Powikłane losy Ukrainy

Abstract

It was already in the Middle Ages that the lands of today’s Ukraine were the area of clashes between the East and the West, Rome and the Byzantine Empire. Those clashes were manifested in confessional discrepancies of Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well as the differences in sacral language. In Ukraine, similarly to the whole area of the Latin – Byzantine borderline, the decisive factor in the later ethnical processes was not the original tribal structure of those lands, but the scope of the Eastern Christianity influence. In the days of Kievan Rus’, the vast area of this country was home to the general attitude of “Russian” community, primarily understood as the community of Eastern Christianity followers. The remains of the “Russian peoples” community lasted long after the fall of Kievan Rus’. To some extent, its origins can be found until this day. In the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, emerges the identity of the “Russian nation”, separate from the Russians in the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the political, ideological, but also largely in the religious, cultural, and linguistic sense. However, it is not possible to observe separate Ukrainian and Belarussian ethnic groups in this area until the end of the XVI century. The Ruthenian ethnos was entirely separate from the Russian ethnos. The differentiation into the Ukrainian and Belarussian ethnos begins after the Union of Lublin, following which the Ukrainian lands become a part of the Crown, and the Belarussian lands remain a part of Lithuania. The political and cultural independence of Ukrainian lands is consolidated with the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the events that followed.