【動畫歷史系列】全集 - 俄羅斯、德國、法國、瑞典、英國、蘇格蘭、巴西、意大利、日本、波蘭 . . . . . . P14 - 烏克蘭

Ukraine is located here, right below Russia and Belarus. So, Ukraine is a relatively young country, like, really young. Its Declaration of Independence was only ratified in 1991, making it roughly the same age as most millennials. Most of this general region was historically part of either Russia or Poland. Its very name in old Slavic roots means borderland, which illustrates the divided frontier-like nature of the land. So, if you haven't already seen the episode on Russia, you can click here to catch up to speed. And yes, I will eventually cover Poland. You can stop asking for it now. Before the creation of the Kievan Rus', the Ukrainian steppes were the home of, well, steppe people. The Jeno area passed hands many times between large and small nomadic tribes, the largest and most powerful of which are occasionally recorded for us by Western European scholars, who wrote about the dreadful Eastern heathens raiding their lands such as the Huns, Avars and Bulgars. If you want to go back further, there were the Germanic Goth settlements before that, and Roman before that, and Greek before that, and mammoths before that. But hell, we gotta start somewhere. All the while, the people of the steppes remained constant, watching, raiding and trading with their neighbors just often enough to be noteworthy in the ink and paper of the Westerners. The Slavs and the steppe cultures have competing legends about the precise founding of the Kiev. But historians generally agree it was an important trade city between many kingdoms and empires. According to the Primary Chronicle, which is a fancy term for we're not totally biased, we promise this happened, the city was captured by the Rurikid dynasty in 882 from the Khazars, formally being annexed into the Kievan Rus'. The location of the city on a lucrative trade route between the north and the south enabled it to prosper and make it rain dollar bills in the medieval Rus' state. From 1241, Ukraine was part of the Mongol Empire and the Golden Horde. But this was not to last. Some ambitious Poles and Lithuanians were quietly building the foundations of an empire on the Baltic. The rise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created a new superpower in the region, driving the Mongols out of the Ukraine from the 14th to 15th centuries. Because nothing says empire like land grabs and the amount they needed was more. So pausing now to take off our ethnic and nationalistic hats, for a moment, the Sweeney Channel would like you to take note of the following disclaimer. A lot of Ukraine's history has been influenced by a people called the Cossacks. We don't know exactly where these people came from, but we do know they formed a distinct ethnic and culture minority. For many centuries, the most compelling origins is a likelihood of mixed ancestry between the Slavs and various Mongol and Turkic descendants, many of whom remained long after the collapse of the Mongol Khanate. There's also a theory that the collapse of the Mongol Empire began the process of Jewish migration into Europe, but it's pretty debatable at this point. The Cossacks did briefly win independence from Poland, but were annexed by Russia in the following decades. The people of this region spoke a variety of tongues including Russian, Polish and Ruthenian. Ruthenian is a bit of a catch-all term for Rus' dialects related to Russian that were spoken in both Poland and Russia and heavily influenced by both. Some linguists believe it to be a form of Pronto-Lingu-Franka, which gradually formed the Belorussian-Ukrainian dialectal continuum. However, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian still carry large degrees of mutual intelligibility today. Some linguists even suggest that all three may be dialects of the same language, but the studies are still debated over. The Russians banned the use of Ruthenian dialects in 1804, but the use of it stayed alive in small communities in Austria-Hungary. The language divide is still evident today, as many parts of eastern Ukraine have a good knowledge of or speak Russian as their mother tongue. As you know from the previous episodes, the modern Ukraine borders became completely part of the Russian Empire and the later USSR. The nuclear reactor explosion in Chernobyl was the worst nuclear disaster in history, releasing megatons of radioactive dust into the soil and air. And were it not for the brave emergency workers who sealed the leaking reactor, we might all be walking around with a few extra limbs. Chernobyl is still a ghost town to this day, as the radiation leak is still a credible threat to public safety. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became a fully sovereign state for the first time in 1991. Hooray! The world had a new baby, and the world opened its arms to the new independent Ukraine, and there was peace and prosperity and...