Template:Wp-Ukraine-History

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Early history

Settlement by modern humans in Ukraine and its vicinity dates back to 32,000 BC, with evidence of the Gravettian culture in the Crimean Mountains. By 4,500 BC, the Neolithic Cucuteni–Trypillia culture was flourishing in wide areas of modern Ukraine, including Trypillia and the entire Dnieper-Dniester region. Ukraine is also considered to be the likely location of the first domestication of the horse. During the Iron Age, the land was inhabited by Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. Between 700 BC and 200 BC it was part of the Scythian kingdom.

From the 6th century BC, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine colonies were established on the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea, such as at Tyras, Olbia, and Chersonesus. These thrived into the 6th century AD. The Goths stayed in the area, but came under the sway of the Huns from the 370s. In the 7th century, the territory that is now eastern Ukraine was the centre of Old Great Bulgaria. At the end of the century, the majority of Bulgar tribes migrated in different directions, and the Khazars took over much of the land.

In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Early Slavic, Antes people lived in Ukraine. The Antes were the ancestors of Ukrainians: White Croats, Severians, Eastern Polans, Drevlyans, Dulebes, Ulichians, and Tiverians. Migrations from the territories of present-day Ukraine throughout the Balkans established many South Slavic nations. Northern migrations, reaching almost to Lake Ilmen, led to the emergence of the Ilmen Slavs, Krivichs, and Radimichs, the groups ancestral to the Russians. Following an Avar raid in 602 and the collapse of the Antes Union, most of these peoples survived as separate tribes until the beginning of the second millennium.

Golden Age of Kyiv

The establishment of the Kievan Rus' remains obscure and uncertain; there are at least three versions depending on interpretations of the chronicles. In general, the state included much of present-day Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. According to the Primary Chronicle the Rus' elite and rulers initially consisted of Varangians from Scandinavia. In 882, the pagan Prince Oleg (Oleh) conquered Kyiv from Askold and Dir and proclaimed it as the capital of the Rus'. However, it is also believed that the East Slavic tribes along the southern parts of the Dnieper River were already in the process of forming a state independently.

During the 10th and 11th centuries, Kievan Rus' became the largest and most powerful state in Europe. The Varangians later assimilated into the Slavic population and became part of the first Rus' dynasty, the Rurik dynasty.^[1] Kievan Rus' was composed of several principalities ruled by the interrelated Rurikid kniazes ("princes"), who often fought each other for possession of Kyiv.

The Golden Age of Kievan Rus' began with the reign of Vladimir the Great (980–1015), who turned Rus' toward Byzantine Christianity. During the reign of his son, Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054), Kievan Rus' reached the zenith of its cultural development and military power.^[1] The state soon fragmented as the relative importance of regional powers rose again. After a final resurgence under the rule of Vladimir II Monomakh (1113–1125) and his son Mstislav (1125–1132), Kievan Rus' finally disintegrated into separate principalities following Mstislav's death.

The 13th-century Mongol invasion devastated Kievan Rus' and Kyiv was completely destroyed in 1240. On today's Ukrainian territory, the principalities of Halych and Volodymyr-Volynskyi arose, and were merged into the state of Galicia–Volhynia. Daniel of Galicia, son of Roman the Great, re-united much of south-western Rus', including Volhynia, Galicia and the ancient capital of Kyiv. He was subsequently crowned by the papal archbishop as the first king of the newly created Kingdom of Ruthenia in 1253.

Foreign domination

In 1349, Ruthenia ceased to exist as an independent entity in the aftermath of the Galicia–Volhynia Wars, with its lands partitioned between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. From the mid-13th century to the late 1400s the Republic of Genoa founded numerous colonies in the Black Sea region of modern Ukraine and transformed these into large commercial centers headed by the consul, a representative of the Republic. In 1430, the region of Podolia was incorporated into Poland and Ukraine became increasingly settled by Polish colonisers. In 1441, Genghisid prince Haci I Giray founded the Crimean Khanate on the Crimean Peninsula and the surrounding steppes; the Khanate orchestrated Tatar slave raids and took an estimated two million Ruthenian slaves.

In 1569 the Union of Lublin established the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and most of the former Ruthenian lands were transferred from Lithuania to the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, becoming de jure Polish territory. Under the pressures of Polonisation, many landed gentry of Ruthenia converted to Catholicism and joined the circles of the Polish nobility.

Deprived of native protectors among Rus nobility, the peasants and townspeople began turning for protection to the emerging Zaporozhian Cossacks. In the mid-17th century, a Cossack military quasi-state, the Zaporozhian Host, was formed by Dnieper Cossacks and Ruthenian peasants. Poland exercised little real control over this population, but found the Cossacks to be useful against the Turks and Tatars, and at times the two were allies in military campaigns. However, the continued harsh enserfment of Ruthenian peasantry by Polish overlords and the suppression of the Orthodox Church alienated the Cossacks.^[2] The Cossacks did not shy from taking up arms against those they perceived as enemies and occupiers, including the Polish Catholic state with its local representatives.

Cossack Hetmanate

In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky led the largest of the Cossack uprisings against the Commonwealth and the Polish king. After Khmelnytsky made an entry into Kyiv in 1648, where he was hailed liberator of the people from Polish captivity, he founded the Cossack Hetmanate, which existed until 1764 (some sources claim until 1782). After Khmelnytsky suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Berestechko in 1651, he turned to the Russian tsar for help. In 1654, Khmelnytsky was subject to the Pereyaslav Council, forming a military and political alliance with Russia that acknowledged loyalty to the Russian monarch.

In the period 1657–1686 came "The Ruin", a devastating 30-year war amongst Russia, Poland, the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, and Cossacks for control of the Cossack Hetmanate. The wars escalated in intensity with hundreds of thousands of deaths. The "Treaty of Perpetual Peace" between Russia and Poland in 1686 divided the lands of the Cossack Hetmanate between them, reducing the portion over which Poland had claimed sovereignty. In 1686, the Metropolitanate of Kyiv was annexed by the Moscow Patriarchate through a synodal letter of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Dionysius IV, thus placing the Metropolitanate of Kyiv under the authority of Moscow.

In 1709, Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) defected to Sweden against Russia in the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Eventually Tsar Peter recognized that to consolidate and modernize Russia's political and economic power it was necessary to do away with the Cossack Hetmanate as well as the Ukrainian and Cossack aspirations to autonomy.^[3] Mazepa died in exile after fleeing from the Battle of Poltava (1709), in which the Swedes and their Cossack allies suffered a catastrophic defeat.^[3]

In 1768, the Cossacks led yet another anti-Polish uprising, called Koliivshchyna, killing tens of thousands of Poles and Jews who settled Ukraine in the previous centuries. Religious warfare also broke out between two Ukrainian groups. Increasing conflict between the Ruthenian Uniate Church and Orthodox parishes along the newly reinforced Polish-Russian border on the Dnieper eventually led to the uprising. Faith also reflected the opposing Polish (Western Catholic) and Russian (Eastern Orthodox) political allegiances.

In the years 1764–1781, Catherine the Great incorporated much of Central Ukraine into the Russian Empire when the Cossack Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich were abolished. After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 1783, the newly acquired lands, now called Novorossiya were opened up to settlement by Russians. The tsarist autocracy established a policy of Russification, suppressing the use of the Ukrainian language and curtailing the Ukrainian national identity. The western part of present-day Ukraine was subsequently split between Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria after the fall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795.

19th and early 20th century

Beginning in the 19th century, there was migration from Ukraine to distant areas of the Russian Empire. According to the 1897 census, there were 223,000 ethnic Ukrainians in Siberia and 102,000 in Central Asia. An additional 1.6 million emigrated to the east in the ten years after the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1906. Far Eastern areas with an ethnic Ukrainian population became known as Green Ukraine.

The 19th century saw the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, particularly in Austrian Galicia under the relatively lenient rule of the Habsburgs. With growing urbanization and modernization, and a cultural trend toward romantic nationalism, a Ukrainian intelligentsia committed to national rebirth and social justice emerged. The serf-turned-national-poet Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) and the political theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841–1895) led the growing nationalist movement.

Ukrainians entered World War I on the side of both the Central Powers, under Austria, and the Triple Entente, under Russia. Around 3.5 million Ukrainians fought with the Imperial Russian Army, while 250,000 fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army. During the Russian Revolution and War of Independence, the short-lived and socialist-leaning Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) was proclaimed on 23 June 1917 with Mykhailo Hrushevsky at its head. The pro-Soviet factions (Bolsheviks, some Mensheviks, Left SRs and others) founded the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets and later the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, successively established on the territories of the former Russian Empire; while the West Ukrainian People's Republic and the Hutsul Republic emerged briefly in the Ukrainian lands of former Austro-Hungarian territory. Meanwhile, the German Empire desired to establish its own client state in the region and as such attempted to oust the UPR militarily, replacing it with the conservative and monarchist Ukrainian State led by Pavlo Skoropadskyi. All of these factions sought to forge the future of Ukraine and at various times fought both alongside and against the Red, White, Black and Green armies that formed both natively and from the other former parts of the Russian Empire, as well as against Poland in the western provinces. The result of the conflict was a partial victory for the Second Polish Republic, which annexed the Western Ukrainian provinces, as well as a larger-scale victory for the pro-Soviet forces, which succeeded in dislodging the remaining factions and establishing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Soviet Ukraine). Meanwhile, modern-day Bukovina was occupied by Romania and Carpathian Ruthenia was admitted to Czechoslovakia as an autonomy.

This conflict, a part of the broader Russian Civil War, devastated the whole of the former Russian Empire including eastern and central Ukraine. The fighting left over 1.5 million people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless in the former Russian Empire's territory. Soviet Ukraine also faced the Russian famine of 1921 (primarily affecting the Russian Volga-Ural region).

Inter-war Ukraine

In Poland, the Polish government openly propagated anti-Ukrainian sentiment and restricted rights of people who declared Ukrainian nationality and belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church. In consequence, an underground Ukrainian nationalist and militant movement arose in the 1920s and 1930s, which gradually transformed into the Ukrainian Military Organization and later the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Meanwhile, the recently constituted Soviet Ukraine became one of the founding republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, more commonly known as the Soviet Union or USSR.

During the 1920s, under the Ukrainisation policy pursued by the national Communist leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk, Soviet leadership encouraged a national renaissance in Ukrainian culture and language. Ukrainisation was part of the Soviet-wide policy of Korenisation (literally indigenisation), which was intended to promote the advancement of native peoples, their language and culture into the governance of their respective republics.

Around the same time, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), which introduced market relations alongside private ownership of some small and medium-sized productive enterprises; effectively creating a form of market socialism, which Lenin intended as a policy to reconstruct the post-war Soviet Union that had been devastated by both WWI and later the civil war. The NEP was successful at restoring the formerly war-torn nation to pre-WWI levels of production and agricultural output by the mid-1920s; much of the latter being based in Ukraine. These policies attracted many prominent former UPR figures, including former UPR leader Hrushevsky, to return to Soviet Ukraine, where they were accepted. There, they participated in the advancement of Ukrainian science and culture. However, this period was cut short as Joseph Stalin managed to secure the leadership of the USSR following Lenin's death. After doing so, Stalin did away with the NEP in what became known as the Great Break. Starting from the late 1920s and now with a centrally planned economy, Soviet Ukraine took part in an industrialisation scheme which quadrupled its industrial output during the 1930s.

However, as a consequence of Stalin's new policy, the Ukrainian peasantry suffered from the programme of collectivization of agricultural crops. Collectivization was part of the first five-year plan and was enforced by regular troops and the secret police known as Cheka. Those who resisted were arrested and deported to gulags and work camps. As members of the collective farms were sometimes not allowed to receive any grain until unrealistic quotas were met, millions starved to death in a famine known as the Holodomor or the "Great Famine", which was recognized by some countries as an act of genocide perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and other Soviet notables. Largely the same groups were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization, and later the Great Terror, which was designed to purge the influence of Stalin's opponents primarily within the ranks of his own party, such as Leon Trotsky's internationalist Left Opposition and Nikolai Bukharin's pro-NEP Right Opposition.

World War II

Following the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, German and Soviet troops divided the territory of Poland. Thus, Eastern Galicia and Volhynia with their Ukrainian population became part of Ukraine. For the first time in history, the nation was united.

In 1940, the Soviets annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. The Ukrainian SSR incorporated the northern and southern districts of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region. But it ceded the western part of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to the newly created Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. These territorial gains of the USSR were internationally recognized by the Paris peace treaties of 1947.

German armies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, initiating nearly four years of total war. The Axis initially advanced against desperate but unsuccessful efforts of the Red Army. In the encirclement battle of Kyiv, the city was acclaimed as a "Hero City", because of its fierce resistance. More than 600,000 Soviet soldiers (or one-quarter of the Soviet Western Front) were killed or taken captive there, with many suffering severe mistreatment.

Although the majority of Ukrainians fought in or alongside the Red Army and Soviet resistance, in Western Ukraine an independent Ukrainian Insurgent Army movement arose (UPA, 1942). It was created as the armed forces of the underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Both organizations, the OUN and the UPA, supported the goal of an independent Ukrainian state on the territory with a Ukrainian ethnic majority. Although this brought conflict with Nazi Germany, at times the Melnyk wing of the OUN allied with the Nazi forces. From mid-1943 until the end of the war the UPA carried out massacres of ethnic Poles in the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia regions, killing around 100,000 Polish civilians, which brought reprisals.

These organized massacres were an attempt by the OUN to create a homogeneous Ukrainian state without a Polish minority living within its borders, and to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over areas that had been part of pre-war Poland. After the war, the UPA continued to fight the USSR until the 1950s. At the same time, the Ukrainian Liberation Army, another nationalist movement, fought alongside the Nazis.

In total, the number of ethnic Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the Soviet Army is estimated from 4.5 million^[4] to 7 million. The pro-Soviet partisan guerrilla resistance in Ukraine is estimated at 47,800 from the start of occupation to 500,000 at its peak in 1944, with about 50% being ethnic Ukrainians. Generally, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's figures are unreliable, with figures ranging anywhere from 15,000 to as many as 100,000 fighters.

Most of the Ukrainian SSR was organised within the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, with the intention of exploiting its resources and eventual German settlement. Some western Ukrainians, who had only joined the Soviet Union in 1939, hailed the Germans as liberators. Brutal German rule eventually turned their supporters against the Nazi administrators, who made little attempt to exploit dissatisfaction with Stalinist policies. Instead, the Nazis preserved the collective-farm system, carried out genocidal policies against Jews, deported millions of people to work in Germany, and began a depopulation program to prepare for German colonisation.^[5] They blockaded the transport of food on the Kyiv River.

The vast majority of the fighting in World War II took place on the Eastern Front. By some estimates, 93% of all German casualties took place there. The total losses inflicted upon the Ukrainian population during the war are estimated at 6 million, including an estimated one and a half million Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen, sometimes with the help of local collaborators. Of the estimated 8.6 million Soviet troop losses, 1.4 million were ethnic Ukrainians.^[6][7] Victory Day is celebrated as one of ten Ukrainian national holidays. The losses of the Ukrainian people in the war amounted to 40–44% of the total losses of the USSR.

Post–World War II

The republic was heavily damaged by the war, and it required significant efforts to recover. More than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages were destroyed. The situation was worsened by a famine in 1946–1947, which was caused by a drought and the wartime destruction of infrastructure. The death toll of this famine varies, with even the lowest estimate in the tens of thousands.^[8] In 1945, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations organization (UN), part of a special agreement at the Yalta Conference. This effectively meant that Soviet Ukraine, alongside Soviet Belarus, were admitted and allowed to vote separately as independent nations within the UN, despite being constituent republics of a state that was already a member and had voting rights (the Soviet Union). Moreover, Ukraine once more expanded its borders as it annexed Zakarpattia.

Post-war ethnic cleansing occurred in the newly expanded Soviet Union. As of 1 January 1953, Ukrainians were second only to Russians among adult "special deportees", comprising 20% of the total. In addition, over 450,000 ethnic Germans from Ukraine and more than 200,000 Crimean Tatars were victims of forced deportations.^[9]

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became the new leader of the USSR. Having served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukrainian SSR in 1938–1949, Khrushchev was intimately familiar with the republic; after taking power union-wide, he began to emphasize "the friendship" between the Ukrainian and Russian nations. In 1954, the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav was widely celebrated. Khrushchev denounced his predecessor and began the policies of De-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw. During his term as head of the Soviet Union, Crimea was transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. This represented the final extension of Ukrainian territory and formed the basis for the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine to this day.

By 1950, the republic had fully surpassed pre-war levels of industry and production. Soviet Ukraine soon became a European leader in industrial production and an important centre of the Soviet arms industry and high-tech research. Such an important role resulted in a major influence of the local elite. Many members of the Soviet leadership came from Ukraine, most notably Leonid Brezhnev. He later ousted Khrushchev and became the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982.

On 26 April 1986, a reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, resulting in the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history. At the time of the accident, 7 million people lived in the contaminated territories, including 2.2 million in Ukraine.

After the accident, the new city of Slavutych was built outside the exclusion zone to house and support the employees of the plant, which was decommissioned in 2000. A report prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Health Organization attributed 56 direct deaths to the accident and estimated that there may have been 4,000 extra cancer deaths.

Independence

On 21 January 1990, over 300,000 Ukrainians organized a human chain for Ukrainian independence between Kyiv and Lviv, in memory of the 1919 unification of the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian National Republic. Citizens came out to the streets and highways, forming live chains by holding hands in support of unity.

On 16 July 1990, the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine. This established the principles of the self-determination, democracy, independence, and the priority of Ukrainian law over Soviet law. A month earlier, a similar declaration was adopted by the parliament of the Russian SFSR. This started a period of confrontation with the central Soviet authorities. On 2–17 October 1990, the Revolution on Granite took place in Ukraine, the main purpose of the action being to prevent the signing of a new union treaty of the USSR. The demands of the students were satisfied by signing a resolution of the Verkhovna Rada, which guaranteed their implementation.

In August 1991, a faction among the Communist leaders of the Soviet Union attempted a coup to remove Mikhail Gorbachev and to restore the Communist party's power. After it failed, the Ukrainian parliament adopted the Act of Independence on 24 August 1991.

A referendum and the first presidential elections took place on 1 December 1991. More than 92% of the electorate expressed their support for the Act of Independence, and they elected the chairman of the parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, as the first president of Ukraine. At the meeting in Brest, Belarus on 8 December, followed by the Alma Ata meeting on 21 December, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine formally dissolved the Soviet Union and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). On 26 December 1991 the Council of Republics of the USSR Supreme Council adopted the declaration "In regards to creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States" which de jure dissolved the Soviet Union, and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin. The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine did not ratify the accession, so Ukraine has never been a member of the CIS.

Ukraine was initially viewed as having favourable economic conditions in comparison to the other regions of the Soviet Union. However, the country experienced deeper economic slowdown than some of the other former Soviet Republics. During the recession, between 1991 and 1999, Ukraine lost 60% of its GDP and suffered five-digit inflation rates. Dissatisfied with the economic conditions, as well as the amounts of crime and corruption in Ukraine, Ukrainians protested and organized strikes.

The Ukrainian economy stabilized by the end of the 1990s. A new currency, the hryvnia, was introduced in 1996. After 2000, the country enjoyed steady real economic growth averaging about seven percent annually. A new Constitution of Ukraine, under the second President Leonid Kuchma in 1996, turned Ukraine into a semi-presidential republic and established a stable political system. Kuchma was, however, criticised by opponents for corruption, electoral fraud, discouraging free speech and concentrating too much power in his office. Ukraine also pursued full nuclear disarmament, giving up the third largest nuclear weapons stockpile in the world and dismantling or removing all strategic bombers on its territory in exchange for various assurances (main article: Nuclear weapons and Ukraine).

Orange Revolution

In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, then prime minister, was declared the winner of the presidential elections, which the Supreme Court of Ukraine later ruled had been largely rigged. The results caused a public outcry in support of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, who challenged the outcome. During the tumultuous months of the revolution, candidate Yushchenko suddenly became gravely ill, and was soon found by multiple independent physician groups to have been poisoned by TCDD dioxin. Yushchenko strongly suspected Russian involvement in his poisoning. All of this eventually resulted in the peaceful Orange Revolution, which brought Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko to power, while casting Yanukovych in opposition.

Yanukovych returned to power in 2006 as prime minister in the Alliance of National Unity, until snap elections in September 2007 made Tymoshenko prime minister again. Amid the 2008–09 Ukrainian financial crisis the Ukrainian economy shrank by 15%. Disputes with Russia briefly stopped all gas supplies to Ukraine in 2006 and again in 2009, leading to gas shortages in other countries. Yanukovych was elected President in 2010 with 48% of the vote.

Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity

The Euromaidan (literally "Eurosquare") protests started in November 2013 after the president, Viktor Yanukovych, began moving away from an association agreement that had been in the works with the European Union and instead chose to establish closer ties with the Russian Federation. Some Ukrainians took to the streets to show their support for closer ties with Europe.

Meanwhile, in the predominantly Russian-speaking east, a large portion of the population opposed the Euromaidan protests, instead supporting the Yanukovych government. Over time, Euromaidan came to describe a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, the scope of which evolved to include calls for the resignation of President Yanukovych and his government.

Violence escalated after 16 January 2014 when the government accepted new Anti-Protest Laws. Violent anti-government demonstrators occupied buildings in the centre of Kyiv, including the Justice Ministry building, and riots from 18 to 20 February left 98 dead, with approximately fifteen thousand injured and 100 missing. On 21 February, President Yanukovych signed a compromise deal with opposition leaders that promised constitutional changes to restore certain powers to Parliament and called for early elections to be held by December.

However, Members of Parliament voted on 22 February to remove the president and set an election for 25 May to select his replacement, a move described by Russia and US academic John Mearsheimer as a coup. The ousting of Yanukovych prompted Vladimir Putin to begin preparations to annex Crimea on 23 February 2014. Petro Poroshenko, running on a pro-European Union platform, won with over fifty percent of the vote, therefore not requiring a run-off election. Upon his election, Poroshenko announced that his immediate priorities would be to take action on the civil unrest in Eastern Ukraine and mend ties with the Russian Federation.^[10][11][12] In October 2014 Parliament elections, the party Petro Poroshenko Bloc won 132 of the 423 contested seats.

2014 Russian armed interventions and invasion

Using the Russian naval base at Sevastopol as cover, Putin directed Russian troops and intelligence agents to disarm Ukrainian forces and take control of Crimea. On 16 March 2014 a referendum was held in the Crimea under Russian occupation, which reported that 97 percent of the Crimean population wished to join Russia.

On 18 March 2014, Russia and the self-proclaimed Republic of Crimea signed a treaty of accession of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol in the Russian Federation. The UN General Assembly immediately responded by passing resolution 68/262 declaring that the referendum was invalid and supporting the territorial integrity of Ukraine; only Russia voted against the resolution. However, it was not enforceable. Attempts to pass enforceable resolutions in the U.N. Security Council were blocked by Russian vetoes.^[13][14]

Separately, in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, armed men declaring themselves as local militia and supported by pro-Russian protesters seized government buildings, police and special police stations in several cities and held unrecognised status referendums. The insurgency was led by Russian emissaries Igor Girkin and Alexander Borodai as well as militants from Russia, such as Arseny Pavlov. They proclaimed the self styled Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic which have controlled about of the oblasts since then.

Talks in Geneva between the EU, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States yielded a Joint Diplomatic Statement referred to as the 2014 Geneva Pact in which the parties requested that all unlawful militias lay down their arms and vacate seized government buildings, and also establish a political dialogue that could lead to more autonomy for Ukraine's regions. When Petro Poroshenko won the presidential election held on 25 May 2014, he vowed to continue the military operations by the Ukrainian government forces to end the armed insurgency.

In August 2014, a bilateral commission of leading scholars from the United States and Russia issued the Boisto Agenda outlining a 24-step plan to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. The Boisto Agenda was organized into five imperative categories for addressing the crisis requiring stabilization identified as: (1) Elements of an Enduring, Verifiable Ceasefire; (2) Economic Relations; (3) Social and Cultural Issues; (4) Crimea; and, (5) International Status of Ukraine.^[15] In late 2014, Ukraine ratified the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement, which Poroshenko described as Ukraine's "first but most decisive step" towards EU membership.^[16] Poroshenko also set 2020 as the target for EU membership application.^[17]

In February 2015, after a summit hosted in Minsk, Belarus, Poroshenko negotiated a ceasefire with the separatist troops. The resulting agreements, known as the Minsk Protocol, included conditions such as the withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the front line and decentralisation of rebel regions by the end of 2015. They also included conditions such as Ukrainian control of the border with Russia in 2015 and the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Ukrainian territory. The ceasefire began on 15 February 2015. Participants in this ceasefire also agreed to attend regular meetings to ensure that the agreement was respected.

On 1 January 2016, Ukraine joined the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union,^[18] which aims to modernize and develop Ukraine's economy, governance and rule of law to EU standards and gradually increase integration with the EU Internal market.^[19] In 2017 the European Union approved visa-free travel for Ukrainian citizens: entitling Ukrainians to travel to the Schengen area for tourism, family visits and business reasons, with the only document required being a valid biometric passport.

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

In the spring of 2021, Russia began building up troop strengths along its border with Ukraine. On 22 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered military forces to enter the breakaway Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, calling the act a "peacekeeping mission". Putin also officially recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as sovereign states, fully independent from the Ukrainian government.

In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Putin announced what he called a "special military operation" to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine, launching a large-scale invasion of the country. Later in the day, the Ukrainian government announced that Russia had taken control of Chernobyl. On 28 February 2022, Ukraine asked for immediate admission to the European Union in response to the invasion. Initially Russian troops were told that the “special military operation” of the invasion of Ukraine would last for only four or five days.

One month later it appeared that early Russian and US predictions for a quick victory in Ukraine had been based on faulty intelligence. At this point in time after the first thirty days of fighting of the war, Russia had not yet achieved either of its two primary initial objectives, the capture of Ukraine's two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, with Ukrainian counter-offensives pushing back Russian front lines around Kyiv. Meanwhile, several newspapers were reporting a woefully under-trained Russian army and of a lack of adequate Russian equipment, food, and weaponry.

In late March Ukrainian forces began to reclaim territory in the Kyiv region which had previously been taken and held by Russian troops. Eventually the Kyiv regional Ukrainian forces pushed the Russian front lines in the Kyiv vicinity all of the way back to the Ukrainian border. Meanwhile, Russia declared that the Russian “retreat” in the Kyiv region had been a part of its plan all along, and that Russia would merely be repositioning its troops in the Ukrainian east, placing them there to enable a new Donbas area offensive.

On April 14, Ukrainian forces sank the Russian flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva with a missile strike. By the end of April, one month into Russia's new “Donbas Offensive,” Russian forces had not yet managed to advance significantly in the Donbas region, not yet having fully taken a single major metropolitan area in the region since announcing its new “Donbas Offensive." Military analysts continue to refer to the progress of the war as devolving into a "stalemate situation".