The

The Welcome to Russian History Retold, Episode 169, The History of Ukraine, Part 2.

Last time, we covered the early years of the lands that were to become the country known as Ukraine.

Today, we pick things up before one of the major events of Ukrainian history, known as the ruin.

But before we get into that, I just want to apologize to those of you who listen to this podcast on a regular basis,

in kind of real time. I've been off for a little while, about five, six weeks.

Life just happens, and lots of things came on my plate, and so I wanted to get them out of the way

before I got back into the podcast series and then I got a pretty bad cold and it made my voice

at times sound like a 14 year old adolescent boy whose voice is changing and then it switched

over to a raspier version of Joe Cocker. now I'm doing better and ready to get going.

We're now in the early 1600s, and the lands of Ukraine were being split apart by various factions,

led by the Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians, and some talk amongst the Swedes.

Added to this, we have the most powerful remnant of the

Golden Horde, the Crimean Tatars, raiding the countryside, taking slaves with them to sell in the Ottoman

Empire. The number of slaves they captured was by no means an inconsequential amount. It has been

estimated that close to one million people were taken.

This led to great fear throughout the land all the way up to Moscow, which had been destroyed

by the Tatar's as late as 1571. While the land around Ukraine was highly fertile, it was also

a dangerous place to live, so few would take the risk.

The setup for the time of the ruin has the various groups vying for power.

Zaporosian Cossacks in the region were the main internal power, but for many years they were not

really unified enough to present a threat

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