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Ukraine is no longer "The Ukraine." For centuries, the definite article was considered appropriate, given the land's history and the name's meaning. However, given recent events, the article is usually considered inappropriate and even offensive.
 The Dnepr River was settled by humans as the ice age receded around 5000 BC. The settlers raised crops and livestock. Little else is known of them and historians rarely consider them as an independent people, but rather as a culture that would interact with others from as far away as Central Asia, the Middle East, and Scandinavia - the Scythians, the Samaritans, the Khazars, the Ostrogoths, and the Hellenic Jews.
By the sixth century, this mixing of peoples produced a new distinct linguistic and cultural group known as Slavs, who set about building fortifications and militaries to protect themselves and finally entered history. However, while their land held rich potential, including Europe's richest farming ground and its most profitable trade route, they remained plagued by invasions and infighting.
The most common users of Dnepr trade route, which linked Western Europe to the Silk Road, were the Varangians (Vikings). According to legend, the Slavs invited one of these merchant-warriors to become their leader – though the Varangians may have also initiated the idea to protect their investments. In any case, the arrival of the new ruler in Kiev is considered the birth of a new civilization – the Russian civilization - which would later move its capital eastward.
When Rus' fell to the Mongols, so did Ukraine for a short time. In the mid 14th century, Mindaguas of Lithuania conquered eastern Ukraine (including Kiev) from the Mongols while western Ukraine was absorbed into an expanding Polish empire. The two halves were united when the Lithuanian and Polish empires did the same in the 16th century to present a united front against an increasingly aggressive and newly independent Moscow. By this time, the local people around the Dnepr were known as "Ruthenian." They worshiped in Orthodox churches and spoke a language also called "Ruthenian." These locals did not fair well in the new Latin-speaking, Catholic empire and were soon relegated to serfdom, producing grain for the profit of Polish nobility.
 Many fled south to the Central Dnepr Basin. The area was a block of fertile land contested between the Poles, the Turks, and the Tartars of Crimea, but over which no one held effective authority. It was known as the "U-krayi-na" or the "Borderlands." The fiercely independent Ruthenians became master equestrians and warriors to protect their new independence from all three potential masters. Their loose militia system, which allowed them to spend most time farming but banded them together in war, was so effective that the rebuked Turks soon began referring to the warrior-farmers as "Cossacks" or "free men."
For the first time in their history, the population had become a truly independent entity, and not a borderland for another civilization. Europe’s poor and oppressed flocked to them hoping for a better life and soon the Cossacks were powerful enough to sack Constantinople, crush Poland, and under the legendary hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, to found an independent country covering much of modern Ukraine. The Cossacks are the source of what is considered "traditional Ukrainian." However, the independent Ukraine would last only three years. Khmelnytsky, seeking military support from Moscow to help sustain his new country, was tricked into swearing loyalty to the tsar – giving the tsar dominion over the land.
 Ukraine again became a land of warfare and infighting that ended only when Russia established permanent dominance. Ukraine was again drawn in half by the Russian and the Austro-Hungarians, both of which would institute a particularly harsh form of serfdom on Ukraine, just as most of Europe was moving towards freer social forms. It would remain divided until the USSR "liberated" the western half in WWII, which saw the Nazis ravage the area and decimate the centuries-old Jewish population.
Ukrainian nationalism as it is known today was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when most of Europe was fascinated with peasant culture. Scholars at the university in Kharkiv began studying and documenting local customs, songs, stories, and the local language which began to be referred to as Ukrainian rather than Ruthenian. In 1840, Taras Shevchenko published Kobzar, a collection of Ukrainian poetry that is still considered the greatest achievement of that written language. Yet the peasants who owned that culture and that language remained a lower class, used by the Russians, the Austro-Hungarians, and later the Soviets to produce massive grain exports while they themselves starved. Many immigrated to new lands of freedom: America and Canada.
"The" Ukraine became Ukraine again only in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell. The country is still poor and suffering from its Soviet past, which left behind large and economically unsustainable factories and bureaucracies, and an ecological disaster at Chernobyl that is still causing problems in health, ecology, and the economy. However, major cities such as Kiev are starting to reap the benefits of recent economic reforms and the popular movement for greater governmental transparency.
 Travelers are often struck by Kiev's diverse architecture, which mixes Russian with western European styles and features some fascinating examples of early Soviet constructionist buildings. The wide, green streets are arranged to feature prominent buildings and are kept immaculately clean. They offer rewarding sight-seeing strolls and are lined with shops, coffee houses, and pubs. The people are surprisingly friendly as well, apparently happy just to be Ukrainian.
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