DoDo: as far as I know, the late Vyacheslav Chornovil, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist politician, identified nine key ethnocultural regions of Ukraine and at some point suggested that the country become a federation of those.

The Western areas (E. Galicia, Volhynia) might have been the cradle of modern Ukrainian nationalism within Austria-Hungary, but the North-Center has a stronger claim to being the country’s core. With Kyiv at its heart, it was indeed at least one of the birthplaces of Ancient Rus’ and the entry point for Orthodox Christianity; much of the debate between Ukrainian nationalists and Moscow is about who is the rightful heir to Kievan Rus’ (as if there had to be only one).

A century after the Mongols destroyed Kyiv, Lithuania easily annexed the North-Center; Galicia and Volhynia were divided between Poland and Lithuania in the 14th century. Then Poland merged with Lithuania; in the late 16th century Western Ukrainian areas converted (not without political pressure from Polish authorities) to Catholicism of the Eastern Rite. Most Orthodox subjects of the Polish crown (Ukrainians and Belarusans, to use our terminology retroactively) saw this conversion, the so-called Unia, in a rather negative light. This division is still important.

As the Orthodox Ukraine, again centered around Kyiv, resisted Polish attempts at Catholization in the 16th and 17th centuries, the so-called bratstva — communities or fellowships of Orthodox believers — emerged to promote solidarity and education. I would say these were the seeds of civil society in Ukraine.

On the bright side, the peaceful mingling of Blue and Orange protestors Neeka described in an earlier post are just… fascinating.

I note two things. First, while there was incredulity about the above-90-% Yanukovych vote in the easternmost oblasts, we can see similar percentages in the Westernmost oblasts (with the exception of the one oblast that belonged to Czechoslovakia and before that to Hungary) for Yushchenko. So I think the division is very real, and the magnitude of election fraud is not necessarily in the double digits (of voters’ percentages).

Second, on that blue ethno-linguistic border. As I wrote on my blog, it might make more sense to represent Ukrainian territorial differences with a three-way split, rather than a two-way one. There is Western Ukraine: Western Christian, originated as the Halic (Galician) kingdom, later history as part of either Poland-Lithuania, Poland or the Habsburg Empire, and the birthplace of Ukrainian nationalism. Then there is the Central-North: onetime center of Russia smashed by the Mongol invasion, later Cossack territory and at times in Lithuanian control, Eastern Orthodox. Finally, the South and Southeast are territories where nomadic tribes passed through for centuries, with the Mongols as the last one, whose heirs were the Tatars - this area was conquered and re-settled (with settlers from both from ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Russsia proper’ areas) by Russia from Peter The Great until the Crimean War.