The Cossack Hetmanate and the Birth of the Ukrainian Identity
Ukrainians built a thriving democracy in the Zaporizhian Sich
I have read some articles claiming how integrated and similar Russian and Ukrainian history and culture are all over Medium. I have been trying to combat those misconceptions as well as I can. If Russia and Ukraine were so similar, thirty years of independence wouldn’t have been enough time to change the trajectory of the two nations and Vladimir Putin’s grand plans for taking Ukraine in three days would have been realized.
If Russia and Ukraine were so analogous, then why in the thirty-two years of independence has Russia had only three Presidents while Ukraine has had six?
It’s because of their divergent history that happened long before modern Ukrainian territory became a part of the Russian Empire in the mid-seventeen hundreds.
The Birth of the Cossacks
Long before the Tsardom of Muscovy had designs on expansion, the territories of modern Ukraine were integrated into other states — Galicia into the Kingdom of Poland in the 1430s, and the rest into the Commonwealth of Lithuania in the late 1300s with the dissolution of the Galicia-Volhynian principality. The Galicia-Volhynian principality was the only Kyian-Rus legacy…
