We continue with Andy Greenberg's Sandworm...

..Though he didn’t know it yet, Yasinsky had found himself in the middle of the sort of event that had defined Ukraine’s long and unkind history: a foreign invasion.

To understand how Ukraine would come to serve as the battleground for the world’s first full-blown cyberwar, it helps to look back at a millennium of conflict and domination, with Ukraine as the point where the bloodiest edges of two continents meet. Over the last thousand years, incursions into Ukraine have taken the form of Mongol hordes from the east and Lithuanian heathens and Polish imperialists from the west. The nation’s name itself, “Ukraina,” comes from a Slavic word for “borderland.” Ukraine’s existence has been defined by its position, caught between powerful neighbors. But the country’s most perpetual nemesis has been the one with whom it shares not only the longest border but also the most history and culture—its larger, more aggressive, estranged brother from the same mother.[ Not buying this writers political view on Ukraine, the world knows what happened in 2014, and who did what and when dc]

Russia and Ukraine trace the origins of their two civilizations to a common ancestor, the flourishing medieval state of Kievan Rus. That kingdom, growing around Kiev from the tenth century AD, became an eastern outpost of European culture after its king Volodymyr somewhat arbitrarily decided to convert his people from paganism to Orthodox Christianity. Ukrainians like to point out that his son Yaroslav the Wise built Kiev’s iconic St. Sophia Cathedral in 1037, when Moscow was little more than a forest by the Volga River.

But geography was never in Ukraine’s favor. Kievan Rus was destroyed in the thirteenth century by brutal Mongols riding southwest from the Urals across the indefensible landscape of the steppe, led by Batu Khan, one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan. After a long siege, the invaders massacred Kiev’s population, burned hundreds of churches, and razed its city walls.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2023/02/part-2-sandworm-new-era-of-cyberwar-and.html