After six months of war in Ukraine, most observers agree that the roots of Russian aggression lie in the country’s deep-rooted attitudes to culture and history. In line with Russia’s nationalist traditions, Putin denies any place for a separate Ukrainian identity.

The Ukrainians, in contrast, see themselves as a proud nation with their own history, culture, centuries long struggle for independence, and, of course, language. And while Ukrainian has been dismissed as a dialect of Russian in Moscow, it in fact has a long history – and is very much a language in its own right.

That independence can be seen in the genesis of the word ‘Ukraine’ itself. In most Slavonic languages, the letter ‘U’ – and written in Cyrillic as У – is a preposition of location; according to context it can be translated as ‘in’, ’on’ ‘at’ or ‘near’, and it is followed by nouns in the genitive case. In Ukrainian, the word Kray means ‘edge’ (although in Russian it means ‘land’ or ‘country’). So ‘U Krayu’ stands for ‘At the Edge’, and Ukraina for ‘the Land on the Edge’ or ‘Borderland’. It is very similar to the American idea of the ‘Frontier’.

The question ‘on the edge of what?’, however, sparks controversy. One answer, since the term first appears in mediaeval times when Ukraine lay within the Jagiellonian realms of Poland-Lithuania, would be: ‘the borderland of Poland-Lithuania’. Others might say that Ukraine was ‘the Edge of Christendom’ or possibly of civilised settlement before the endless steppe. Russians think that Ukraine is the borderland of Russia.

The tenth century state of Kyivan Rus was created by a Viking dynasty ruling over a collection of East Slavic tribes. Those Eastern Slavs were the last in a prehistoric procession of Slavic peoples, who had drifted out of Eurasia in the rear of Latins, Celts, and Germanics. After crossing the ‘Borderland’, the leading group of Slavs had turned south to occupy the Roman province of Illyria, thereby obtaining the label of South Slavs or ‘Yugoslavs’: the ancestors of Serbs, Croats, and others. After them, the ‘Western Slavs’ passed through on their way to create the Great Moravian Empire and the kingdoms of Bohemia and Poland; they were the progenitors of Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles. Finally, the Eastern Slavs settled in Kyivan Rus – in a land known in Latin as Ruthenia. Their ruski language, best classed as Ruthenian or ‘Old East Slavonic’, was the predecessor of three modern languages – Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian.

Since the territorial base of Old East Slavonic coincided largely with modern Ukraine, some overzealous linguists have been tempted to call it ‘proto-Ukrainian’. This egregious anachronism resembles the more frequent mistake of confusing ancient Rus with modern Russia.

Chronology is all important here. All the Slav tribes once spoke a common, undocumented tongue which has been reconstructed by linguists, and is now designated a ‘Proto-Slavonic’. A branch of the overarching Indo-European linguistic family, Proto-Slavonic gave each of its offspring with the roots of their core vocabulary, their basic phonology, and their highly inflected grammar that operates, like Latin, through genders, conjugations, declensions and multiple cases. It was the source from which some 20 modern Slavonic languages have evolved .

In due course, Kyivan Rus was converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, who introduced the art of writing together with a new, artificial liturgical language called Old Church Slavonic. Originally devised by the brothers, Saints Cyril (826-64) and Methodius (815-85), for use in the Great Moravian Empire, OCS was developed from the brothers’ native Macedonian speech, and was written down firstly in the Glagolitic alphabet, later in a simplified Bulgarian-based form known as Cyrillic. Like Latin in the Catholic world, it became the language of priests and educated people and greatly influenced vernacular Ruthenian and all its derivatives. It is still in use today by several Orthodox churches.

Kyivan Rus was destroyed by the Mongols in 1246, after which it passed under the harsh rule of the Golden Horde. But different parts of Ruthenian territory threw off the ‘Tatar yoke’ at different times. Those in the north and south-west were absorbed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose forces captured Kiev in 1364. Those further east, like the young city of Moscow, stayed as Tatar vassals to the end of the fifteenth century. Contrasting environments impacted linguistic evolution. Since Lithuania was joined to Poland by the Union of Krewo of 1385, and since Polish and Latin were the dominant languages of the Jagiellonian realms, Ruthenian speech in the Grand Duchy was strongly affected by Polish and other western influences. Kiev stayed in the Polish cultural sphere to 1667, most other parts of Ukraine for considerably longer, either until the Partitions of 1773-95, or in the case of western Ukraine, until 1945.

No such western influences ever reached the upper Volga Basin, from which the Grand Duchy of Moscow was to launch its dramatic expansion. Moscow started life as a settlement within the mediaeval principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, whose ‘Golden Ring’ of cities is now regarded as the womb of the Russian language. Moreover, having overpowered their neighbours and cast off the Tatar yoke by 1481, the rulers of Moscow claimed to be the successors of the recently destroyed Byzantine Empire. Their ideology of the ‘Third Rome’ led them to pose as the sole heirs of Rus, asserting that their form of governance, their Muscovite brand of Orthodoxy, and their version of ruski speech, should be adopted willy-nilly by all other Orthodox Slavs. Linguistic imperialism was in their blood.

Between Ivan the Terrible’s coronation in 1547 and the declaration of the Russian Empire in 1721, the Muscovite state transformed itself into the ‘Tsardom of All Rus’, as its territory expanded on average by an area larger than the size of Belgium every year. The title of Tsar was adapted from the Roman ‘Caesar’, and the formula of ‘All Rus’ – vsieya Rusi – laid claim not only to those parts of the former Rus under Muscovite control but also to large parts beyond it. In Muscovite usage, the old name of ‘Rus’ gradually took on the modern form of ‘Russia’, whilst the standardised, Muscovite version of the ruski language was increasingly regarded as ‘Russian’. Yet in that same period, when the whole of Ukraine was transferred from Lithuania to the Kingdom of Poland, the gulf between the old ruski of Ukraine and the new Russian ruski of Muscovy widened.

A comparison with the Low Countries may help to clarify. For centuries, various forms of Low German or Plattdeutsch had been spoken right across northern Europe from Flanders to Saxony, each identified by the names of düütsch/duits/or Deutsch. But in early modern Europe different parts of the region found themselves in different political and cultural environments. In the western province of Flanders, first Burgundian then Spanish or French rule was instigated, creating conditions for the emergence of Vlaams or Flemish. Then, in 1579, 17 United Provinces launched the independent state of the Netherlands, thereby consolidating the Dutch or Nederlands language. Further east, in a reduced Holy Roman Empire, local dialects merged into German. One can suggest with caution, therefore, that Flemish, Dutch and German are the Germanic counterparts of Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian in the Slavonic world.

In 1721 under Peter the Great, Putin’s hero, the freshly-minted Russian Empire adorned itself with the twin titles of ‘all the Russias’ and Rossiya – the latter being the Byzantine Greek word for Rus. By this time, the fine distinctions between Rus, Russia, ‘all the Russias’ and Rossiya, were thoroughly confused. Moreover, the Empire proceeded to dismember Poland-Lithuania and to annexe all parts of the former Rus that had previously escaped. Russian bureaucrats then undertook a brilliant renaming exercise. The northern stretches of Ruthenia became ‘White Russia’ while the southern stretches in Ukraine became Malorossiya or ‘Little Russia’. This nomenclature was presented as historic.

Many inhabitants of so-called ‘Little Russia’ were not pleased by the labels foisted on them. Bit by bit, they began to call themselves ‘Ukrainians’ after their homeland and, because the term ruski had been appropriated by the Muscovites, to call their language ‘Ukrainian’. Yet the change moved slowly, not least because an absolute majority of those would-be Ukrainians were still illiterate serfs.

Throughout the two centuries of imperial Russian rule, officialdom did everything in its power to strengthen the Russian language in Ukraine and to suppress Ukrainian. Russification was helped by the influx of colonists into the southern province of ‘New Russia’ and of workers into new industrial towns like Yuzhovo, the future Donetsk. Russian speakers soon came to dominate the cities, including Kiev, while barriers of all sorts were erected against Ukrainian speakers in the countryside. Teaching in Ukrainian was banned, books destroyed, writers like the poet Taras Shevchenko arrested and exiled. As the Valuev Circular of 1850 put it: ‘The tongue used by commoners [in Ukraine] is nothing but Russian corrupted by the influence of Poland. A separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.’ By the Ems Ukaz (Ems decree) of 1876, Alexander II closed down all Ukrainian printing.

Yet, once the serfs were emancipated in 1861, Tsarist officials underestimated the on-going demand for Ukrainian schooling, and they could not control Ukrainian activities in nearby Austro-Hungary, especially in Lemberg (now known as Lwow or Lviv), where teaching thrived and books could be published. They also did not foresee that the Empire of the Tsars would collapse, and that after the revolutions of 1917, the Bolsheviks would actively support the dissemination of all non-Russian languages.

In these matters, Tsarist Russians were not uniquely wicked. In 19th Century Europe a widespread, Darwinian belief was that powerful so-called ‘historical languages’ like English, French, or German (and indeed Russian) deserved to flourish while ‘unhistorical languages’ were unfit to survive. Leading British educators shamelessly embraced the assumed superiority of English and the accompanying demotion of Welsh, Irish or Scottish Gaelic.

A special animus, however, was reserved for forms of regional speech, which were closely related to dominant state languages, and which were viewed by the powers that be as needless, subversive irritants. In France, the Republic’s full weight was thrown against Occitan and Provençal in particular. In Spain, General Franco’s educators were pursuing their campaign to liquidate Catalan as late as 1975.

So Ukrainian speakers in Russia were fighting a fight shared by numerous minorities across Europe. In 1917, after the formal recognition of their language, they could be forgiven for believing that a new day was dawning. They could not have imagined the ordeals that awaited.