Long, long ago, in the area of the world now known as Eastern Europe, a great and mighty empire came into being. The empire was known as Rus with Keiv as its capital. Under Vladimir the Great and his son, Yaroslav the Wise, Kievan Rus reached its zenith, becoming one of the most civilized and advanced nations in Europe around 1000 A.D. Rus at that time stretched from the Black Sea in the south to the tip of modern Finland in the north while it almost reached the Baltic Sea in the west and touched parts of the Volga River in the east.

To go back further, events in the land that was to become Ukraine were very heavily influenced by the fact that the land lay on one of the main travel routes between Europe and Asia. The route was used by peaceful trade caravans as well as tribes migrating westward with their powerful armies. As a result, many different peoples occupied or passed through Ukrainian territory at one time or another. Among them were the Cimmerians, Sythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Goths, Huns, Bulgarians and Avars. Behind that constant movement of people the Slavs emerged in eastern Europe sometime during the second millennium B.C. As the original Slavs dispersed, they formed into three main groups: the Western Slavs including the Czechs, Poles and Slovaks; the Southern Slavs consisting of the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Slovenes; and the Eastern Slavs consisting of the Ukrainians, the Great Russians and the White Russians. The Slavs who moved to the south, taking the place of the Goths after they moved westward are the direct ancestors of the modern day Ukrainians.

The ancient Greeks and mighty Vikings both contributed to the development of ancient Rus. The Greeks at one time had colonies on the shores of the Black Sea. The ancient Ukrainian lands and its peoples are mentioned in Homer's great Greek epics, the Odyssey and the Iliad. The Greek alphabet was used by Saint Cyril, a Christian missionary, as the basis for the Cyrillic alphabet which in different forms is used by all the eastern Slavs. The Greeks also lent their form of Christianity, Greek Orthodox, to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the adventurous Vikings who explored as far west as Canada provided the early leaders of Rus. The Viking roots of these leaders was readily apparent in their names, Askold, Dir, Rurik, Oleg, Igor and Olga.

The "Chronicle of Bygone Years" records the history of Kieven Rus. During the latter half of the 900s, Sviatoslav, the son of Igor and Olga and a true warrior, ascended to the throne and led what has been described as "The Great Adventure". He vastly expanded ancient Rus and succeeded in bringing all of the Eastern Slavs under the rule of Kiev. Unfortunately for the Eastern Slavs though, he also conquered the Khazars, a people of Turkish origin who lived to the east of the Slavs. For a few centuries these people had formed a protective barrier against the nomadic Asian tribes and allowed the Eastern Slavs to develop and organize. When they were conquered to allow direct trading relations with the East, the protective barrier that they had provided disappeared. First, in the tenth century, the Pechenegs and later, in the eleventh century, the Polovtsi swept in from the east. They were constantly at war with Kievan Rus and savagely plundered the land.

Vladimir the Great came to power in 980 and ruled until 1015. Valdimir was a strong leader and he successfully fought many campaigns against the enemies of Rus. The focus of his reign, however, was the consolidation his empire and the introduction of a stronger administration to run it. Vladimir decided to adopt a religion for his country so he began to explore those available. His grandmother Olha had adopted Christianity in around 955. In 988, Vladimir the Great officially converted Rus to Christianity. The form of Christianity he adopted, however, was the Greek Orthodox form from Constantinople with all its Byzantine trappings as opposed to the Catholic form from Rome. The Byzantine influence is outwardly apparent in the Orthodox cross and domes of the Ukrainian churches. In order to encourage the adoption of the new religion, Vladimir had his subjects taken to the Dneipro River to be baptised. In later years Vladimir's choice of religion was to have a profound effect on the survival of the nation.

(The icon shown here of Vladimir having his subjects baptised in the Dneipro River is located in St. George's Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.)

Vladimir's son, Yaroslav, followed in his father's footsteps and became another great leader. But with Yaroslov's passing, the Kievan Empire began to crumble. This was due in part to that fact that no strong order of succession had been established and Yaroslav's sons fought amongst themselves for control of the empire just as their father and grandfather had done before them. None of the princes were strong enough to control the empire, however, so Kievan Rus was partitioned amongst Yaroslav's sons. During the following decades, the princes not only fought common enemies but unfortunately they often fought amongst themselves. In 1169, one of the princes of the Russians in the north, wishing to undermine the power and prestiage of Kiev while increasing the supremacy of the north, swooped down with his Russian army and sacked Kiev, opening a rift between the north and the south. Many years were to pass before Kiev would regain its former prominence. The fragile Kievan state received a final devastating blow in 1240 when the Tatars under Batu, one of Genghis Khan's grandsons, swept in from the east and laid waste to Kiev.