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

The word "Ukraine" has been on everyone's lips since February 2022, but most people have little idea how old — or how fought-over — the name actually is. Ukraine has been called many things over the centuries: Ruthenia, Malorossiya, the Ukrainian SSR, and before any of those, simply "the borderland." Each label carries a political charge that reverberates to this day, and understanding the history of these names helps explain why the current war is, at least in part, a war over identity itself.

## What Ukrainians Called Themselves

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.

Common Ukrainian given names reflect this long national tradition. Men's names like Oleksandr, Dmytro, Mykhailo, Volodymyr, and Bohdan have distinct Ukrainian forms that differ subtly from their Russian equivalents — distinctions Ukrainians are increasingly insistent on in the context of the war. Women's names like Olha, Iryna, Kateryna, and Oksana carry the same distinctiveness.

## The Kievan Rus: Ukraine's Medieval State

The oldest significant political entity on Ukrainian territory was Kievan Rus, a loose federation of East Slavic and Finno-Ugric tribes centered on Kyiv. Founded in the ninth century, it reached its peak under Volodymyr the Great — who converted the realm to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 988 — and under Yaroslav the Wise in the eleventh century. At its height, Kievan Rus stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and was one of the most powerful states in medieval Europe, with marriage alliances connecting the Kyivan royal family to ruling houses in France, England, Norway, and Hungary.

The Mongol invasion of 1240–1241 shattered the confederation. Kyiv was destroyed and depopulated, and political power shifted northward — eventually to the Principality of Moscow, which grew over the following centuries into the Tsardom of Russia. Ukraine's territory then passed through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetmanate, and finally the Russian Empire, before briefly achieving independence in 1917–1920.

## What Was the Roman Name for Ukraine?

There was no Roman name for Ukraine as a political unit, because the Roman Empire never controlled the region. The Danube marked Rome's effective northeastern frontier in most of Europe. What Roman writers did know about was the vast Pontic Steppe — the grasslands stretching north of the Black Sea — which they associated with the Scythians, a nomadic Iranian-speaking people who dominated the region from roughly the seventh to the third century BCE.

Classical Greek and Roman sources described thriving cities along Ukraine's Black Sea coast: Olbia, Chersonesos (near modern Sevastopol), and Tyras (modern Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi). Chersonesos was a significant Byzantine Greek city for over a millennium and is traditionally the site where Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv was baptized before converting his realm to Christianity. If you're looking for a Roman-era geographic term, "Scythia" is the closest approximation — though it referred to the steppe culture and nomadic people, not any settled Ukrainian polity.

## What Was the Soviet Era Name for Ukraine?

After the chaos of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Ukraine briefly existed as an independent state — the Ukrainian People's Republic — from 1917 to 1920. The Bolsheviks eventually prevailed in the civil war, and in 1922 the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the four founding members of the USSR. The official name — Ukrainian SSR, or in Ukrainian, Ukrainska Radyanska Sotsialistychna Respublika — remained in use until independence on August 24, 1991.

The Soviet period was catastrophic for Ukraine in ways that linger in national memory. The Holodomor of 1932–33, a man-made famine that killed between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians, is recognized as genocide by more than 30 countries. Russia continues to dispute that characterization. The famine's shadow heavily informs why many Ukrainians view Russian power with a historically grounded mistrust that Western observers sometimes find disproportionate — until they learn the history.

## Why Is Ukraine Called "Little Russia"?

The term Malorossiya — Little Russia or Lesser Russia — was a label imposed by the Russian Empire from the seventeenth century onward. The "little" here was originally geographic rather than diminutive: in medieval usage, "little" (mikra in Greek) referred to the original, core territory, while "great" (megale) referred to expanded or outer territories. By that logic, "Little Russia" actually meant something closer to "original Rus" — a point Ukrainian historians have repeatedly made.

By the nineteenth century, however, the term was being weaponized to assert that Ukrainians were merely a regional subgroup of Russians rather than a distinct people. Russian imperial policy actively suppressed Ukrainian language and identity: the 1863 Ems Decree prohibited publishing books in Ukrainian, and further restrictions followed in 1876. The term "Little Russia" became, for Ukrainians, a symbol of cultural subjugation — which is precisely why its use by Russian state media today is considered deeply offensive rather than merely archaic.

## Why Is Ukraine Called "the Borderland"?

The word Ukraine almost certainly derives from Proto-Slavic words meaning "border region" or "frontier territory" — specifically from "u" (at, near) and "krai" (edge, border, land). It appears in Kyivan Rus chronicles as early as 1187, describing frontier territory of the realm.

Some Russian commentators have seized on the "borderland" etymology to argue that Ukraine is merely a geographic description rather than a proper national name, and therefore that Ukraine lacks genuine national identity. Ukrainian linguists and historians reject this framing entirely. Plenty of country names have geographic origins — Nigeria comes from the Niger River, Iceland is fairly self-explanatory, and "France" derives from the Frankish tribe — without anyone using that fact to question those nations' legitimacy.

## Does Russia Recognize Ukraine as a Country?

Legally and diplomatically, yes — Russia recognized Ukrainian independence in 1991 and signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine surrendered the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Russia has violated those assurances twice: first with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and then with the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Putin's 2021 essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" argued that Ukraine's existence as a separate nation was an "artificial" creation of Soviet policy — a claim that Ukrainian scholars and most Western historians consider factually wrong and politically motivated. In international law, Russia still formally maintains an ambassadorial relationship with Ukraine, though all practical diplomatic relations have been severed since 2022.

## Was Ukraine Part of Russia Before World War II?

Not exactly — and the distinction matters. Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire from the late eighteenth century until 1917. After its brief independence, it became a Soviet republic in 1922. The Soviet Union was not Russia, even if Russia was its dominant constituent. Ukraine had its own government, its own capital, its own language policies, and even its own seat at the United Nations — a concession Stalin extracted from the Allies in 1945 to give the USSR more votes in the General Assembly.

To say Ukraine was simply "part of Russia" conflates the Russian Empire, the Russian Federation, and the Soviet Union — three distinct political entities across three different centuries. Western Ukraine — Galicia and Volhynia — was actually part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, then Poland until 1939, when Stalin seized it as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The borders of the Ukrainian SSR essentially became the borders of independent Ukraine in 1991 — until Russia began dismantling them in 2014.

## What Is the Official Name of Russia?

The full official name is the Russian Federation — Rossiyskaya Federatsiya in Russian. It's a federal state comprising 89 federal subjects, including republics, oblasts, krais, federal cities (Moscow and Saint Petersburg), and autonomous okrugs. "Russia" is the common short form used in all international contexts. The name derives from Rus, the same medieval Slavic root as Rusyn and Ukraine's own historical name — which is, of course, exactly the point of contention.

## How Big Is Ukraine Compared to Texas?

Ukraine is slightly smaller than Texas. Ukraine covers approximately 233,000 square miles; Texas covers about 268,600 square miles — meaning Ukraine is roughly 87 percent the size of Texas. Ukraine is the largest country located entirely within Europe, bordering Russia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. The scale of the country helps explain why the war's front line, stretching across eastern and southern Ukraine, spans hundreds of miles and why logistics and air defense coverage are so difficult to maintain simultaneously.