Ukrainian Statehood: Key Stages

One yardstick does not fit every period

A modern state is described through sovereign borders, citizenship, centralized institutions, and a separation of powers. Premodern polities followed a different logic: authority could be dynastic, estate-based, contractual, and divided among several centers. Measuring Rus’ or the Commonwealth only against a twenty-first-century model is therefore anachronistic^[1].

This produces two equally misleading simplifications. One labels every polity on the territory of modern Ukraine “Ukrainian.” The other recognizes only a modern national republic as a state and declares everything before it “stateless.”

A qualified chronology, not an unbroken state

The lecture follows the tradition through different forms: Rus’ and the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia; the political institutions of the Ruthenian community in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Commonwealth; the Cossack state called the Zaporozhian Host; the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the Ukrainian State of 1917–1921; Soviet Ukraine, which had formal republican institutions but lacked full sovereignty; and independent Ukraine after 1991^[2].

These forms were separated by ruptures and changes in elites, territory, and political systems. “Tradition” here means historical memory, institutional experience, and renewed claims to self-government, not the legal identity of every polity in the sequence.

Rus’: a beginning with a qualification

Rus’ was not a modern Ukrainian nation-state. It was dynastic and multiethnic, and its lands extended far beyond today’s Ukraine. At the same time, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav formed its political core, while Ruthenian elites of later centuries appealed to its legacy. Rus’ can therefore serve as a qualified beginning of the Ukrainian state tradition without being assigned a modern national identity^[5].

The Commonwealth was not an empty interval

The inclusion of Ukrainian lands in Lithuania and Poland meant neither full independence nor the disappearance of political agency. In the estate-based Commonwealth, the Ruthenian nobility participated in diets and local self-government, lived under a distinct legal tradition, and preserved the memory of Rus’^[4]. Vitaliy Mykhailovskyi’s book about “our kings” makes the same distinction: a premodern subject could regard the king of a multinational polity as his own ruler without turning that polity into a Ukrainian nation-state.

Two Zaporozhian Hosts

The name Zaporozhian Host can conceal different institutions. The Cossack state ruled by the hetman, known as the Hetmanate, had a regimental administrative system and covered much of central and Left-Bank Ukraine. The Zaporozhian Host of the Lower Dnipro meant the Zaporozhian Sich and its lands on the lower river. They were connected but not identical political bodies^[3].

How the Hetmanate ended: the abolition of autonomies

Cossack statehood did not simply “dissolve” on its own — Catherine II deliberately abolished it. In 1764 the office of hetman was abolished and its powers passed to the Little Russian Collegium; in 1775 an imperial manifesto destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich (in June 1775 Russian troops surrounded and razed the Sich); and between 1781 and 1783 the regimental structure of the Hetmanate was dismantled. This was not a series of isolated episodes but a systemic centralizing policy: the abolition of regional autonomies across the whole empire, including the rights of the Baltic (Ostsee) provinces, under a program of “administrative unification” that Catherine herself had proclaimed as early as her 1764 instruction^[6].

Contemporaries and later authors link the ideological framing of this unification to the European Enlightenment. Catherine corresponded with Voltaire and cast herself as an “enlightened monarch,” while France was then consolidating its state by abolishing regional liberties — a model of absolutist unification she transferred to the Russian Empire^[7]. This is an interpretation rather than a direct cause: historians explain the abolition of the autonomies primarily through the pragmatics of imperial centralization (after the war with Turkey and the Pugachev revolt), yet Catherine’s correspondence with Voltaire is a documented fact that makes her cultural affinity with the Enlightenment entirely real.

The modern state and 1991

The states of the Ukrainian Revolution were the first to meet a modern national understanding of a Ukrainian state. Their defeat did not erase the project itself. Soviet Ukraine had a territory, constitution, and organs of government, but the union center made the decisive choices, so treating it as fully sovereign would be inaccurate.

The year 1991 marks the emergence of today’s independent Ukraine, not the first attempt at Ukrainian state-building. The myth of a state “gifted after the Soviet collapse” works only by removing Rus’, the Ruthenian political tradition, the Hetmanate, and the states of 1917–1921 from the historical record.