Modern history of Ukraine

Ukraine emerges as the concept of a nation, and the Ukrainians as a nationality, with the Ukrainian National Revival in the early 19th century, in the wake of the peasant revolt of 1768/69 and the eventual partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Galicia fell to the Austrian Empire, and the rest of Ukraine to the Russian Empire.

Ukraine first became independent with the Ukrainian War of Independence of 1917 to 1921, but the resulting Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (in 1919 merged from the Ukrainian People's Republic and West Ukrainian People's Republic) was quickly subsumed in the Soviet Union. Apart from historical Ukraine (Little Russia), the Soviet republic also comprised a vast area of newly colonised land, formerly known as New Russia. Galicia, South Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and Carpathian Ruthenia were added as a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Second World War. The Soviet famine of 1932–33 or Holodomor killed an estimated 6 to 8 million people in the Soviet Union, the majority of them in Ukraine.

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