ABSTRACT
The problem of Russians in Ukraine and Belarus is a crucial issue in Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Belarusian relations. Russians are substantial minorities in these republics, accounting for roughly one out of every five inhabitants. Russians constitute the majority of the urban population of eastern (left-bank) and southern Ukraine and almost half the population of the industrial Don basin. In addition, they outnumber Ukrainians three to one in the Crimea. In the West, in the former Galicia and in Trans-carpathian Ukraine, the number of Russians is insignificant. The pattern of Russian concentration in Ukraine is due to the fact that between the second part of the thirteenth century and the seventeenth century, the eastern areas of today’s Ukraine were a very sparsely populated no-man’s-land between Muscovy, Poland, and the Crimean khanate. When Tatar power was on the decline, settlers from both Russia and Ukraine (the latter was still in Polish-Lithuanian hands) began to move into the area, and with the conquest of Crimea at the end of the eighteenth century, the same movement took place there too. Thus cut off from Kievan Ukraine, local Ukrainians underwent a centuries-long russification.
