of hospitality are at the heart of Ukrainian life, and a source of strength in hard times.
A resilient people
Ukrainians are often described as warm, hospitable, hard-working, and deeply resilient people, with a strong attachment to their land, their family, and their nation, and a quiet endurance forged by a long and often hard history. Beneath a reserve that can seem serious or guarded to strangers at first, Ukrainians are warm, generous, and loyal, opening up with great friendliness and hospitality once trust is made, and valuing sincerity, family, and the bonds of community.
The defining quality of the Ukrainian character, shown to the world in recent years, is resilience, a deep strength and endurance in the face of hardship, born of centuries of struggle, foreign rule, and suffering, through which the nation has held to its identity and its will to be free. Ukrainians have a powerful love of freedom and independence, the old Cossack spirit, and a fierce attachment to their homeland, along with a capacity to endure, to help one another, and to keep their culture and good humour alive even in the darkest times.
In everyday life, Ukrainians value family, hospitality, hard work, and faith, and they take deep pride in their land, their language, their traditions, and their folk culture. Greetings are warm among friends, hospitality is generous, and the table is the heart of social life. For a visitor, the keys to Ukraine are warmth and respect, an openness to its rich culture and history, and an appreciation of the hospitality and the resilience of its people. Through all they have endured, Ukrainians have kept a deep humanity, warmth, and strength of spirit.
The nation today
Ukraine today is a nation at war, fighting for its survival and its freedom, and no account of the country can avoid the conflict that has shaped its recent years. In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, building on its earlier seizure of Crimea and its war in the east since 2014, in the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. The Ukrainian people, against great odds, mounted a fierce and determined resistance in defence of their homeland, under their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who became a symbol of that resistance to the world.
The war has brought immense suffering and destruction. Cities and towns have been bombed and besieged, tens of thousands have been killed, and millions of Ukrainians have been driven from their homes, many fleeing abroad as refugees and many more displaced within the country, in one of the largest movements of people in Europe in generations. Whole regions have been devastated, and the nation has endured attacks on its cities, its power supply, and its people through the seasons of the war. As this guide is written, the fighting continues, and efforts to reach a peace have not succeeded, leaving the situation grave and uncertain.
Through this ordeal, the Ukrainian nation has shown the world its resilience, unity, and resolve, and its determination to remain a free, independent, and European country. The war has deepened the sense of Ukrainian identity, strengthened the language and the culture, and drawn the support of many nations. Beneath the conflict, the enduring Ukraine remains: the black earth and the golden fields, the golden-domed churches, the embroidered shirts and painted eggs, the songs, the borscht, and the warm hospitality of its people. Proud, resilient, and rooted in a deep and ancient culture, Ukraine endures, and looks toward the day it can build its future in peace.