Quotes from Anna Reid

Nor, since not all Ukrainians were Cossacks and not all Cossacks Ukrainians, did Cossackdom form an embryo Ukrainian nation.

Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral. It is hard to make out

In 1362 a Lithuanian army under Grand Duke Algirdas took Kiev, and the following year it inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mongols at the battle of Blue Waters in the bend of the Dnieper. The Lithuanian Grand Duchy now occupied roughly half the territory of old Rus, extending all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Many Lithuanians adopted Orthodoxy, and Ruthenian – the precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian – became the Duchy's lingua franca.

The Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations'. From the late fourteenth century until Russia took its first big bite out of the Commonwealth in the mid seventeenth, therefore, nearly the whole territory of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev, was ruled from the Polish royal capital of Cracow.

Moreover, until very recently Ukraine's neighbours did not see it as a separate country, or Ukrainians as a separate people, at all. To Russians it was part of Russia; to Poles, part of Poland.

If Moscow is Russia's heart,' runs a Russian proverb, 'and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.

The (Polish-bom) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that 'without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is 'the struggle of the Workers against Capital'. 'In that case,' replies the policeman, 'you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other.

When the Bolsheviks, came to power in 1917, Jews were able to take government jobs for the first time – hence the connection, in the minds of peasants whose first sight of a Jew in a position of authority was a commissar come to requisition grain or conscript men for the Red Army, between Jewishness and the nastier aspects of communism.

Here begins Ukraine's great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine 'Eastern Little Poland'; the Russian name for Ukraine was 'Little Russia'.

West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as 'Pan So-and-So'; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are 'Gospodin'. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate 'Uniate' church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope.

But Kievan Rus's glory days were short-lived. Lying on his deathbed in 1054 Yaroslav had pleaded with his offspring to 'love one another' for 'If ye dwell in envy and dissension, quarrelling with one another, then ye will perish yourselves and bring to ruin the land of your ancestors . . .'11

In 1299 Kiev lost its religious status too, when the Metropolitan, Rus's senior churchman, transferred his see to Vladimir, and thence, a few decades later, to Moscow.

That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila's marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time.

Ukraine's relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising;

Lviv, in present-day western Ukraine, became the only city in the world besides Rome to host three Christian archbishoprics – Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian.

Thus the heirs of Rus are not the Ukrainians, with their funny language and quaint provincial ways, but the far more successful Russians themselves.

The weirdest manifestation of the new exclusivity was the cult of 'Sarmatism', based on the lunatic notion that the Polish nobility were descended from a mythic eastern warrior-tribe called the Sarmatians, justifying an imaginary racial divide with the rest of the population. In line with their newly-invented Sarmatian credentials, the szlachta developed a bizarre taste for the bejewelled and exotic.

Beautiful in the frost and mist-covered hills above the Dnieper, the life of the City hummed and steamed like a many-layered honeycomb. All day long smoke spiralled in ribbons up to the sky from innumerable chimney-pots. A haze floated over the streets, the packed snow creaked underfoot, houses towered to five, six and even seven storeys. By day their windows were black, while at night they shone in rows against the deep, dark blue sky . . .

Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved -- on the contrary they saw plots under every stone.

The official Soviet line on the dispute emphasised harmony, homogeneity, Brotherhood. Kievan Rus was inhabited by a single monolithic 'ancient Rus' nationality, from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians all descended; for them to argue over Volodymyr and Yaroslav made no more sense than for the English and French to squabble over Charlemagne. The languages of all three nations descend from the ancient Slavs', and all three inherited Orthodoxy.

Being 'Ukrainian', for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian.

UKRAINA is literally translated as 'on the edge' or 'borderland', and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.