With a long and tumultuous history, Ukraine has been variously occupied and controlled by Poland, Austria, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire since the 13th century. Subsumed into the Soviet Union, it achieved full independence following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, but the ambitions of its larger neighbour saw the nation embattled once more since 2022. Prior to that year, Ukraine was one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, and produced a huge variety of machinery including Antonov aircraft and space technology. Half of the country’s electricity is produced by nuclear power, despite the legacy of the ill-fated Soviet nuclear project at Chernobyl. Ukraine is one of Europe‘s largest countries, being larger than France and in the same ballpark as Botswana. 

I visited Ukraine in March 2014 with two friends, having booked the trip late the previous year before the Revolution of Dignity took place. For a period it looked like visiting would not have been wise, but the revolution was over and Lufthansa restarted flights two days before our travel date: a refund would not have been possible. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for us, so we headed off from Aberdeen via Frankfurt to Kyiv Boryspil Airport, for four nights in Ukraine. As well as seeing Kyiv itself, we organised a day trip up to the exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat, a place I’d been fascinated with for years.