A very layman's version of Ukrainian history

During the 10th and 11th centuries, much of what is now known as Ukraine was part of Kievan Rus, the most powerful and largest state in Europe and eventually laid the foundation for the national identity of Ukrainians and Russians. That time period saw the rise of Vladimir the Great, who helped steer the nation towards Byzantine Christianity, and the Yuroslav the Wise, whose tenure as the nation’s leader saw increased cultural and military development.

After the disintegration of the Kievan Rus state after the reign of Mstislav (1125-1132), foreign invasions and incursions plagued the land, including from Turkic tribes and Mongols (they decimated Kiev in 1240); the state was succeeded by Galicia-Volhynia, a merged state consisting of the principalities of Galich (Halych) and Volodymyr-Volynskyi.

In the time that followed, the Poland and Lithuania both ruled in Galicia-Volhynia, and then jointly (although the Polish Crown apparently ruled a lot more of the territory) after the 1569 Union of Lublin, which established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Under Polish rule, and as a result of Polonisation of Rutheian nobility (yielding a blending, of sorts, between the two cultures), many Ukrainian commoners turned to the Cossacks for protection. Then, the Cossacks turned to Orthodox Russia for protection, forming an alliance that eventually lead to the downfall of the Polish-Lithuanian state.

Apparently there was a broken promise between the Russian Empire—which controlled a good chunk of eastern Ukraine (western Ukraine was under the rule of Austria after the Russo-Polish war)—and the Cossacks and Ukrainians, in which Russia renigged on Ukrainian independence as detailed in a treaty. Later, tsarist Russia supressed the Ukrainain language in print and public.

Then a bunch of time passes. Nearly 4 million Ukrainians fought in WWI (3.5 million under Russia, 250,000 under Austria) and, following the collapse of the two empires after the Great War, a pretty bitchin’ independence movement was started up. After some stuff, western Ukraine was incorporated into Poland and Poland recognized the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a founding member of the Soviet Union. The revolution left over 1 million Ukrainians dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. A devestating famine gave the Soviet Union reason to slacken the restrictive rules in regards to Ukrainian language in print and public, and that caused a resurrgence in Ukrainian culture. However, this was largely reversed by the mid-1930s under Stalin—whose political repression also resulted in the deaths of 80 percent of Ukrainian cultural elite.

During WWII, since Poland (which controlled the western part of the Ukraine) and the Soviet Union were fighting together, there was a reunification of Ukraine. This was apparently a watershed moment for the Ukraine. But not every Ukrainian was happy; apparently some, but not many, fought against the Soviet Union. Of 8.7 million Soviet felled in battle, 1.4 million were Ukrainian.

After Stalin’s death, Soviet-Ukrainian relations were less tense under Kruschev (he was apparently First Secretary of the Communist Part of Ukrainian SSR).

Of the 7 million people in the contaminated area of Chernobyl, 2.2 million were Ukrainian.

On August 24, 1991, the Ukrainian parliament adopted the Act of Independence and, less than three months later, there was a referendum and presidential election in which 90 percent of the people voted for the Act and Leonid Kravchuk to become the country’s first president.

I hope I got most of this right. Here is a link to the CIA's World Factbook on the Ukraine.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/up.html