Poland · Lithuania · Ukraine
Слава Україні
Glory to Ukraine. This is a short account of a history three nations share — and of the people defending one of them right now.
I · 1385–1795
One state, many nations
For four hundred years Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians lived inside the same borders, under an elected king and a parliament, at a time when almost everyone else in Europe lived under an absolute one. It was not a fair state and it was not a peaceful one. It was, however, a state built by more than one nation — and it kept coming close to admitting it.
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1385
The Union of Krewo
Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, married Jadwiga, the crowned king of Poland, and took the throne in Kraków. Lithuania — the last pagan state in Europe — accepted Christianity. Two peoples began four centuries of shared life.
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14th–16th c.
A Ruthenian grand duchy
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretched across most of what is now Belarus and Ukraine. Its chancery wrote in Ruthenian, the ancestor of Ukrainian and Belarusian. Its law, the Lithuanian Statutes, grew out of the legal tradition of Kyivan Rus. The dukes were Lithuanian; the state was largely Ruthenian.
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1569
The Union of Lublin
Poland and Lithuania became one elective monarchy — the Commonwealth of Both Nations. In the same act the Ukrainian voivodeships of Volhynia, Kyiv and Bracław passed from Lithuania to the Polish Crown.
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16th–17th c.
The Sich
Below the Dnipro rapids the Cossacks built the Zaporizhian Sich: a self-governing host that elected its hetmans and answered to no lord. It is the oldest continuous argument in this part of Europe that people can rule themselves.
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1658
The Union of Hadiach — the road not taken
Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky and the Commonwealth signed a treaty to add a third, equal member: the Grand Duchy of Ruthenia, with its own courts, treasury, army and an academy in Kyiv. A Commonwealth of Three Nations. The Sejm ratified only a watered-down version, war swallowed the rest, and it never came into being — but the idea was written down, and it has never entirely gone away.
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1772–1795
The partitions
The Commonwealth was carved up by its neighbours. Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine all disappeared into empires at once — the largest share of each into Russia. What had been a shared state became a shared absence.
II · 1920
An alliance, and a border bought with it
When both countries reappeared after the empires fell, they fought the same enemy side by side — briefly, and to very different ends.
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April 1920
Piłsudski and Petliura
Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petliura, head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, signed an alliance in Warsaw. In May, Polish and Ukrainian troops entered Kyiv together.
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August 1920
Zamość
When the Red Army rolled west, the 6th Sich Rifle Division under Marko Bezruchko held Zamość against Budyonny’s cavalry — Ukrainians defending a Polish town in the days that decided the Battle of Warsaw.
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March 1921
The Peace of Riga
Poland made its peace with Soviet Russia and Ukrainian lands were divided between them. Poland got a border. Ukraine’s soldiers got internment camps, and Ukraine got another hundred years of waiting. Petliura was shot dead in Paris five years later.
III
The pages that are not bright
The same century holds Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–45, where tens of thousands of Polish civilians were murdered by the UPA and Ukrainian villages burned in reprisal; and 1947, when Operation Vistula deported Ukrainians from south-eastern Poland and scattered them across the country.
None of that is a footnote and none of it cancels out. It is written here because solidarity that needs an edited history is not worth much — and because two nations able to say all of this out loud, and still stand together, have done something rarer than winning an argument about the past.
IV · since 24 February 2022
What Ukraine did
Russia invaded before dawn on 24 February 2022, along the whole length of the country. Foreign capitals gave Kyiv three days and offered the government a flight out. Ukrainians — soldiers, territorial defence volunteers, railway crews, surgeons, teachers, people who had never held a rifle in their lives — declined the schedule.
The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.
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24 Feb 2022
Hostomel
Russian air-assault troops landed by helicopter at Antonov airport to open an airbridge into Kyiv on the first morning. National Guardsmen and the 4th Rapid Response Brigade counter-attacked and wrecked the runway. The transports never landed, and the plan to take the capital in days died there.
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24 Feb 2022
Snake Island
Thirteen border guards on a rock in the Black Sea were ordered by a cruiser to surrender. Their answer — “Russian warship, go f*** yourself” — was on postage stamps within two months.
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25 Feb 2022
“I need ammunition, not a ride”
Offered evacuation from Kyiv, the president stayed in the city. It was reported around the world that night, and a great many people who had been told the war would last three days changed their minds.
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Feb–May 2022
Mariupol
The city held out for nearly three months under siege and bombardment. The last defenders fought on from beneath the Azovstal steelworks until 20 May.
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April 2022
Kyiv held
Russian forces withdrew from northern Ukraine — and Bucha, Irpin and Borodianka showed what they had done in the towns they had held.
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Sept–Nov 2022
Kharkiv, then Kherson
A counteroffensive retook most of Kharkiv oblast in a matter of days. On 11 November Kherson — the only regional capital Russia had captured — was liberated, and the city square filled with flags.
Behind the front there is a second war that photographs badly: railway workers running evacuation trains under fire, power crews climbing pylons after every strike to give a city back its light, medics, drivers, volunteers, whole streets of people baking and welding and driving vans east. And in Poland, in the first weeks, millions crossed the border and ordinary families simply opened their doors to strangers — the most Polish-Ukrainian thing that has happened in four hundred years.
Ukraine is still defending itself. That it had any choice at all was decided in the first three days, by people who were not supposed to hold.
V
Help them hold
Two places that take international donations and publish what they do with them.
UNITED24
u24.gov.ua
The official fundraising platform of Ukraine, launched by the President in 2022. Choose where your money goes: defence, humanitarian demining, medical aid, rebuilding, education. Reports are published weekly.
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Come Back Alive
Повернись живим
Founded in May 2014, when a handful of volunteers delivered body armour marked “come back alive” to the front. Today it is Ukraine’s largest defence-focused foundation, and the first Ukrainian charity licensed to procure military and dual-use equipment. Administrative costs are raised separately, so donations go to the forces in full.
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