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In July 1941 the most apocalyptic clash of arms in world history raged across the borderlands of Eastern Europe. A three million strong Nazi invasion force stood poised to conquer the Soviet Union, with the Blitzkrieg wreaking a terrible toll of death and destruction on the exposed Red Army and resistance collapsing along a disintegrating front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Millions of Red army troops trudged into a bestial captivity few would survive, and the Soviet capital Moscow appeared to lie at the mercy of Hitler’s legions.

Then, as his apparent moment of supreme triumph approached the German Fuehrer overruled his furious generals and ordered that they swing south and concentrate their attack on Ukraine. It was to prove a fateful decision. In the wake of the Nazi defeat in 1945 many leading German generals pointed to this crucial turning-point as the one moment when Hitler effectively lost the war, but the German dictator was actually following well-established historical precedent in opting to pursue the industrial and agricultural wealth of


Ukraine. He was merely the last in a long line of conquerors who sought to build their empires on Ukrainian foundations.





The name Ukraine first appears in the chronicles in the late 12th century, which predates the peak of the medieval nation-building epoch by over a hundred years. However, by the time the word Ukraine came into usage the fi rst Ukrainian nationstate was already in a state of fragmentation and decline.

Early Ukrainian history begins with the founding of Kyiv and the myths and legends that surround the creation of the Kyivan Rus empire, the super power of early medieval Slavonic Europe. What

we do know for certain is that from the early ninth until the latter half of the twelfth century an empire centred on Kyiv dominated much of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics and European Russia, covering the entire route down from Scandinavia to Byzantium. Ukraine is not alone in claiming Kyivan Rus ancestry, with both Russia and Belarus regarding it as the progenitor of their civilisations, but as the home of the ancient capital Kyiv, Ukraine holds the trump card in the battle to ancestral bragging rights among the East Slavs.

The Kyivan Rus empire eventually succumbed to a series of internal divisions which pitted princely brother against brother, but not before the empire had adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Kyiv ruler Prince Volodymyr “The Great” converted
the then-pagan peoples of the Kyivan Rus in 988 for what appear to have been dynastic and aesthetic as much spiritual reasons, but regardless of these somewhat earthly motivations the impact of his decision have