Geography

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine#History
  
• Ukraine shares borders with Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the south; and has a coastline along the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. It consists mostly of fertile plains (or steppes) and plateaus, river Dnieper across the country with the capital Kyiv along the river. To the southwest, the delta of the Danube forms the border with Romania.
• Ukraine has significant natural resources, including iron ore, coal, manganese, natural gas, oil, salt, sulfur, etc., and an abundance of arable land. Two-thirds of the country's surface land consists of black earth, a resource that has made Ukraine one of the most fertile regions in the world and well known as a "breadbasket". -

Black sea coast and the Donets basin

• The two regions were colonized in imperial Russian times.
• The Donets basin is a large mining and industrial region of southeastern Europe, notable for its large coal reserves. The coalfield lies in southeastern Ukraine and in the adjoining region of southwestern Russia. The coal exploitation did not begin until the early 19th century and became significant only after the first railway reached the area in 1869.

Religion

• Volodymyr’s baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv, marking the beginning of the Christianization of the Rus'. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity.
• Volodymyr’s son Yaroslav promoted learning and scholarship in addition to building churches and supporting the Christian religion. His rule marked the beginning of literacy in Kyivan Rus’. Texts are translated into a language that came to Rus’ from Bulgaria, whose rulers had accepted Christianity earlier than the Kyivan princes. His marriage or his successors' are with Sweden, Norway, or Poland.

People and Origins

• Slavs, a conglomerate of tribes defined in linguistic and cultural terms and represented in various political formations. The Indo-European origins of their languages suggest that they came to Europe from the east sometime between the seventh and third millennia BC. Linguistic data suggest that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and the forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today's Ukraine. Forested areas north of the Pontic steppes are their home. According to the dominant Kurgan hypothesis in Indo-European studies, the Pontic–Caspian steppe was the homeland of the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, and these same speakers were the original domesticators of the horse.
• The Kyivan chronicler counted twelve Slavic tribes west of the Carpathians. In the north, their settlements extended as far as Lake Ladoga, near present-day St. Petersburg; in the east, to the upper Volga and Oka Rivers; in the south, to the lower reaches of the Dniester and the middle Dnieper region. These Slavs were the predecessors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians. Linguists define them as Eastern Slavs on the basis of dialectal differences that began to develop in the sixth century, setting them apart from the Western Slavs—the predecessors of today’s Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks—as well as the South Slavs, who include Serbs, Croats, and other Slavic peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
• Archeologists show the Eastern Slavs to have been rather more sedentary. They engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry. Byzantine or Gothic adversaries or Christian zealots saw Slav as barbarians fighting either the Christian Empire or Christian dogma and ritual. But they peacefully colonize eastern Europe.
• The term 'Rus' and 'Slav' became interchangeable in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries when Vikings took the area.