Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which borders it to the east and northeast. It also borders Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; and Romania and Moldova to the southwest; with a coastline along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the south and southeast. Kyiv is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa. Ukraine's official language is Ukrainian; Russian is also widely spoken, especially in the east and south.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is the President of Russia. Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012. He is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin.
Mikheil Saakashvili is a Georgian and Ukrainian politician and jurist. He was the third president of Georgia for two consecutive terms from 25 January 2004 to 17 November 2013. From May 2015 until November 2016, Saakashvili was the governor of Ukraine's Odesa Oblast. He is the founder and former chairman of the United National Movement party. Saakashvili heads the executive committee of Ukraine's National Reform Council since 7 May 2020. In 2021 he began serving a six-year prison sentence in Georgia on charges of abuse of power and organization of an assault occasioning grievous bodily harm against an opposition lawmaker Valery Gelashvili.
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych is a former Ukrainian politician, who was the fourth President of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He also served as Prime Minister of Ukraine several times between 2002 and 2007 and was a member of the Verkhovna Rada from 2006 to 2010. A member of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, his removal from the presidency via revolution in 2014 led to the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since then, he has lived in exile in Russia.
Vitalii Volodymyrovych Klychko, known as Vitali Klitschko, is a Ukrainian politician and former professional boxer. He serves as mayor of Kyiv, and is also head of the Kyiv City State Administration, having held both offices since June 2014. Klitschko is a former leader of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, and is a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament. He became actively involved in Ukrainian politics in 2005 and combined this with his professional boxing career until his retirement from the sport in 2013. He holds a Doctoral Degree (Ph.D.) from Kyiv University's Physical Science Department.
Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko is a Ukrainian oligarch and politician who served as the fifth president of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019. Poroshenko served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2010, and as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development in 2012. From 2007 until 2012, he headed the Council of Ukraine's National Bank. He was elected president on 25 May 2014, receiving 54.7% of the votes cast in the first round, thus winning outright and avoiding a run-off. During his presidency, Poroshenko led the country through the first phase of the war in Donbas, pushing the Russian separatist forces into the Donbas Region. He began the process of integration with the European Union by signing the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.
Willian Borges da Silva, known mononymously as Willian, is a Brazilian professional footballer who plays as a left winger or attacking midfielder for Premier League club Fulham.
Right Sector is a loosely defined coalition of right-wing to far-right Ukrainian nationalist organizations. It originated in November 2013 as a right-wing, paramilitary confederation of several ultranationalist organizations at the Euromaidan revolt in Kyiv, where its street fighters participated in clashes with riot police. The coalition became a political party on 22 March 2014, at which time it claimed to have roughly 10,000 members. Founding groups included the Trident (Tryzub), led by Dmytro Yarosh and Andriy Tarasenko, and the Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA–UNSO), a political and paramilitary organization. Other founding groups included the Social-National Assembly, and its Patriot of Ukraine paramilitary wing, White Hammer, and the Sich Battalion. White Hammer was expelled in March 2014, and Patriot of Ukraine left the organization, along with many UNA–UNSO members, in the following months.
Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh is a Ukrainian activist, politician, nationalist and military commander who is the main commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. From 2013 to 2015, he led the Right Sector nationalist organisation, and formerly the Right Sector's Ukrainian Volunteer Corps. In late 2015, he withdrew from the Right Sector. From 2014 until 2019, Yarosh served as a People's Deputy of Ukraine. In February 2016, he started a new organisation called Governmental Initiative of Yarosh (DIYA).
The Russo-Ukrainian War is an ongoing international conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donbas war. The first eight years of conflict also included naval incidents, cyberwarfare, and heightened political tensions. In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and began occupying more of the country.
In February and March 2014, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula, part of Ukraine, and then annexed it. This took place in the relative power vacuum immediately following the Revolution of Dignity and was the first act of the wider Russo-Ukrainian War.
The Donetsk People's Republic is an internationally unrecognized republic of Russia, comprising the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, with its capital in Donetsk. The DPR was created by Russian-backed paramilitaries in 2014, and it initially operated as a breakaway state until it was annexed by Russia in 2022.
The war in Donbas, or Donbas war, was a phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The war began 12 April 2014, when a fifty-man commando unit headed by Russian citizen Igor Girkin seized Sloviansk in Donetsk oblast. The Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. It continued until it was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The Luhansk People's Republic or Lugansk People's Republic is an internationally unrecognised republic of Russia in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine's Luhansk Oblast, with its capital in Luhansk. The LPR was proclaimed by Russian-backed paramilitaries in 2014, and it initially operated as a breakaway state until it was annexed by Russia in 2022.
The Azov Assault Brigade is a formation of the National Guard of Ukraine formerly based in Mariupol, in the coastal region of the Sea of Azov, from which it derives its name. It was founded in May 2014 as the Azov Battalion, a volunteer paramilitary militia under the command of Andriy Biletsky to fight pro-Russian forces in the war in Donbas. It was formally incorporated into the National Guard on 11 November 2014, and redesignated Special Operations Detachment "Azov", also known as the Azov Regiment. In February 2023, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that Azov was to be expanded as a brigade of the new Offensive Guard.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down by Russian-controlled forces on 17 July 2014, while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 km (31 mi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage from the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred during the war in Donbas over territory controlled by Russian separatist forces.
The Minsk agreements were a series of international agreements which sought to end the Donbas war fought between armed Russian separatist groups and Armed Forces of Ukraine, with Russian regular forces playing a central part. The first, known as the Minsk Protocol, was drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format. After extensive talks in Minsk, Belarus, the agreement was signed on 5 September 2014 by representatives of the Trilateral Contact Group and, without recognition of their status, by the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR). This agreement followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the region and aimed to implement an immediate ceasefire.
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian politician who has been serving as the sixth president of Ukraine since 2019. He was formerly a comedian and actor.
Casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian War included six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas, and up to 500,000 estimated casualties during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Oleksandr Stanislavovych Syrskyi is a Ukrainian military officer. Holding the rank of colonel general, he has been the commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces since 2019. Previously, he was the commander of the Joint Forces Operation from May to August 2019.
