Name of Ukraine

[10] Derivatives in modern Slavic languages include variations of kraj or krai in a wide array of senses, such as "edge, country, land, end, region, bank, shore, side, rim, piece (of wood), area.

[15][16][circular reference] The oldest recorded mention of the word ukraina is found in the Kievan Chronicle under the year 1187,[2] as preserved in the Hypatian Codex written c. 1425 in an Old East Slavic variety of Church Slavonic.

[7] The passage narrates the death of Volodimer Glebovich [uk; ru; pl], prince of Pereyaslavl'[7] (r. 1169–1187):[b] ѡ нем же Ѹкраина много постона.

(Lisa L. Heinrich, 1977)[21]Serhii Plokhy (2015, 2021) connected the 1189 mention to that of 1187, stating that both referred to the same region: '1187–1189 A Kyivan chronicler first uses the word "Ukraine" to describe the steppe borderland from Pereiaslav in the east to Galicia in the west.

[7] In these decades, and the following centuries until the end of the Middle Ages, this term was applied to fortified borderlands of different principalities of Rus' without a specific geographic fixation: Halych-Volhynia,[7][23] the (Western) Buh region,[7] Pskov,[7][23] Polatsk,[7] Ryazan etc.

[23]: 183 [24] According to Serhii Plokhy (2006), 'the Muscovites referred to their steppe borderland as "Ukraine," while reserving different names for areas bordering on the settled territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland.

[26] In the mid-17th century, Franco-Polish cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, who had spent the 1630s as a military engineer and architect designing and building fortifications in the region, played a significant role in popularising Ukraine as a name and a concept to a broader Western European audience, both through his maps and his writings.

"), thereby 'using the term "Ukraine" to denote all the provinces of the Kingdom of Poland that bordered on the uninhabited steppe areas (campus desertorum)'.

published in Amsterdam in 1645, the sparsely inhabited region to the north of the Azov sea is called Okraina and is characterized to the proximity to the Dikoye pole (Wild Fields), posing a constant threat of raids of Turkic nomads (Crimean Tatars and the Nogai Horde).

[27] After the south-western lands of former Rus' were subordinated to the Polish Crown in 1569, the territory from eastern Podillia to Zaporizhia got the unofficial name Ukraina due to its border function to the nomadic Tatar world in the south.

[35] A May 1660 set of negotiation instructions written by hetman Yurii Khmelnytsky defined "Ukraine" as the territory controlled by the Cossack state according to the Treaty of Zboriv (1649), thus making it a political rather than geographic term.

[35] The scope of this Cossack political concept of Ukraine was remarkably different from that popularised by Beauplan (who was influenced by Polish traditions) around the same time; Beauplan's Vkrainie was first and foremost a set of voivodeships controlled by the Kingdom of Poland, characterised by their juxtaposition to the steppes as opposed to the rest of Poland.

[citation needed] It was also taken up by Volodymyr Antonovych and the Khlopomany ("peasant-lovers"), former Polish gentry in Eastern Ukraine, and later by the Ukrainophiles in Halychyna, including Ivan Franko.

The generally accepted and frequently used meaning of the word as "borderland" has increasingly been challenged by revision, motivated by self-asserting of identity.

[49][50] Linguist Hryhoriy Pivtorak (2001) argues that there is a difference between the two terms україна (Ukraina, "territory") and окраїна (okraina, "borderland").

Pivtorak argues that Ukraine had been used as a term for their own territory by the Ukrainian Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich since the 16th century, and that the conflation with okraina "borderlands" was a creation of tsarist Russia.