Ukraine is not Russia

In response to Putin claiming that Ukraine is just southern Russia and in follow-up to the post about the spelling of Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, I offer this comparison between Kyiv and Moscow. Kyiv was founded back in 482 AD by three Norse explorers and their sister. Ukraine was a great Empire by the  9th century and its Christian roots go back to that period. In 867 Saints Cyril and Methodius appealed in person to the Bishop of Rome to bring the Christian faith into Kyivan Rus. By 906, they had founded a diocese in Peremyshl, today a diocese of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in what is now Przemyśl, Poland from where my father's family hails. Their efforts, and those of their apostles, led to the translation of Christian Scriptures and service (liturgy) from Greek to Slavonic, and the eventual development of the modern Cyrillic alphabet. Christianity became dominant in the territory with the mass Baptism of Kiev in the Dniepro River in 988 ordered by Vladimir the Great.

This was several hundred years before Russia even existed! Moscow was founded around 1147. Ukraine is not Russia and never has been.

Russian and Ukrainian are the same language, aren't they?

The politics of language and culture

My sister, Oksana, at Plast camp in NY - a typical Ukrainian American

When I was growing up in America, we did not yet have a television but we did manage to get a phone with a party line. Those old enough to remember will understand this strange phenomenon of sharing phone lines with neighbors and being able to listen in on their conversations. Except it didn't do us much good as we didn't understand a word of English.