Between the southern foothills of the Carpathians in the west and the now agriculturally used expanses of the steppe in the east, between the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov in the south, and Belarus (White Russia) and Russia’s Muscovite heartland in the north lies a land – about 603,000 square kilometers in size and with a population of around 48 million at the beginning of the 21st century – that declared itself independent on 24 August 1991 under the name Ukraine. Traversed by several large rivers flowing north to south (Dniester, Southern Bug/Buh, Dnipro/Dnieper, Donez), it possesses an internal geographic structure only in the sense that forests and forest steppes predominate in the west and north, while the south – as far as the mountains of the Crimean peninsula that are close to the sea – and the east are covered by steppe regions, the “wild field.”

The region and its boundaries

Lacking any natural barriers, Ukraine was a transition land for migrant groups moving between Asia and Europe. A non-nomadic settlement of the Dniester valley is presumed to have existed as early as the fourth century bce in the Trypillya culture. But it was the nomadic horsemen (Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, later Avars, Hungarians, Chazars, Mongols/Tatars) from the east who, like the Greeks on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the eastward wandering Goths, at various times inhabited the territory of modern-day Ukraine. Between the fifth and eighth centuries ce, a Slavic population then began to trickle in from the northwest and settled initially above all in the river valleys.