Ukraine - Land of the Cossacks

Notes

Essentials

Visas
Most nationals, including EU, UK and US citizens no longer require a visa to visit Ukraine for stays of less than 90 days.

Regulations do frequently change though, so we advise that you check the current requirements with your nearest embassy.

Airport Tax
Departure taxes are usually included in the price of your ticket.

Health and Immunisations
We strongly recommend that you contact your doctor’s surgery or a specialist travel clinic for up-to-date information, advice and the necessary vaccinations. For a visit of less than one month, almost certainly you will be advised to have immunisations against the following: Diphtheria and Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, Polio and Typhoid.

Insurance
What should my travel insurance policy cover?

• medical and health cover for an injury or sudden illness abroad
• 24 hour emergency service and assistance
• personal liability cover in case you’re sued for causing injury or damaging property
• lost and stolen possessions cover
• cancellation and curtailment (cutting short your trip) cover
• Extra cover for activities that are commonly excluded from standard policies, such as certain sports

The policy should cover the whole time that you are away.

Your policy may also have:

• personal accident cover
• legal expenses cover

Common travel insurance policy exclusions
Always check the conditions and exclusions of your policy:

• most policies will not cover drink or drug-related incidents

You must take reasonable care of your possessions or your policy will not cover you.

Practical information

Local Currency
The local currency is the hryvnia (UAH). For current exchange rates visit www.xe.com. Our advice is to travel with US dollars or Euros cash. Notes should be new or in a good condition.

Where currency can be exchanged
It’s relatively easy, although often time consuming, to change money in banks and exchange booths. You’ll find these in larger towns and cities. ATM machines are also available – again, in larger towns and cities.

Credit cards and travellers cheques
As a general rule we advise against taking travellers’ cheques as these will be difficult to change. The use of credit cards is limited to the top hotels and restaurants in major towns and cities – they are not readily accepted elsewhere.

Best time to go
It’s possible to visit Ukraine at any time of year, but it’s significantly warmer from June to September. The winter months can experience significant snowfall – although that’s not necessarily an impediment to visiting it can limit your options to explore the mountains, and is accompanied by shorter days.

Main Language
The official language is Ukrainian, however you will also find Russian widely spoken throughout the country. There are also pockets of Ukraine where Romanian and Hungarian are spoken.

Main Religion
The principal religion is Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity, which is practised by around 70% of the population. Other religions include Catholicism and Judaism, and in the Crimea Islam.

Food and drink
Ukraine’s national dish is borscht – a type of beetroot soup with pretty much anything added into it, depending on what is to hand. Dumplings known as varenniki are also hugely popular and are often stuffed with meat, cheese or potatoes. Also stuffed are vine or cabbage leaves – often with rice or meat. As a nation with a large agricultural base, much of the food comes from the local area and you can expect simple yet flavoursome local dishes made with what is seasonally available, with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, especially in summer.

If you have any special dietary requirements you must notify us at the time of booking. While we will make every effort to cater for you, we cannot guarantee that this will be possible.

A light lunch should cost around $4-6, while something more substantial in an inexpensive restaurant will cost $9-17. Of course, fancy restaurants will cost a lot more. A beer or soft drink in a restaurant will cost around $1-3.

Transport
Our tours in Ukraine mostly rely on private minibuses to get around.

We also use sleeper trains – these will be 2nd class with four berths in each cabin, but we only put two people in a cabin. Compartments are lockable. Dining cars can often – although not always – be found on the trains.

Local conditions
Travelling in the destinations that we visit requires a good deal of understanding that often standards simply won’t be as they are at home. While we aim to make your trip as comfortable as possible, please be aware that we are often visiting remote or less developed regions that may have little infrastructure. While we aim to make your trip run as smoothly as possible there may be times when we need to ask for your patience while we rectify any problems.

What to take with you

First Aid Kit

The first thing on your list should be a first aid kit. Whilst there is no undue cause for alarm, travellers are best advised to travel well-prepared: adequately immunized, with sufficient supplies of prescription drugs, along with a medical kit.

Clothing
Our general recommendation is to bring light clothing with a couple of fleeces or jumpers for cooler evenings. You should also bring a waterproof jacket for any days that it may rain. You should bring at least one long sleeved top for any churches that you will visit.

Footwear
Footwear is a main priority on this tour. Comfortable walking shoes/boots are recommended..

Luggage
Your luggage should not exceed 20kgs (44lbs). One large rucksack, and one small hand luggage rucksack is acceptable. We advise you to travel with a rucksack or soft bag rather than a suitcase.

Other
Suncream/sunblock is a must – you should not rely on being able to find it in Ukraine.

Insect repellent, including a bite spray will be useful to have. You should also bring a torch / flashlight.

If you will be using a camera which needs film, it is recommended that a supply is taken with you, as it may be difficult to obtain in smaller towns.

Fitness
This tour does not require any special degree of fitness but you will find it more enjoyable if you are reasonably fit.

Cultural and environmental guidelines
You may come across beggars while on tour. Every traveller has different perspectives on this and ultimately the choice is up to you. Many sources recommend that you watch to see if local people give, and then follow their lead with genuine beggars. We do not recommend giving money, sweets, pens etc to children as this can encourage a begging mentality and can lead to children choosing to beg rather than go to school.

Please make sure that you take any rubbish back to the hotel with you where they can be properly disposed of – this includes cigarette butts as well.

Please do not buy any products made from endangered species – this is not sustainable and hastens the species’ decline.

Photography
You should always ask permission before taking anyone's photograph and respect their decision if they say no. In more remote areas women and older people often do not want to be photographed. Some people may also ask for some money – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot - in return for a photo. Taking photos of military installations, state buildings, and airports can lead to problems with local authorities. If you are unsure about whether it is acceptable to take a photo, please ask your tour leader or guide.

Tipping
If your local guide has been helpful then you could think about tipping, although it is not as common in Ukraine as it is elsewhere. This amount can obviously be left to you. When tipping a driver, a guide or hotel staff a few dollars will always be gratefully received.

Foreign Office Advice
We constantly monitor the advice posted by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). In particular we will always advise clients of any travel warnings. At present there are no warnings against travel to Ukraine. Please feel free to contact us should you have any specific concerns or would like to know in detail what measures are being taken to ensure visits remain trouble free and without incident.

It should be noted that this information applies to British citizens. Other nationals are asked to check the current position of their respective government.

Further Information

Public Holidays in Ukraine:

1 Jan New Year's Day
7 Jan Ukrainian Christmas
14 Jan Old New Year’s Day
8 Mar Women’s Day
1 May International Worker’s Day
9 May Victory Day
24 Aug Independence Day
7 Nov Anniversary of the October Revolution

Dates are for guidance only and may vary year to year

Electrical Supply
Generally electrical supply is 200V AC (50 Hz) and uses European two circular pin style plugs.

Recommended Reading

Ukraine – The Bradt Guide
Andrew Evans

Borderland: A Journey through the history of Ukraine
Anna Reid

An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey through Ukrainian History
Askold Krushelnycky

IMPORTANT NOTES – PLEASE READ

Please note that the information provided is correct at the time of writing but may change. It is intended as a guide only. Further information regarding vaccinations and travel health visit www.fitfortravel.scot.nhs.uk or contact your local healthcare provider.

In addition we strongly advise you to check the information and any travel advice provided by your government. For British citizens you should visit the Foreign Office website www.fco.gov.uk.

Furthermore, you should be aware that any travel warnings or advisories may affect the validity of your travel insurance. Therefore, at the time of booking your tour it is essential you check any restrictions on cover with your insurance provider.

Issue Date – 04/09/09

For possible changes to this dossier please visit www.undiscovered-destinations.com or call +44 (0)191 296 2674

Historical background

The former Soviet nation of Ukraine gets a bad press in the western world, known primarily – if at all – for the Chernobyl disaster of the 1980s and some of the worst excesses of the Second World War. Too often confused with Russia, Ukraine is only just beginning to shake off past associations and show the world what it has to offer. And what an offering! Ukraine’s history stretches back further than most other European nations and the country has long been a crossroads of cultures, from Tatars to Mongols to ancient Greeks and Jews, each leaving their own particular footprint. For so long considered part of Russia, Ukraine has a distinct national identity and a rich cultural heritage that would surprise anyone, if only they would care to look. Religious traditions meld with indigenous superstitions to create a unique outlook on the world, and Ukraine is perhaps one of the very few places left where one can see a glimpse of what much of Europe was once like, with rustic villages and farming communities dotted across sweeping plains and over rugged mountains. Incredible cathedrals and churches compete for space with ancient cave cities, elaborate palaces, and medieval fortresses to create one of the continent’s most diverse and surprising nations. Ukraine has been at the forefront of world history on more than one occasion, but years of inaccessibility and its incorporation into the Soviet Union have blinded people to its many varied charms. Slowly it is beginning to attract attention among the discerning and curious traveller keen to discover the wealth of highlights within its borders.

Ukraine’s location on the borders of Europe has ensured that it has seen many different groups passing over its land. The first that we know of were the Scythians, a nomadic race from Central Asia who arrived in the 8th century BC. Feared among those who knew of them, the Scythians had a fierce reputation as warriors who showed little mercy to their conquered peoples. However, archaeological remains show us that the Scythians settled in Ukraine, establishing small agricultural communities and leaving their mark on the land in the form of burial mounds found throughout Ukraine and southern Russia, many of which contain intricate gold jewellery. The Scythians were pushed out of the region in the 3rd century BC by the Sarmatians, but not before Greek trading communities had established themselves on the Black Sea Coast. These small communities were to hold on and become Roman and then Byzantine colonies until the 6th century AD. The demise of the Scythians saw Ukraine visited by a number of different groups – the Germanic tribes of the Goths and Ostrogoths, and the Huns, thought to be the Hsiung Nu, one of the ancient barbarian hordes that prompted China to erect its Great Wall. The Khazars, a semi-nomadic tribe from Central Asia, arrived in the 7th century and established an empire incorporating southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, Eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Rule by nomadic tribes had been Ukraine’s lot for several centuries, but at some point during the 6th century AD an indigenous culture began to flourish – the successor of the older Kiev culture which had ended with the arrival of the Huns. The Slavs, as they came to be known, were a nature worshipping group of people who set about expanding their presence throughout Eastern Europe, from Poland to the Balkans and Russia. Building defensive forts, they relied on the land for their livelihoods, hunting, farming and fishing, establishing Kiev in the 6th century. The Slavs were to fall prey to the Vikings a few centuries later. The Vikings were part of a culture extending from Scandinavia to present day Russia and down to the Black Sea – the state of Rus, ruled from Novgorod. Arriving from the north and keen to secure control of trade routes with Byzantium, the Vikings seized control of trading posts and fortresses forcing local inhabitants to pay tribute to them. However it was the control over trade with the Byzantine Empire that was one of its most lucrative strategies, and the city of Kiev grew wealthy. Sensing an opportunity, the Viking price Oleg captured Kiev and became lord over all of Rus.

Under Oleg, Kiev pursued an expansionist policy, establishing control over all the lands between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Kievan Rus came to be a power to be reckoned with, attacking and then making peace with Constantinople, raiding Bulgaria and fighting nomadic hordes to the east, with regional centres of power in Kiev and Novgorod. Oleg’s grandson Volodymyr, having defeated his brother Yaropolk to establish control over the whole kingdom, converted to Christianity – many argue as a tactical move to enhance the development of his empire. Volodymyr then set about converting his subjects to the new religion, who had up until then worshipped pagan gods. Force was often used against those who resisted. The old pagan gods and idols were destroyed, and Volodymyr presided over a period of church building throughout Rus. Volodymyr is known as is known as Volodymyr the Great or Saint Volodymyr. During his reign, pillaging Pecheneg hordes defeated the Khazars, pushed out the Hungarian hordes from the southern steppes and became a menace to the state. Volodymyr started to fortify Kyiv against them. After his death in 1015, fighting and assassinations between his sons ensued, resulting in victory for prince Yaroslav in 1019.

Under Yaroslav, Rus continued to prosper and develop, establishing links through marriage with other great regional powers such as Byzantium and Hungary. However, after a period of unity, in the 12th century the state began to slowly unravel – power was divided between various princes, each controlling their own principalities, which resulted in a weakened Rus, leaving it less able to fend off invaders. One such group were the Mongols, attacking Kiev in 1240 and bringing Rus under Mongol domination. Kiev, the most powerful of the Rus principalities, was reduced to little more than rubble, its people subject to harsh rule and high taxes.

The Mongols stayed for around a century in Ukraine, and towards the middle of the 14th century their power began to wane. The emerging power of Lithuania had already seized many parts of Rus from them and in 1362 inflicted a decisive defeat that brought Ukraine under their control. By all accounts, rule by Lithuania was infinitely more preferable than rule by the Mongols, and Ukraine began to assume a degree of normality once more. Fearing raids from any of the numerous other powers eyeing Ukraine, Lithuania entered into a tactical alliance with Poland which resulted in Ukraine being effectively partitioned between the two states by the 16th century, with Tatar descendants of the Mongols staying behind in the Crimea.

Ukraine was seen as a buffer zone by Poland, which had come to increasingly dominate the union with Lithuania – an area that could protect its key cities from attack by any more nomadic invasions from the east. Its vast plains were cultivated for grain, but it was the areas closest to the Tatars which yielded the best results, and so through a mixture of official encouragement and a desire to escape the feudal system imposed by Polish overlords, these lands came to be settled by peasants. Finding themselves under attack by the Tatars, they organized themselves into defensive societies, becoming skilled warriors dedicated to protecting their crops. This was the birth of the Cossacks, a people renowned for living on the frontiers of empire, a wild and free people who live on as folk heroes of Ukraine. Within a short space of time the Cossacks had gained a huge popular appeal and progressed from merely defending their lands to launching pre-emptive attacks and then to raiding. The Cossacks raided Turkish ports as well as Constantinople itself, and fought against Poland, later gaining support from the Tatars in a rather ironic twist of history. Under their leader Khmelnytsky they defeated Polish forces in 1646 and established control over large swathes of Ukraine.

However constant raids and warfare took their toll on Ukraine, and when the Cossacks became weak towards the end of the 17th century due to the loss of Tatar support, Poland and Muscovy were able to divide its lands between themselves, with Muscovy taking the lion’s share. Crushing the Cossacks, Muscovy, quickly expanding from a principality into the state of Russia, assumed direct control of Ukraine and settled much of it by way of land grants given to Russian nobles. Rule was uncompromising and the Tsar had unlimited powers over his subjects, with serfs the virtual property of landowners. This was a miserable time for ordinary Ukrainian peasants, deprived of basic freedoms and marginalized by an ever increasing Russian speaking elite. Cossacks were rounded up and used as forced labour on numerous engineering and building projects such as a series of canals to connect the Caspian and Black Seas. Ukraine had become, effectively, a province of Russia by the 19th century. Between 1853 and 1856, it also suffered from the Crimean War, fought between the armies of Russia on one side and France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire on the other. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining Ottoman Empire, and was renowned for its tactical mistakes – one notable oversight being the complete lack of preparation from the British for the Ukrainian winter, resulting in untold deaths and hardships for their soldiers. Considered to be the first modern conflict, it resulted in a crushing defeat for Russian forces at Sevastopol, highlighting the urgent need to modernise the empire. Reforms began to be made to Russian society, but they generally did little to alleviate the day to day conditions of ordinary peasants.

Throughout Russia in the latter half of the 19th century, demands for social reform began to grow, fuelled by Marx’s theories and vaguer notions of social justice. Russia was ripe for revolution and Ukrainian intellectuals were at the forefront of demanding an end to the autocratic rule of the Tsars, mobilising peasants and instigating uprisings. Fearful of the power of the masses, Tsar Nicholas II reacted in the only way he knew – ruthless suppression of anyone thought to be of a revolutionary bent. In particular, Jews paid a heavy price – forming a high proportion of the educated urban (and therefore suspect) population they presented a ‘natural target’ for the Tsar’s forces.

Following the 1905 revolution, Ukrainians began to get more brazen in their defiance of the Tsar, expropriating land from the hated landowners and causing huge disruption of the existing social order. Russia finally succumbed to revolution in 1917, with the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a provisional government. Ukraine’s national assembly proclaimed its independence in 1918, but it was not to be – by this time the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and were intent on keeping Ukraine within the old empire. Ukraine was fought over by both Bolshevik, White Russian and German troops, with devastating results for local people. Food was requisitioned, women were raped and towns were looted in an orgy of violence that lasted almost two years. Peasants rose up to fight the various armies ravaging their land, only to be rounded up and shot when caught. Villages were destroyed, livestock slaughtered and thousands killed before the Red Army finally seized control at the end of 1919, incorporating Ukraine into the Soviet Union.

Under Stalin, Ukraine was heavily industrialised, with factories springing up in many towns and immense pressure on ordinary workers to meet state set targets. Ukraine also saw some of the worst effects of Stalin’s policy against the kulaks – as a country with a large agricultural base, many slightly wealthier peasants were shipped off to labour camps, never to return. Stalin’s policies of grain requisition and collectivisation caused immense hardships for Ukrainians, resulting in a mass famine between 1932 and 1933 which saw between three and six million deaths due to starvation. As with everywhere in the Soviet Union, the 1930s and 1940s were a grim time in Ukraine, with purges of the educated, religious figures or simply anyone who did not fit into the Stalinist ideal of the Soviet man.

The Second World War saw Ukraine as an enormous battleground, positioned as it was between German held territory and Russia proper. Kiev was captured in 1941 by Nazi forces with the rest of the country falling not long afterwards. Under Nazi occupation Ukraine’s large Jewish population was virtually annihilated – around one and a half million people being consigned to grim deaths in the camps or simply shot and thrown into mass graves. Ukrainian resistance movements sprang up to fight the Nazis, and in many cases the Soviets as well – indeed anti-Soviet resistance continued well into the 1950s, covertly assisted by Britain and the United States. In 1943 Soviet forces managed to retake Ukraine, and in Yalta at the end of the war, the peace conference between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt ceded formal control over Ukraine, including its Polish provinces, to the Soviet Union. Ukraine had however been decimated during the war, with almost 20% of its population losing their lives.

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw Ukraine finally regain its independence in 1991. Since then it has undergone its own, ‘Orange’ revolution in 2004 when Viktor Yuschenko won power following rigged elections in favour of his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych – but not before he was poisoned, some say by his rival, resulting in facial disfigurement.

Ukraine has suffered more than most of Europe through invasions, wars and civil turmoil, but its people are a testament to the remarkable resilience of the human spirit. Travel through Ukraine and you will find a people all too aware of their painful past, but inheritors of a proud tradition that stretches back many centuries and encompasses many different cultures that have melded to form Ukraine today. Ukraine offers us a snapshot of a Europe long since vanished elsewhere, of rural villages where life seems to have changed little for decades, of medieval castles and brooding fortresses, and of wildlife no longer found in much of the continent. It is surprising how little we know of a country with such an incredible history, which has so much to offer those prepared to forget any notions they may have of Soviet greyness and industrial disasters. Ukraine is on the up, a country that welcomes its visitors and shows them, most of all, that Ukraine is not Russia! Be one of the few to unravel its secrets.