Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. Ukraineborders the Russian Federation to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west,Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast, respectively. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after the Russian Federation. According to a popular and well established theory, the medieval state of Kievan Rus was established by the Varangians in the 9th century as the first historically recorded East Slavic state which emerged as a powerful nation in the Middle Ages until it disintegrated in the 12th century. By the middle of the 14th century, Ukrainian territories were under the rule of three external powers—the Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Kingdom of Poland. After the Great Northern War (1700–1721) Ukraine was divided between a number of regional powers and, by the 19th century, the largest part of Ukraine was integrated into the Russian Empire with the rest under Austro-Hungarian control. A chaotic period of incessant warfare ensued, with several internationally recognized attempts at independence from 1917 to 1921, following World War I and the Russian Civil War. Ukraine emerged from its own civil war, and on December 30, 1922 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian SSR's territory was enlarged westward during the civil war shortly before, and after World War II, and further south in 1954 with the Crimea transfer. In 1945, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations.
Ukraine became independent again when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. This dissolution started a period of transition to a market economy, in which Ukraine was stricken with an eight-year recession. Since then, however, the economy has experienced a high increase in GDP growth. Ukraine was caught up in the worldwide economic crisis in 2008 and the economy plunged. GDP fell 20% from spring 2008 to spring 2009, then leveled off as analysts compared the magnitude of the downturn to the worst years of economic depression during the early 1990s. However, the country remains a globally important market and supplier, particularly, the world's third biggest grain exporter (as of 2011).
Ukraine is a unitary state composed of 24 oblasts (provinces), one autonomous republic (Crimea), and two cities with special status:Kiev, its capital and largest city, and Sevastopol, which houses the Russian Black Sea Fleet under a leasing agreement. Ukraine is a republic under a semi-presidential system with separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine continues to maintain the second largest military in Europe, after that of Russia. The country is home to 46 million people, 77.8 percent of whom are ethnic Ukrainians, with sizable minorities of Russians (17%), Belarusians and Romanians. Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine. Russian is also widely spoken. The dominant religion in the country is Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which has heavily influenced Ukrainian architecture, literature and music.
The traditional view (mostly influenced by Russian and Polish historiography) on the etymology of Ukraine is that it came from the old Slavic term ukraina which meant "border region" or "frontier" and thus corresponded to the Western term march. The term can be often found in Eastern Slavic chronicles from 1187 on, but for a long time it referred not solely to the border lands in present-day Ukraine. The plural term ukrainy was used as well in the Grand Duchy of Moscow as in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly the lands across the border to the nomad world (Crimean Khanate) were described by this word. Frequent raids from the steppe made life in such regions a special and dangerous challenge. With the migration of the Great Abatis Belt southwards, the application of the term switched to Sloboda Ukraine and then to Central Ukraine where in the course of the time it obtained ethnic meaning for the local South Rus' (Little Russia in the ecclesiastic and the imperial Russian terminology).
Many contemporary Ukrainian historians translate the term "u-kraine" as "in-land", "home-land" or "our-country". This translation is in accordance with the original Ukrainian language meaning of preposition "у-" (u-) and noun "країна" (krayina). The accompanying claim that it always had a strictly separate meaning to "borderland" (ukraina vs. okraina) is considered inconsistent with a number of historical sources, often of not Ukrainian origin, while the translation as "borderland" agrees well with the traditional Russian language meaning of "у-" (u-) and "краина" (kraina).
Though the form "the Ukraine" was once the more common term in English, this is now considered inappropriate; most sources have dropped the article in favour of simply "Ukraine".