Ukraine

The medieval state of Kyivan Rus, centred on Kyiv from the ninth to the thirteenth century, adopted Christianity in 988 and is claimed as a common ancestor by Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians. After the Mongol invasions the lands were divided among Lithuania, Poland, and later the expanding Russian and Austrian empires. The Cossack Hetmanate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a touchstone of Ukrainian statehood and self-rule.

A short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–21) was crushed and the territory absorbed into the Soviet Union, where Stalin's policies produced the Holodomor of 1932–33, a man-made famine that killed millions and is recognised by many countries as genocide. The Second World War brought further catastrophe, including the massacre at Babyn Yar, and in 1986 the Chornobyl reactor explosion contaminated a swathe of the north.

Ukraine declared independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed. Post-Soviet politics was marked by corruption and a tug-of-war between closer ties with the West and with Russia: the 2004 Orange Revolution overturned a rigged election, and the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests (the "Revolution of Dignity") drove out President Viktor Yanukovych after he abandoned an EU agreement. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and fomenting war in the eastern Donbas in 2014. On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion; Ukrainian forces halted the drive on Kyiv, and the war has continued since, with mass civilian casualties, millions of refugees and displaced people, and widespread destruction. Ukraine was granted EU candidate status in 2022 and opened accession negotiations in 2024.

Ukrainian culture has been asserted against long periods of imperial and Soviet suppression, and the war has sharpened that. Language is central: a decisive shift toward speaking Ukrainian, renaming streets, and distancing from Russian cultural influence has accelerated since 2022. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine, recognised as independent from Moscow in 2019, and the Greek Catholic Church in the west are the main religious bodies.

Folk traditions remain vivid — the embroidered vyshyvanka shirt, now an everyday symbol of identity with its own national day; pysanky, intricately wax-dyed Easter eggs; the bandura, a many-stringed folk instrument; and polyphonic village singing. Borscht was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2022 as a Ukrainian dish, amid the war.

Hospitality is generous, with guests pressed to eat and drink; toasts at the table are taken seriously. Since 2022, volunteering, fundraising for the army, and commemorations of the fallen have become part of the fabric of daily life.

Before the invasion around 41 million people lived in Ukraine; the war has driven millions abroad as refugees, mostly women and children, and displaced millions more inside the country. Kyiv, the capital, and Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro are the major cities; Kharkiv and the south and east have been heavily shelled, and Mariupol was largely destroyed.

Life under martial law means air-raid sirens, time in shelters and metro stations, curfews, and rolling power and water cuts caused by strikes on the grid, met with a large-scale switch to generators and battery power. Men of military age are subject to mobilisation and generally cannot leave the country. The economy has contracted sharply and depends heavily on Western financial and military support, though agriculture, IT services, and much ordinary business have kept going.

Away from the front, in cities like Lviv and Kyiv, cafés, theatres, and shops operate between alerts, and there is a determined normality, but no part of the country is untouched by the war.

Ukrainian cooking is hearty and vegetable-rich. Borscht, a beetroot soup with cabbage, potato, and often meat, served with pampushky (garlic bread rolls) and sour cream, is the national dish and comes in countless regional versions. Varenyky — filled dumplings, with potato, cheese, cabbage, cherries, or meat — and holubtsi (stuffed cabbage rolls) are everyday staples.

Salo (cured pork fat), rye bread, pickled vegetables, deruny (potato pancakes), kotleta po-kyivsky (chicken Kyiv), and kholodets (meat aspic) are classics, and syrniki (sweet cheese pancakes) a favourite breakfast. Odesa adds a Black Sea and Jewish influence, and the west a Habsburg one, with coffee-house culture strong in Lviv.

Uzvar (dried-fruit compote), kvass (fermented rye drink), and kompot are the traditional soft drinks; horilka (vodka, often pepper- or honey-infused) is the spirit, and Ukrainian craft beer and wine from the south have grown.

In more settled times, Kyiv offered Saint Sophia's Cathedral and the cave monastery of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra (both UNESCO sites), the Golden Gate, the Motherland Monument above the Dnipro, and Andriivskyi Descent; Independence Square (Maidan) is the symbolic heart of the country's two revolutions.

Lviv, in the far west and least affected by the war, has a UNESCO-listed old town of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, a celebrated coffee-house and chocolate culture, and Habsburg-era grandeur. The Carpathian Mountains beyond it offer hiking, ski villages, wooden churches (also UNESCO-listed), and the Hutsul folk culture.

Odesa, on the Black Sea, has the Potemkin Stairs, an opera house, and catacombs, its historic centre added to the World Heritage list — and its danger list — in 2023 after Russian strikes. Kamianets-Podilskyi's island fortress, the palace at Chernivtsi, and the exclusion zone around Chornobyl (visited on organised tours before 2022) round out a country whose sights are, for now, mostly out of reach.