Ukraine’s Borders: A Century of Flux and the Myth of Permanence

There is a persistent belief—particularly among Western observers—that Ukraine’s borders, as they stood on the eve of 2014, were somehow sacrosanct, immutable, a fixed reality of the international order. This view betrays a profound ignorance of history. The notion that any European border, let alone Ukraine’s, is beyond dispute ignores the repeated redrawings of maps, the frequent rise and fall of territorial claims, and the consistent reality of border changes through war, treaty, and political maneuvering. Ukraine, in particular, is one of the most illustrative examples of this broader historical phenomenon. If there is a European country whose borders could be considered permanently settled, Ukraine is not it.

The history of Ukraine’s borders is a history of shifting sovereignties. The land that today constitutes Ukraine has been contested ground for centuries, passing through the hands of empires, republics, and military occupations. Its territorial definition has been redrawn at least a dozen times in the last few hundred years, often at the whims of external forces. Its current borders, inherited from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, are more of a historical accident than a product of some long-standing, organic national unity.

Consider the earliest configurations of the region. The medieval state of Kievan Rus, often cited as Ukraine’s foundational polity, was not a distinct Ukrainian entity but a loose federation of East Slavic principalities stretching from modern-day Belarus to Russia. It had no fixed borders in the contemporary sense, its influence waxing and waning with the strength of its rulers. When the Mongols sacked Kyiv in 1240, the remnants of Kievan Rus splintered, and control over Ukrainian lands shifted westward to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. By the late 14th century, most of Ukraine was under Lithuanian or Polish control, its borders dictated by dynastic marriages and military conquests rather than any intrinsic national identity.

The Union of Lublin in 1569 transferred most of what is now Ukraine from Lithuanian to direct Polish control, integrating it into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This arrangement lasted barely more than a century before the 1648 Cossack uprising against Polish rule created an autonomous Hetmanate in central Ukraine, a quasi-state that in turn sought the protection of Russia through the Pereyaslav Agreement of 1654. That agreement led, within a few decades, to Ukraine being partitioned along the Dnieper River between Poland and Russia—just one of many instances where Ukraine’s territorial fate was decided by external actors.

By the late 18th century, the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth resulted in yet another reconfiguration. The Russian Empire absorbed Right-Bank Ukraine, while the Austrian Habsburgs took control of Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia. At the same time, Catherine the Great expanded Russian control over southern Ukraine, annexing the Crimean Khanate in 1783. These changes laid the foundation for the Ukraine of the 19th century: a divided land, split between Russian and Austrian dominions, with no unified political existence of its own.

World War I and the Russian Revolution created another moment of flux. As the empires of Eastern Europe collapsed, multiple Ukrainian states were declared between 1917 and 1920—the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, even a short-lived Ukrainian Soviet Republic. But these fledgling entities were short-lived, crushed by Bolsheviks from the east and Poles from the west. The Treaty of Riga in 1921 formally divided Ukraine once again: western territories fell under Polish rule, while the east became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a constituent part of the USSR.

Even within the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s borders were not fixed. In the interwar period, the Ukrainian SSR lost some territory to the newly formed Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924. In 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet troops invaded eastern Poland and annexed western Ukraine, shifting the republic’s borders westward. In 1940, Northern Bukovina and parts of Bessarabia were taken from Romania and added to Ukraine. In 1945, Transcarpathia was transferred from Czechoslovakia to Soviet Ukraine. These expansions completed the territorial shape of what would become independent Ukraine in 1991—but they were hardly natural or inevitable.

The last major border adjustment before Ukraine’s independence was the 1954 transfer of Crimea from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian SSR. At the time, this move was largely symbolic, an administrative shift within the Soviet Union with little consequence. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine’s leaders insisted that the inherited Soviet boundaries should be the inviolable borders of the new state. That position—embraced by Western policymakers in the post-Cold War settlement—ignored the long history of border fluidity in the region and the tenuousness of Ukrainian sovereignty over territories that had never been definitively “Ukrainian” in any historical sense.

The events of 2014 and beyond fit into this broader historical pattern. Russia’s annexation of Crimea was not a sudden aberration but rather a return to a historical norm in which Ukraine’s frontiers were subject to external pressures and internal upheavals. The war in the Donbas, the contested status of Luhansk and Donetsk, and the shifting military lines in the current conflict all reinforce the reality that Ukraine’s borders—like those of much of Eastern Europe—are far from settled.

This does not mean that Ukraine’s sovereignty is illegitimate or that territorial integrity should not be defended. But it does mean that appeals to the supposed permanence of borders, as though they were some unchanging fact of nature, are fundamentally ahistorical. Ukraine, like Poland, Germany, and countless other European nations, has had its borders drawn and redrawn by the forces of history. To claim that they are now unchallengeable is to ignore centuries of evidence to the contrary.

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