Ukraine

Ukraine spreads across open plains of black earth. Its steppe and forest-steppe, covered by chernozem soil among the most fertile anywhere, roll from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the uplands of the east, and the Dnipro cuts the country in two on its way south to the Black Sea. Pine forests and the marshes of Polesia fill the north, and the Danube reaches the sea through a delta in the south-west. Winters are cold and summers warm.

Kyiv was the centre of Kyivan Rus’, the medieval state that adopted Christianity in 988 under Volodymyr the Great. After the Mongol invasion the land passed largely to Lithuania and Poland; in the seventeenth century Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack Hetmanate won self-rule before coming under Russian control, while the west belonged to Austria-Hungary until 1918. A short-lived independent state after 1917 gave way to Soviet rule. The famine of 1932–33, the Holodomor, killed millions, the Chernobyl reactor exploded in 1986, and Ukraine declared independence in 1991.

Taras Shevchenko’s nineteenth-century poetry shaped the modern literary language, and embroidered vyshyvanka shirts and painted pysanky eggs are made for festivals. Borscht is listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage. The black earth has long made Ukraine one of the world’s great grain suppliers: wheat, maize, barley and sunflower oil leave through Odesa and the other Black Sea ports, and iron ore from Kryvyi Rih, steel, engineering and software outsourcing make up much of the rest.