• MyHeritage Wiki
  • Historical context
  • Colonization of Ukraine
    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    File:Смерть Аскольда.jpg
    The Kievan Rus' in the ninth century

    Colonization of Ukraine is a multi-faceted process which has happened in many different ways and played out over thousands of years. Ukraine is basically the natural superhighway or migration route running from Asia to Europe. Over thousands of years almost every major group of people that have conquered large parts of Europe had moved eastwards from the Asian Steppe, past the Ural Mountains and then along the flat open lands of Ukraine to descend into Europe. These groups have included the Celts, the Huns and the Mongols. Ukraine also became subject to a different form of colonization in the ninth and tenth centuries when Norse raiders from Scandinavia descended down the great rivers of Eastern Europe, the Volga, Don and Dnieper, to colonize the region, building Kyiv into a great city in the process. In more modern times, as a result of the successive rise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, various parts of Ukraine were colonized by foreign powers, notably eastern Ukraine by Russia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. All of this has left a complex ethnic and cultural legacy in Ukraine and means that people here, or indeed members of the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide, have a rich genealogy.[1]

    Colonization of Ukraine chronology of eventsColonization of Ukraine chronology of events

    File:Scythian Kingdom in West Asia.jpg
    The Scythian lands, c. 600 BCE

    Ukraine is one of Europe’s newest countries. A distinct Ukrainian identity evolved gradually in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was then given a fresh impetus at the time of the romantic nationalist revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. Eventually Ukraine as a distinct entity emerged in the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and within the USSR the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a distinct constituent part of the Soviet Union.[2] This echoes several other countries in Europe that have always had a distinct regional identity, but which did not become independent nations until relatively modern times, notably Belgium, which was ruled for centuries by the Duchy of Burgundy, Spain, Austria, France and the Netherlands before the Belgian Revolution of 1830.[3]

    This complex Ukrainian history means that the lands that comprise Ukraine today have been ruled for most of recorded history by different powers, often ones which were engaged in internal European colonization. This goes back to ancient times in Ukraine’s case. The large, flat plateau that comprises much of the country (the Pontic-Caspian Steppe) is the ideal transit route from Asia into Europe and was the migration superhighway which groups like the Celts, Scythians, Huns, Slavs, Pechenegs and Mongols all used as they migrated from Asia into Europe over thousands of years.[4] While this involved traffic from east to west across Eurasia, in the ninth and tenth centuries, Norse or Viking war parties started traversing from north to south through the region travelling along the Dnieper and Don Rivers from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The first stirrings of a distinct regional identity were found in the emergence of the Norse state of Kyiv and its dominance of a large part of Eastern Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Hence, colonization brought new people to Ukraine in ancient and medieval times even as it shaped an emergent Ukrainian national identity at the same time.[5]

    File:Catherine II after Roslin, Rokotov (1780s, Kunsthistorisches Museum).jpg
    Tsarina Catherine the Great

    In the mid-thirteenth century Ukraine was largely conquered by the Mongols at the western extremity of their conquests. Large parts of the country remained under the rule of the Crimean Tatars or the Mongol Golden Horde until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even when they were conquered in turn, it simply brought about different forms of foreign domination. The Poles conquered parts of western and northern Ukraine in the sixteenth century, while the Russian Empire expanded southwards and then westwards into eastern and central Ukraine through Catherine the Great’s wars against the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Tatars and the overlapping Partitions of Poland between the 1770s and 1790s. Meanwhile, the Poles were replaced by the Austrians in the west via the Partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century. As each new power acquired chunks of Ukraine, there was inevitable migration and colonization.[6]

    Ukraine’s national identity was revived as a result of the changes that occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. Nationalists looked back to the era of the Kievan Rus’, while others looked to the legacy of the Zaporizhian Cossacks that had been a largely independent power in central and eastern Ukraine between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, even while nominally pledging allegiance to various neighbors depending on the geopolitical currents of the day. In the end this Ukrainian national identity won out over foreign rule and an independent Ukraine emerged in the twentieth century, albeit one profoundly impacted on by centuries of foreign rule and colonization.[7] At the end of the Cold War it became fully independent of Russia.[8]

    Extent of colonization of Ukraine and demographic impactExtent of colonization of Ukraine and demographic impact

    A lot of the colonization of Ukraine by various ethnic groups over the centuries took place a long time ago in an era of history prior to the maintenance of any form of demographic or immigration records. These impediments aside, there is no doubt that a lot of this colonization had a very substantial impact. Take the example of the Norse migrations down the rivers of Eastern Europe towards the Black Sea; this was unquestionably a mass migration. The Swedish warlords who led these bands of Northmen built up cities like Kyiv to become major powers in Eastern Europe. Their settlement of the area and the lands further east was so substantial that this part of Europe became known as the Land of the Rus’, which was later changed into Russia in the lands along the course of the River Volga. Rus’ is derived from Ruotsi, an Old Finnic word that means ‘Swede’.[9]

    File:Location of Kyivan Rus.png
    Location of the Kievan Rus'

    Hence, many people in Ukraine and Russia alike today will have some Norse heritage stretching back to the ninth and tenth centuries. The same holds true of parts of England, Ireland, Scotland, northern France and other parts of Europe that the Norse migrated to and conquered in the period between the 790s and the eleventh century. This is just one example of the kind of colonization of Ukraine that occurred in ancient and medieval times.[10]

    More recent colonization of Ukraine came from multiple directions. In the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the most important power in this regard was the Kingdom of Poland, which became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 via the Union of Lublin. It controlled large parts of western Ukraine and Polish settlers acquired land here. Later Poland declined rapidly in the face of the expansion of its surrounding neighbors, Russia, Austria and Prussia. There was a fresh influx of Germans, Hungarians and Czechs into Lviv and other parts of western Ukraine in the early nineteenth century under Habsburg rule. This is reflected in Lviv’s architecture to this day, which is more stylistically Central European than Eastern European.[11] Yet, while there was some Austro-Hungarian migration to western Ukraine, it was limited and there was not an intense policy of Germanization of western Ukraine, in large part because the Habsburgs ruled over a profoundly cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic empire that they could not impose cultural homogeneity within.[12]

    File:Ruslangsup2001.PNG
    Russian speakers in Ukraine, c. 2001

    The situation was very different to the east. The conquest of eastern and central Ukraine by the Russians in the eighteenth century led to significant colonization of the region by Russians settlers. Settlement here was attractive for multiple reasons. There is a lot of mineral wealth in eastern Ukraine, it is prime agricultural land that has served as a breadbasket of Europe for centuries, and the climate is warmer. The Russian elites, for instance, including the imperial family, would decamp to the Crimean Peninsula and other lands around the Black Sea for part of the year from the time of Catherine the Great onwards to get away from the snow and cold of St Petersburg and Moscow. Then, in the nineteenth century, a systematic policy of Russification sought to Russify regions of the empire like Finland, Poland and Ukraine.[13] In the process much of eastern Ukraine was further colonized and the region did become largely Russian-speaking, as did the Crimean Peninsula and the region around Odessa. By way of contrast, Russian speakers only make up a small percentage of Ukrainians in the west and north-central parts of the country.[14]

    The overall impact of these processes on the demography and genetic heritage of Ukraine has been very profound. It means that Ukrainians have a complex genetic heritage from the conquest and settlement of their country by many different groups, from the Celts and Scythians in ancient times, through the Norse in the medieval period and down to the Poles, Austrians and Russians in modern times. There is also a regional element to this, with Russian influences strong in the east and Germanic and Polish ones in the west. Many people exploring their genealogy in Ukraine or within the Ukrainian diaspora will find an ancestor who migrated to Ukraine as part of this complex colonial history.[15]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about colonization of UkraineExplore more about colonization of Ukraine

    References

    1. ↑ https://openpress.digital.conncoll.edu/beingukraine/chapter/chapter-2-colonization-and-occupation-of-ukraine/
    2. ↑ https://theconversation.com/a-short-history-of-ukrainian-nationalism-and-its-tumultuous-relationship-with-russia-179346
    3. ↑ https://retrospectjournal.com/2025/10/12/the-belgian-revolution-1830-1831-a-triumph-of-romantic-nationalist-ideals/
    4. ↑ Lehti Saag, ‘North Pontic crossroads: Mobility in Ukraine from the Bronze Age to the early modern period’, in Science Advances, Vol. 11 (January, 2025).  
    5. ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Kievan_Rus/
    6. ↑ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine-fact-checking-the-kremlins-version-of-ukrainian-history/
    7. ↑ https://kyivindependent.com/who-were-the-ukrainian-cossacks/
    8. ↑ https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/ukraine/independent
    9. ↑ Omeljan Pritsak, ‘The Origin of Rus'’, in The Russian Review, Vol. 36, No. 3 (July, 1977), pp. 249–273.
    10. ↑ Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads (London, 2021).
    11. ↑ https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2015/08/12/ukraine-between-east-and-west-the-case-of-galicia/
    12. ↑ https://openpress.digital.conncoll.edu/beingukraine/chapter/chapter-2-colonization-and-occupation-of-ukraine/
    13. ↑ https://www.ukrainer.net/en/russia-russified/
    14. ↑ Olesya Palinska, ‘East vs West: Geopolitical Orientations and Language Practices of Residents of Central and Southern Ukraine’, in Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2023).
    15. ↑ Taras K. Oleksyk, et al., ‘Genome diversity in Ukraine’, in GigaScience, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January, 2021).


    Authors template (click twice to edit)
    Retrieved from ""

    APA citation (7th Ed.)

    Dr. David Heffernan. (2025, November 25). *Colonization of Ukraine*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Colonization_of_Ukraine