Ukraine

Ukraine (pronounced in Ukrainian UKRAYINA) is a country in southeastern Europe, the second largest of the continent after Russia, and of the most populous in Europe. Its history spans more than a thousand years. For several centuries it had stayed under Russia’s domination and regained independence in 1991.

The garden and the bell tower in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra Monastery.
 		Physical geography
Ukraine is bordered by Belarus on the north, by Russia on the north, northeast, and east, by the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea on the south, by Moldova and Romania on the southwest, and by Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland on the west.
The capital is Kyiv. Ukraine occupies an area of 233,100 square miles (603,700 square km) and its population is about 50,000,000.
Ukraine consists almost entirely of level plains and occupies a large portion of the East European Plain. The Dnipro River runs from north to south. Other lowlands extend along the shores of the Black and Azov seas in southern Ukraine, while the Crimean Peninsula, in the extreme south, has both lowlands and low mountains. Western Ukraine has some uplands, and the Carpathian Mountains extend through that region for more than 150 miles (240 km).
Ukraine lies in a temperate climatic zone and receives 16 to 24 inches (400 to 600 mm) of precipitation annually.

The Dnipro, Don, Dniester, and other rivers all drain southward through the plains to empty into the Azov-Black Sea Basin. Ukraine’s most important river, the Dnipro, is extensively dammed along much of its course for hydroelectric and irrigation purposes.

Population
Ethnic Ukrainians make up more than seven-tenths of the total population of about fifty million people. The Ukrainian language is related to Russian and Belarusian and belongs to the Slavic group of languages.
Russians are the largest minority group, accounting for about two-tenths of the population. Other ethnic minorities of varying sizes are Belarusians, Moldavians, Greeks, Poles, Bulgarians, Jews, Tartars, and others. The highest population densities are found in the industrialized Donetsk Basin and Dnipro Bend regions and in the agriculturally productive forest-steppe belt.

Industries and agriculture
The belt of mixed forest and steppe running west-east across south-central Ukraine has rich black soils whose intense cultivation has made the country a major producer of winter wheat and sugar beets. Other crops include sunflower seeds, corn (maize), potatoes, grapes, oats, rye, millet, and buckwheat. Fruits and vegetables are grown on the outskirts of cities, and cattle and pigs are raised throughout the country.
Ukraine has rich reserves of iron ore, bituminous and anthracite coals, and manganese-bearing ores located in close proximity to each other . This region, in east-central Ukraine, is the industrial heartland of the country and one of the major heavy-industrial and mining-metallurgical complexes of Europe. Ukraine also produces natural gas and petroleum, though reserves of these fuels were much depleted during the Soviet period.
Besides its basic mining industries, Ukraine has ferrous-metals industries that produce iron and steel in large quantities. Durable goods manufactured include mining and metallurgical equipment, automobiles, and tractors. The chemical industry produces large amounts of sulfuric acid and mineral fertilizers. Ukraine’s food-processing industries yield a wide spectrum of all kinds of food of good quality.

The Day of Kyiv celebrated at Andriyivsky Uzviz.
 		 
Political system
Ukraine’s political system underwent rapid changes in the early 1990s after the country gained its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in late 1991. Ukraine’s parliament is called the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), whose members (People’s Deputies) are chosen to four-year terms in free, multicandidate elections. The chief executive of Ukraine is the president, who is also chosen in free elections. The day-to-day administration of the government rests in the hands of the prime minister, who heads the Cabinet of Ministers and is chosen by the president with parliamentary approval.

Education
Illiteracy was virtually eliminated in the first half of the twentieth century, and secondary education is compulsory. Technical schools provide specialized education in many fields and higher education is gained at numerous universities, granting bachelor’s, master’s and doctorates degrees. Liberal arts and a wide scope of scientific and technical subjects are taught at a very high level.

The main building of Taras Shevchenko University.
 Culture
A millennium of cultural development has created a wide spectrum of spiritual achievements. Splendid architectural landmarks, very rich folk art, music, a network of drama and music theatres, art schools, thousands of artists creating in all possible styles attest to a high level of cultural development despite all political and economic upheavals.

Sports
Dynamo Kyiv is a leading soccer club in Ukraine, well known in Europe for its remarkable victories over many grandees of European football. Ukrainian boxers successfully compete at the world’s professional boxing level. Ukrainian national teams and individual athletes win gold, silver and bronze at the Olympic games and at world and European championships.

Some historical facts
The state known as Kyivan Rus-Ukraine arose in late 9th century.The Kyivan Rus-Ukraine reached its zenith in the 10th and 11th centuries under the rulers Volodymyr I (St Vladimir) and his son Yaroslav I (Yaroslav the Wise). Volodymyr I adopted Christianity as the official religion of his realm about 888 AD.
Christianity gave the eastern Slavic peoples their first written language, called Church Slavonic and Kyiv became eastern Europe’s chief political and cultural centre. The 12th and 13th centuries saw the decline of Kyiv owing to internal dissension, struggles with the invading nomads. The Mongol conquest in the mid-13th century decisively ended Kyivan power, but a Ukrainian principality in western Ukraine that had emerged about 1200 continued into the 14th century.
In the 14th century Lithuania annexed most Ukrainian lands except for the Halychyna principality, which passed to the kingdom of Poland. The Cossacks in 1648, led by their Hetman (military leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rose against the Poles and formed a semi-independent, if short-lived, state. Khmelnytsky’s need for help against the Poles led to an agreement with the Muscovite tsar in 1654.
In the late 18th-century the Russian Empire obtained the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro, except for Halychyna, which went to Austria. A Ukrainian nationalist movement developed in the 19th century, but in Russian-held Ukraine the movement faced political repression and restrictions against the Ukrainian language.
After the Russian Revolution of February 1917, Ukrainian and Bolshevik forces struggled for control of Ukraine until 1921, when the Soviet government emerged victorious.
Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin carried out by brutal force a policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. This policy met with peasant resistance, which in turn prompted the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian farmers by Soviet authorities, with the result that a famine in the early 1930s took an estimated five million lives.
Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union (1941) brought devastation to Ukraine and enormous suffering to its population. A major reconstruction effort after the defeat of the Nazis restored the country’s economy to its pre-war level in a short time.
After the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reforms in the late 1980s, Ukrainian nationalist feelings gradually awoke, and eventually led Ukraine gaining independence in 1991.

Present day
Both Western and domestic observers agree that Ukraine has a great economic potential but the pace of reforms is slowed down by the leftist opposition, ineptitude, inefficiency and corruption. In the fall of 1998 Ukraine was hit by a bad economic crisis. But Ukraine’s very rich historical and cultural legacy, determination on the part of many forces working for the good of the country, will hopefully pull Ukraine through and launch it successfully into the 21st century.

Photo by O. Horobets.