As the Ukraine crisis has progressed I’ve gone back to the books to get as accurate a picture as I can of the territorial evolution of Ukraine over the last few centuries. We know that the country has a rough but persistent division between a more western-oriented and more thoroughly ethnic Ukrainian west and a more Russified east. At least some of that is due to the fact that significant parts of western Ukraine were ruled by Austria-Hungary and its successor states as recently as the first half of the 20th century.
This map doesn’t go back centuries. But it’s a helpful illustration of the territorial expansion of what is now Ukraine going back to World War I.
Click this post’s title to see a larger version of the map.
