The territory of present-day Ukraine has been either invaded or occupied a number of times throughout its history.
Conflict | Invasion | Attacking force(s) | Year | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' | Siege of Kiev (1240) | Mongol Empire | 1236–1242 | The Mongol Empire invaded and conquered Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, destroying numerous southern cities, including the biggest ones: Kyiv and Chernihiv. [1] |
Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe | Crimean Khanate | 1450–1769 | According to Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny, "from 1450 to 1586, eighty-six raids were recorded, and from 1600 to 1647, seventy. Although estimates of the number of captives taken in a single raid reached as high as 30,000, the average figure was closer to 3000...In Podilia alone, about one-third of all the villages were devastated or abandoned between 1578 and 1583." [2] In 1769, the last major Tatar raid, which took place during the Russo-Turkish War, saw the capture of 20,000 slaves. [3] | |
Russo-Polish War (1654–1667) | Battle of Konotop (1659) | Tsardom of Russia | 1659 | Ukrainian Cossacks led by Ivan Vyhovsky repelled an invasion by the Russian Tsardom at Konotop. [4] : 144 |
Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–1921) | First Soviet invasion of Ukraine Battle of Kruty Battle of Kiev (1918) | Russian SFSR | 1918 | Initial fighting in the war (Ukrainian–Soviet War) lasted from January to June 1918, ending with the Central Powers' intervention. [4] : 350, 403 |
Central Powers intervention in Ukraine | German Empire Austro-Hungarian Empire | Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian forces entered Ukraine to push out Bolshevik forces, as part of an agreement with the Ukrainian People's Republic. [4] : 351, 357 Occupation: Ukrainian State (1918), a German-installed government of much of Ukraine. | ||
Allied intervention in Ukraine | French Republic Kingdom of Greece Kingdom of Romania | 1918–1919 | Failure: Allies evacuate | |
Second Soviet invasion of Ukraine | Russian SFSR | 1919 | A full-scale invasion began in January 1919. [4] : 361 Ended with the invasion by the White Army. | |
White invasion of Ukraine | South Russia | White Army captures Donbas, Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv. Ended with the invasion by the Red Army. | ||
Third Soviet invasion of Ukraine | Russian SFSR | 1919–1920 | Red Army captures Kharkiv, Kyiv, Donbas and Odesa. | |
World War II (1939–1945) | Hungarian invasion of Carpatho-Ukraine | Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946) | 1939 | The Kingdom of Hungary occupied and annexed the just-proclaimed Carpatho-Ukraine. The Governorate of Subcarpathia (1939–1945) region included her former territory. |
Soviet invasion of Poland (Ukrainian Front) | Soviet Union | The Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939, extending into Western Ukraine. [4] : 454 Occupation: After the Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, the Soviet Union occupied Western Ukraine until it fell to Nazi Germany in November 1941. They retook the land in 1944. [5] : 625 | ||
Operation Barbarossa | Nazi Germany | 1941 | Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, [4] : 453, 460 in June 1941 with assistance from allied Romania. [6] By November they controlled almost all of what had been Soviet Ukraine, including the portion annexed in 1939. [5] : 624 Occupations:
| |
Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present) | Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation | Russian Federation | 2014 | Russia invaded and subsequently annexed Crimea, then administered by Ukraine as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, during February–March 2014, [7] [8] and also took control of part of the village of Strilkove in neighboring Kherson Oblast. [9] Occupation: The Republic of Crimea and federal city of Sevastopol (2014–present), claimed by Russia as federal subjects and considered an occupation by the government of Ukraine (as part of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine) and by the United Nations. [10] [11] |
War in Donbas | 2014–2022 | After a commencement of hostilities in April 2014, Russian forces invaded the Donbas region of Ukraine in August of that year. [12] [9] A report released by the Royal United Services Institute in March 2015 said that "the presence of large numbers of Russian troops on Ukrainian sovereign territory" became a "permanent feature" of the war following the invasion, [13] with regular Russian and Ukrainian forces coming into direct conflict at the Battle of Ilovaisk [14] [15] and likely the Battle of Debaltseve. [16] Low-intensity fighting continued through 2022, despite the declaration of numerous ceasefires. Occupation: The Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic (2014–2022) were breakaway states in eastern Ukraine that were supported by Russia. | ||
Russian invasion of Ukraine | 2022–present | Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. [17] Occupation: Russia occupied over 25% of Ukrainian territory before being pushed back in counteroffensives. Russia unilaterally declared that the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts were annexed into the Russian Federation (2022–present). |
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which borders it to the east and northeast. It also borders Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; and Romania and Moldova to the southwest; with a coastline along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the south and southeast. Kyiv is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa. Ukraine's official language is Ukrainian; Russian is also widely spoken, especially in the east and south.
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.
The Ukrainian State, sometimes also called the Second Hetmanate, was an anti-Bolshevik government that existed on most of the modern territory of Ukraine from 29 April to 14 December 1918.
Left-bank Ukraine is a historic name of the part of Ukraine on the left (east) bank of the Dnieper River, comprising the modern-day oblasts of Chernihiv, Poltava and Sumy as well as the eastern parts of Kyiv and Cherkasy.
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group and nation native to Crimea. The formation and ethnogenesis of Crimean Tatars occurred during the 13th–17th centuries, uniting Cumans, who appeared in Crimea in the 10th century, with other peoples who had inhabited Crimea since ancient times and gradually underwent Tatarization, including Greeks, Italians, Armenians, Goths, Sarmatians, and others.
The Isthmus of Perekop, literally Isthmus of the Trench, is the narrow, 5–7 kilometres (3.1–4.3 mi) wide strip of land that connects the Crimean Peninsula to the mainland of Ukraine. The isthmus projects between the Black Sea to the west and the Syvash to the east. The isthmus takes its name of "Perekop" from the Tatar fortress of Or Qapi.
The Volhynians were an East Slavic tribe of the Early Middle Ages and the Principality of Volhynia in 987–1199.
The borders of Russia changed through military conquests and by ideological and political unions in the course of over five centuries (1533–present).
The transfer of the Crimean oblast in the Soviet Union in 1954 was an administrative action of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet that transferred the government of Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR.
Orest Subtelny was a Ukrainian-Canadian historian.
Various factions fought over Ukrainian territory after the collapse of the Russian Empire following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and after the First World War ended in 1918, resulting in the collapse of Austria-Hungary, which had ruled Ukrainian Galicia. The crumbling of the empires had a great effect on the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and in a short period of four years a number of Ukrainian governments sprang up. This period was characterized by optimism and by nation-building, as well as by chaos and civil war. Matters stabilized somewhat in 1921 with the territory of modern-day Ukraine divided between Soviet Ukraine and Poland, and with small ethnic-Ukrainian regions belonging to Czechoslovakia and to Romania.
The recorded history of the Crimean Peninsula, historically known as Tauris, Taurica, and the Tauric Chersonese, begins around the 5th century BCE when several Greek colonies were established along its coast, the most important of which was Chersonesos near modern day Sevastopol, with Scythians and Tauri in the hinterland to the north. The southern coast gradually consolidated into the Bosporan Kingdom which was annexed by Pontus and then became a client kingdom of Rome. The south coast remained Greek in culture for almost two thousand years including under Roman successor states, the Byzantine Empire (341–1204), the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), and the independent Principality of Theodoro. In the 13th century, some Crimean port cities were controlled by the Venetians and by the Genovese, but the interior was much less stable, enduring a long series of conquests and invasions. In the medieval period, it was partially conquered by Kievan Rus' whose prince Vladimir the Great was baptised at Sevastopol, which marked the beginning of the Christianization of Kievan Rus'. During the Mongol invasion of Europe, the north and centre of Crimea fell to the Mongol Golden Horde, and in the 1440s the Crimean Khanate formed out of the collapse of the horde but quite rapidly itself became subject to the Ottoman Empire, which also conquered the coastal areas which had kept independent of the Khanate. A major source of prosperity in these times was frequent raids into Russia for slaves.
On the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, capturing the eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic. Lwów, the capital of the Lwów Voivodeship and the principal city and cultural center of the region of Galicia, was captured and occupied by September 22, 1939 along with other provincial capitals including Tarnopol, Brześć, Stanisławów, Łuck, and Wilno to the north. The eastern provinces of interwar Poland were inhabited by an ethnically mixed population, with ethnic Poles as well as Polish Jews dominant in the cities. These lands now form the backbone of modern Western Ukraine and West Belarus.
South Ukraine refers, generally, to the territories in the South of Ukraine.
Ukraine: A History is a 1988 book on the history of Ukraine written by Orest Subtelny, a professor of history and political science at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a comprehensive survey of the history of the geographical area encompassed by what is modern-day Ukraine. Updated editions have been published in 1994 to include new material on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 2000 to include Ukraine's first decade of independence, and 2009 to include the Orange Revolution and the effects of globalization on Ukraine.
For over three centuries, the military of the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde conducted slave raids primarily in lands controlled by Russia and Poland-Lithuania as well as other territories, often under the sponsorship of the Ottoman Empire.
The Autonomous Republic of Crimea is an administrative division of Ukraine encompassing most of Crimea that was annexed by Russia in 2014. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea occupies most of the peninsula, while the City of Sevastopol occupies the rest.
The Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet consists of three bilateral agreements between Russia and Ukraine signed on 28 May 1997 whereby the two countries established two independent national fleets, divided armaments and bases between them, and set forth conditions for basing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. The treaty was supplemented by provisions in the Russian–Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, which was signed three days later. Russia unilaterally terminated the Partition Treaty in 2014 after it annexed Crimea.
Events in the year 1997 in Ukraine.
The Republic of Crimea was the interim name of a polity on the Crimean peninsula between the dissolution of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1992 and the abolition of the Crimean Constitution by the Ukrainian Parliament in 1995. This period was one of conflict with the Ukrainian government over the levels of autonomy that Crimea enjoyed in relation to Ukraine and links between the ethnically Russian Crimea and the Russian Federation.
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