Why "Ukraine" Does Not Mean "Borderland"

The myth and why it persists

“Ukraine is just an ‘okraina’, an outskirt of Russia; the very name proves it is not a country but a borderland” — one of the oldest arguments of imperial publicists, one that has survived into Putin’s articles and today’s comment threads. It is convenient because it looks like “linguistics”: just look at the word, they say.

But the moment one actually looks at the word — in the chronicles, in Bible translations and on old maps — the construction falls apart. Let us take it in order: when the name appeared, what it meant, and whose “borderland” it could never have been.

1187: Ukraine is older than the Muscovite state

The first mention of the name is well known to specialists in the sources. The Hypatian Chronicle — the Kyivan continuation of the Tale of Bygone Years — records under the year 1187 the death of Volodymyr Hlibovych, prince of Pereyaslav, a warrior who defended the southern frontier against the Cumans^[1]. The chronicler closes the obituary with the words “ѡ нем же Оукраина много постона” — “for him Ukraine grieved deeply”, in Leonid Makhnovets’s translation. Just two years later, under 1189, the same chronicle mentions the “Ukraine of Halych” — so the word was applied to different lands of Rus’, and by no means in the sense of anyone’s borderland.

For a sense of scale: in 1187 Moscow was a freshly mentioned settlement on the edge of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality, and the Principality of Moscow would appear only in the thirteenth century. To call Ukraine “Russia’s borderland” is anachronism in its purest form: the name “Ukraine” is centuries older not only than the Russian Empire but than Muscovite statehood itself. How Muscovy later appropriated the name “Rus’” is a separate story, examined in the article How “Rus’” Became “Russia”.

What the root means: krai is not “the edge”

The linguistic core of the myth is a substitution of meaning. The common Slavic root krai has two principal senses: “a piece, the end of something” and “land, country, region”. Ukrainian historians and linguists stress that krai is any part of a whole, not necessarily the part at the edge^[2]. Ukrainians still say ridnyi krai — “native land”, not “native outskirts”; in the Czech administrative system kraj is the ordinary word for a region (kraj Vysočina, the Moravian-Silesian kraj), and nobody translates it as “borderland”^[9].

At the same time, honest historians do not oversimplify: Natalia Yakovenko notes that in the chancellery language of the sixteenth–seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth “Ukraina” could indeed sound like “frontier land” — from the vantage point of Vilnius or Kraków^[3]. But that is a foreign capital’s view of the Dnipro country, not a “translation” of the name — and certainly not an “outskirt of Russia”, which at the time existed on these lands neither politically nor mentally.

The most compelling evidence for the meaning “country” is the Peresopnytsia Gospel (1556–1561), the first known translation of the Gospels into Ruthenian (Old Ukrainian). The translators systematically use ukraina wherever the Greek text has χώρα (“country, land”): “he came into the ukrainas of Judea”, “passed through all the ukraina of the Jordan”, and the environs of Jerusalem are called “ukrainas”^[4]. Judea and the Jordan country are “ukrainas” in the sense of “lands, countries”, with no frontier connotation whatsoever.

This is a typical European naming pattern: England is the “land of the Angles”, Deutschland the “land of the Germans”; the word for “land” underlies the names of many countries^[5]. Ukraine belongs to that family — the “country, land” of its inhabitants.

”Okraina” — whose, and since when?

Now for the myth’s “linguistic” arguments. The first concerns spelling: in old texts the word begins with “оу”, therefore, we are told, it is “okraina”. But “оу” is a digraph — a way of rendering the sound [u] inherited from the Greek scribal tradition: “Оукраина” reads “Ukraina”, just as “оучитель” reads “uchytel” (“teacher”)^[6].

The second argument founders on Russian lexicography itself. The noun okraina is a late word: in the meaning of “border regions” it is attested in Russian texts from the seventeenth century, and it entered dictionaries only in 1847^[7]. A piquant detail: in Muscovite documents of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries the border lands of Muscovy itself were called ukrainnye gorody (“ukrainian towns”) — Tula, Kashira, Serpukhov. So if the “frontier” etymology fits anyone’s usage, it is Moscow’s, not Kyiv’s.

The third argument sounds the most solid: the chronicles do mention “ukrainas” of other lands — the Pskov “ukraina” in the Third Pskov Chronicle under 1271, “our villages… in the Ukraina” in a treaty of the Riazan princes of 1496. Indeed they do — and that works against the myth. First, these “ukrainas” are the borderlands of specific Rus’ principalities, used long before any unified Russia existed for Ukraine to be the “outskirt” of. Second, as the author of the video analysis himself notes, the word was also applied to territories that were never anyone’s periphery^[8]. A common noun ukraina meaning “frontier land” did exist — but it was to the Middle Dnipro region that it attached as a proper name, in time becoming the name of the country.

Ukraine on the maps of Europe

The decisive test of a “proper name” is the outside view: how these lands were seen by those who had no stake in either Kyiv or Moscow. The maps supply the answer^[10].

In 1613 the Radziwiłł map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was published in Amsterdam (compiled by Tomasz Makowski, engraved by Hessel Gerritsz). On the Middle Dnipro, between Rzhyshchiv and Kaniv, the cartographer wrote: “Volynia Ulterior, quae tum Vkraina tum Nis ab alijs vocitatur” — “Further Volhynia, which others call Vkraina or the Niz”. The spelling with V is precisely the “Ukraine written through V” the video mentions.

In 1648 the general map by the French military engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan appeared in Gdańsk — “Delineatio Generalis Camporum Desertorum vulgo Ukraina” (“A General Depiction of the Desert Plains, Commonly Called Ukraine”). And in 1660 the second edition of his book came out in Rouen already under the title “Description d’Ukranie” — “A Description of Ukraine”. For a European reader of the mid-seventeenth century, Ukraine was not “somebody’s outskirt” but a specific country with a name of its own, located on the Middle Dnipro^[11].

What this means

The chronology is simple and fatal to the myth. 1187 — the chronicle’s Ukraine, for which the land “grieves”. The sixteenth century — the “ukrainas of Judea” in the first Ukrainian translation of the Gospels: the word means “country”. 1613–1660 — Vkraina/Ukraina on European maps as the established name of the Dnipro region. And only in 1847 does the Russian word okraina first enter a dictionary.

The name “Ukraine” does not “diminish” the country or make it anyone’s frontier — any more than England is a “borderland” of Germany because the two share the root land. The “borderland” myth is not linguistics but politics: it exists to present a neighbouring state as a derivative of the empire. For how the same logic works in other storylines — from the appropriation of the name “Rus’” to the fairy tale of an “artificial nation” — see the neighbouring articles.