The Mongols who burned Kyiv in December 1240 extracted tribute from the Rus' principalities for more than two hundred years, yet their successor states fractured and fell by 1502 while the Rus' lands rebuilt under Lithuania. By 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossack uprising produced the Hetmanate, a military republic with its own treasury, diplomacy, and 40,000 registered troops. The Mongol Empire is a museum subject; the state that Kyiv anchors still negotiates, still fights, and still elects leaders.
The Holodomor Failed to Erase the Nation
In 1932, when Stalin was 33, his collectivization and grain requisitions triggered a man-made famine that killed an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians. Armed squads swept through villages in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Kyiv oblasts, seizing seed grain and food. A travel ban then trapped peasants inside the starving districts.
Survivors spoke of cannibalism. They described swollen bellies. They told of unburied dead stacked along railway lines. The Soviet state compounded the crime by denying it outright. Officials censored the word "Holodomor." They flooded eastern Ukraine with Russian-speaking settlers.
Yet the nation did not vanish. Ukrainian survived in private homes, in village choirs, in samvydav literature. The Greek Catholic Church kept operating from the catacombs. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, 92 percent of Ukrainians voted for independence in a national referendum. The famine killed millions. It failed, however, to erase the people it was meant to destroy.
The 2014 Revolution Did Not Collapse the State
When Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv for Russia on February 21, 2014, his Party of Regions collapsed within days. The Verkhovna Rada voted 328 to 0 to remove him. It restored the 2004 constitution. Snap elections were scheduled for May 25. Over 100 civilians had been shot dead on Instytutska Street and the Maidan between February 18 and 20.
Yet the state apparatus did not disintegrate. Petro Poroshenko won the presidency with 54.7 percent. Parliamentary elections in October produced a pro-reform majority, and the new government signed the EU Association Agreement that Yanukovych had abandoned in November 2013.
The client regime Moscow had financed with $3 billion in December 2013 bond purchases ceased to exist. Ukraine, meanwhile, began overhauling its banks, police, and military procurement without waiting for permission.
The 2022 Invasion Tested and Failed to Break the State
On February 24, 2022, Russian tank columns crossed from Belarus toward Kyiv expecting to seize the capital in days. Instead, Ukrainian forces stalled the 40-mile convoy at Hostomel and Irpin. By early April, the Russians had retreated north. At its maximum that spring, Russia held roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, stretching from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia through the Donbas.
Ukraine then retook more than half of that occupied land. That included Kherson city on November 11, 2022, and much of Kharkiv oblast the previous September. Through 2024, the Ukrainian state kept collecting taxes and paying pensions. It held elections on schedule where security allowed. It also ran rail service from Lviv to frontline cities like Kramatorsk.
The central bank, the parliament, and the armed forces have not collapsed.
Empires Dissolve; Ukraine Confirms Itself
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth carved Ukraine apart after 1667, splitting the Cossack Hetmanate along the Dnipro at Andrusovo. By 1795, the Russian Empire had finished the partition. It then erased the name "Ukraine" from official use under the Valuev Circular of 1863. The Soviet Union starved four million Ukrainians in the Holodomor of 1932-33. It also redrew the republic's borders in 1939, 1940, and 1945. The Nazi Reich occupied Kyiv in September 1941. Its plan was to empty the black earth region for German settlement.
Each of these powers treated Ukraine as territory to be divided, absorbed, or erased. The Commonwealth dissolved in 1795. The Russian Empire collapsed in 1917. The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. The Nazi Reich lasted twelve years, ending in 1945.
Ukraine declared independence on 24 August 1991 and confirmed it.
