and is considered to be a very important natural resource in the country. The Dnipro River with its many tributaries unifies central Ukraine economically and the mouth of the Danube River provides a trade route for Ukrainian trade with the Balkans, Austria, and Germany. Ukraine has a complex geology with a rich variety of topography. Central and southern Ukraine is primarily steppe (prairie) with very fertile black soil exceptionally well suited for grain farming. In the east, the industrial heartland of the Greater Donbas or Donets Basin contains large reserves of mineral deposits. Enhancing the topography of Ukraine are two mountain ranges. On the western border are the Carpathians Mountains. In the Southeast, the Crimean Mountains divide the Crimean Peninsula, creating a semitropical area on its southernmost tip. The Crimea is a popular tourist destination.
The Ukraine climate is similar to the wheat-producing regions of Canada with abundant precipitation and cloudy skies, especially in fall and winter. Snow can start as early as October and not end until April. The mean temperature in summer is 87°F and in winter 16°F. Although summers are short, the temperature can soar to the 90s. Ukraine has a mild, almost Mediterranean-like climate on the southern Crimean coast. Precipitation across the country is disproportionately distributed, highest in west and north, lesser in east and southeast. Winters in Ukraine vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold farther inland; summers are warm across the greater part of the country, hot in the south.
In the ninth century, Ukraine, known as Kievan Rus, was the seat of Slavic power and the newly adopted Orthodox religion. The Kyivan Rus people, were Scandinavian traders and are the source of Russia's namesake. Ukraine and Kyiv, in particular, are viewed as the birthplace of the Orthodox Religion and the Slavic people. Mongol invasions in the 13th century, however, halted Kyiv's rise to power, with power eventually shifting north into Russia to present-day St. Petersburg and Moscow. 
The result of Stalin’s policies was the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33, a man-made catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Estimates very, but at least 4 million Ukrainians starved to death. The famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivization; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population of Ukraine. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukrainian wheat at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in "procurement", and homes were routinely searched and all food confiscated. At the same time, a law was passed in August 1932 making the theft of "socialist property a capital crime", leading to scenes in which peasants faced the firing squad for stealing a wheat from state storehouses. The rural population was left with insufficient food to feed itself. The ensuing starvation grew to a massive scale by the spring of 1933, but Moscow refused to provide relief. In fact, the Soviet Union exported more than a million tons of grain to the West during this period.
The famine subsided only after the 1933 harvest had been completed. The traditional Ukrainian village had been essentially destroyed, and settlers from Russia were brought in to repopulate the devastated countryside. Soviet authorities flatly denied the existence of the famine both at the time it was raging and after it was over. It was only in the late 1980s that officials made a guarded acknowledgement that something had been amiss in Ukraine at this time.
WWII
World War II created more havoc in Ukraine. The surprise German invasion of the U.S.S.R. began on June 22, 1941. Almost four million people were evacuated east of the Ural Mountains for the duration of the war. The Germans moved swiftly, however, and by the end of November virtually all of Ukraine was under their control. Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by some of the Ukrainian populace. In Galicia especially, there had long been a widespread belief that Germany, as the avowed enemy of both Poland and the U.S.S.R., was the Ukrainians’ natural ally for their independence.
The illusion was quickly shattered. The Germans were accompanied on their entry into Lviv on June 30 by members of OUN-B (a group of Ukrainian nationalists) who that same day proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and the formation of a provisional state administration; within days the organizers of this action were arrested and interned in concentration camps. Far from supporting Ukrainian political aspirations, the Nazis gave Galicia administratively to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control over the area between the Dniester and Southern Buh rivers as the province of Transnistria, with its capital at Odessa. The remainder was organized as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
In the occupied territories, the Nazis sought to implement their “racial” policies. In the fall of 1941 the mass killings of Jews began and continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east. In Kyiv, nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city. The Nazis were aided at times by forces recruited from the local population.
Ukrainians became German labor. The collective farms, whose dissolution was the fervent hope of Ukraine, were left intact; industry was allowed to deteriorate; and the cities were deprived of food as all available resources were directed to support the German war effort. Some 2.2 million people were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave laborers. After their victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive westward. In mid-1943 the Germans began their slow retreat from Ukraine, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake. In November the Soviets reentered Kyiv. With the approach of the front, guerrilla activity in western Ukraine intensified, and bloody clashes that claimed large numbers of civilian victims occurred between Ukrainians and Poles. In spring 1944 the Red Army began to penetrate into Galicia, and by the end of October all of Ukraine was again under Soviet control.
Ukrainian Independence
Instructor Video: Modern Ukrainian History Links to an external site.
Ukraine remained under Soviet control until August 24, 1991. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine proclaimed its independence. Ukraine held a referendum on independence with 84 percent of eligible voters turning out for the referendum, and 90 percent of them endorsing independence. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was regarded as the former Soviet republic (outside of those in the Baltic) with the best chance of achieving economic prosperity and integration with Europe. But by the end of the 20th century, the Ukrainian economy had faltered badly, and social and political change fell short of transforming Ukraine into a fully European state. Nevertheless, Ukraine made some important gains in this period. It consolidated its independence and developed its state structure, regularized relations with neighboring countries, made some important steps in the process of democratization, and established itself as a member in good standing of the international community.
Crimea
Instructor's Video Links to an external site.
The Crimea is a peninsula in Southern Ukraine. It has been fought over repeatedly, changing hands regularly. In its early history, it was colonized and occupied repeatedly - by the Greeks, Romans, Huns, the Byzantine Empire, among others. In the 13th century, Crimea was occupied by the Tatars - Turkic-speaking Muslims who were part of the Golden Horde, a branch of the Mongol Empire established by a grandson of Genghis Khan. Crimea was conquered by the Russian Empire in 1783.
The Crimean War of 1853-56, which pitted Russia against an alliance of Great Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey, was fought mainly on the peninsula. The allied forces took the city of Sevastopol, the home of the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet, after a long siege, and by the war’s end, the Crimea lay in ruins. At the end of the 1917 Russian civil war, Crimea became part of the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
In 1954 the Russian S.F.S.R. had transferred the administration of Crimea to the Ukrainian S.S.R. However, it was the one region of Ukraine where ethnic Russians constituted a majority of the population. In 1991 Crimea was granted the status of an autonomous republic and Crimeans supported the vote for Ukrainian independence (though by a small majority). But disenchantment with an independent Ukraine soon followed, and a movement for greater autonomy or even secession developed in the peninsula. The separatists were encouraged in their efforts by routine pronouncements by prominent Russian politicians and the Russian Duma that Crimea was Russian territory that never should have been part of Ukraine. The situation was complicated by the arrival of about 250,000 Crimean Tatars in the peninsula beginning in the late 1980's—returning to their historic homeland from which they had been deported at the end of World War II.
In 2014, ethnic Russians account for 58 percent of Crimea's population, while Ukrainians make up 24 percent. Crimean Tatars, who began returning to the peninsula from exile after the fall of the Soviet Union, comprise 12 percent of its population.
Until the 2022 conflict in the Ukraine, Crimea became the focus of what was the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War. Kremlin-backed forces seized control of the Crimean peninsula, and the territory, which has a Russian-speaking majority, voted to join Russia in a referendum that Ukraine and the West deem illegal.
On February 23, 2014 pro-Russian and anti-Kviv demonstrations were held in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. On February 27 masked Russian troops from Crimean military bases took over the Supreme Council of Crimea, and secured strategic sites across Crimea by early March. On February 27th the Supreme Council of Crimea voted to hold a referendum on May 25th. The referendum was judged by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine as unconstitutional. Despite this, on March 16th, a referendum on the status of Crimea took place and subsequently the Crimea's independence was declared. Signing the treaty of accession with the Russian Federation took place on March 18, 2014.
Southeastern Ukraine (The Donbas Region)
The Donbas economy is dominated by heavy industry, such as coal mining and metallurgy. While annual extraction of coal has decreased since the 1970s, the Donbas remains a significant producer. The Donbas represents one of the largest coal reserves in Ukraine having estimated reserves of 60 billion tonnes of coal. The region takes its name from an abbreviation of the term "Donets Coal Basin". Coal mining in the Donbas is conducted at very deep depths. Lignite mining takes place at around 600 metres (2,000 ft) below the surface,
whilst mining for the more valuable anthracite and bituminous coal takes place at depths of around 1,800 metres (5,900 ft). Prior to the start of the region's war in April 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts together produced about 30 percent of Ukraine's exports. Other industries in the region include blast-furnace and steel-making equipment, railway freight-cars, metal-cutting machine-tools, tunneling machines, agricultural harvesters and ploughing systems, railway tracks, mining cars, electric locomotives, military vehicles, tractors and excavators. The region also produces consumer goods like household washing-machines, refrigerators, freezers, TV sets, leather footwear, and soap. Over half its production is exported, and about 22% is exported to Russia.
The Donbas Region has been the site of a number of wars and its borders have been redrawn many times. Russia, specifically Vladimir Putin, claims that the region is rightfully and historically part of Russia. In fact, the Donbas has historically been inhabited by Ukrainians, Russians, Jews and others. Like the rest of Ukraine this region has been carved up repeatedly: Mongol warriors from the east conquered Central Ukraine in the 13th century. In the 16th century Polish and Lithuanian armies invaded from the west . In the 17th century, war between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Russia brought lands east of the Dnieper River, including the Donbas under Russian imperial control. Because eastern Ukraine came under Russian rule much earlier than western Ukraine, people in the east have stronger ties to Russia and have been more likely to support Russian-leaning leaders. Western Ukraine, by contrast, spent centuries under the control of European powers such as Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire—one reason Ukrainians in the west have tended to support more Western-leaning politicians. The eastern population tends to be more Russian-speaking and Orthodox, while parts of the west are more Ukrainian-speaking and Catholic. People in the cities of the East tend to be more Russian, those in the villages, Ukrainian.
From the beginning of March 2014, demonstrations by pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in the Donbas. These demonstrations, which followed the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and which were part of a wider group of pro-Russian protests across southern and eastern Ukraine, escalated in April 2014 into a war between the Russian-backed separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR respectively), and the Ukrainian government. Amid that conflict, the self-proclaimed republics held referendums on the status of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts on 11 May 2014. In the referendums, viewed as illegal by Ukraine and undemocratic by the international community, about 90% voted for the independence of the DPR and LPR. There was limited support for separatism in the Donbas before the outbreak of the war, and little evidence of support for an armed uprising. Russian claims that Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted or even subjected to "genocide" by the Ukrainian government, forcing its hand to intervene, were false.