BBC: “Ukraine” or “the Ukraine”: Why do some country names have ‘the’?

The BBC explains: “Those who called it “the Ukraine” in English must have known that the word meant “borderland”. So they referred to it as “the borderland”.

The BBC reports: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians probably decided that the article “the” denigrated their country [by identifying it as a part of Russia] and abolished the article ‘the’ while speaking English, so now it is simply “Ukraine”. That’s why “the Ukraine” suddenly lost its article in the last 20 years, it’s a sort of linguistic independence in Europe, it’s hugely symbolic.” It’s propaganda.

The Germans, very well remembered from the 3rd Reich, still use the article “the” (die Ukraine”) but the English-speaking world has largely stopped using it since Ukraine’s independence.

The word “Ukraine” was firstly created in Polish as it says “borderland” for a part of the region which is today’s Ukraine, Belorussia. Poland and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth reigned over most of the territory which is today’s Ukraine, including Kiev. Polish reign was a historic consequence of the partial collapse of Russia following the Mongolian conquest and the internal Russian struggles and Poland took the chance to occupy for centuries large parts of old Russian lands which was total modern Ukraine. The heartland of what is today’s the most nationalist Ukrainian Western territory, the former old Russian Principality and Kingdom of Galicia-Wolhynia, became an integral part of Poland-Lithuania, after the Polish invasion in 1349. Poland considered this territory as its borderland, always in danger of Mongolian or Tartar raids and later of Russian, Cossack attacks, from the large steppes to the East. But Poland educated its borderland people away from Russia, exterminated the Old Eastern Slavonic Russian languange, introduced Catholicism, converted the orthodox-byzantine religious rites and also introduced Ruthenian, an Old West Slavonic language as administrative language. The nobility spoke Polish. The simple people, peasants were historically speaking a mix of local dialects and the Ruthenian officical language, while absorbing the simple people’s speaking, would then develop in the 17th century into the “Ukrainian”, Belorussian” and “Rusyn” languages – “Rusyn” being a small, disappearing language group, but protected by some states as minority language. These “Ukrainian, Belorussian” languages remained spoken by the peasants and uneducated people, mostly not written, while the official, administrative language depended forthwith on the governing authorities which were firstly the Poles, then mainly the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires (after the partition of Poland in 1777). Russian and German became the administrative languages in what was the former Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and what is now partially the territory of modern Ukraine.

The origin of the name “Ukraine” is therefore, undisputed. It never refered to a people, state or nation, but to an administrative area always governed by different powers, with changing religions, languages, cultures. This was the case till the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The former Soviet Republic of Ukraine, a by the Soviets artificially constituted administrative area, comprising, in addition to Galicia-Wolhynia (the origin of the Ukrainian nationalist movement), large old Russian lands and Russian towns, such as Kiev, Odessa and Crimea, as well as the Russian industrial region of the Donbass, declared its independence in 1991 and its Constitution simply referred to “Ukraine” for what was the total of the former Soviet administrative territory, and not to “the Ukraine”. The new 1991 state of Ukraine incorporated large Russian territories, many Russian towns, industries and resources which were only made available to the former Soviet Republic by the Kremlin’s law. Since then, the Government of Ukraine made clear that it does not want to be called “the Ukraine”, to clearly mark the fact that the new country is not a part of Russia, not Russia’s borderland anymore. What was Russia belongs to independent “Ukraine” since 1991, to a new state sponsored, defended and used by Western-Europe and the US in their geopolitical struggle against modern Russia.

And the English language followed this new requirement – as the BBC confirms. In contrast, the German language has not followed the new propagandistic demands and still calls it “the Ukraine “. For a German speaker who is embedded in histroic knowledge and linguistics continuity, it is impossible to think of anything else than “die Ukraine”, anything else than of a borderland which was since thousand years disputed between the West and Russia.