What Was the Old Name for Ukraine? From Kievan Rus to the Ukrainian SSR

For most of the medieval and early modern period, the people living in what is now Ukraine referred to themselves as Rusyny — a term that translates roughly as "Rus people." This matters enormously in the current geopolitical context, because Russia's own name is derived from the same root. Vladimir Putin has used the shared etymology as a plank in his argument that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people" — a phrase he has repeated in speeches, interviews, and a lengthy 2021 essay that many analysts read as a philosophical preamble to the invasion.

“Ukrainian historians counter that the Rus identity predates Russia as a political entity by several centuries.”

Ukrainian historians counter that the Rus identity predates Russia as a political entity by several centuries. Modern Russians and modern Ukrainians are distinct nations that happen to share a medieval ancestor, in much the same way that the French and Italians both descend from Latin-speaking Romans without being the same people. The term "Ukrainian" as a self-designation became more common from the seventeenth century onward and gained momentum through the nineteenth-century national revival, becoming the standard ethnonym by the early twentieth century.