Russians in Ukraine

Russians constitute the country's largest ethnic minority in Ukraine. This community forms the largest single Russian community outside of Russia in the world. In the 2001 Ukrainian census, 8,334,100 identified themselves as ethnic Russians (17.3% of the population of Ukraine); this is the combined figure for persons originating from outside of Ukraine and the Ukrainian-born population declaring Russian ethnicity.

Ethnic Russians live throughout Ukraine. They form a notable fraction of the overall population in the east and south, a significant minority in the center, and a smaller minority in the west.

The west and the center of the country feature a higher percentage of Russians in cities and industrial centers and a much smaller percentage in the overwhelmingly Ukrainophone rural areas. Due to the concentration of the Russians in the cities, as well as for historic reasons, most of the largest cities in the center and the south-east of the country (including Kyiv where Russians amount to 13.1% of the population) remained largely Russophone as of 2003^[update]. Russians constitute the majority in Crimea (71.7% in Sevastopol and 58.5% in the Autonomous republic of Crimea).

Outside of Crimea, Russians are the largest ethnic group in Donetsk (48.2%) and Makiivka (50.8%) in Donetsk Oblast, Ternivka (52.9%) in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Krasnodon (63.3%) and Sverdlovsk (Dovzhansk) (58.7%) and Krasnodon Raion (51.7%) and Stanytsia-Luhanska Raion (61.1%) in Luhansk Oblast, Izmail (43.7%) in Odesa Oblast, Putyvl Raion (51.6%) in Sumy Oblast.

There are two notable sub-ethnic groups of Russians in Ukraine: the Goryuns around Putyvl, and the Lipovans (a group of Old Believers) around Vylkove.^{[citation needed]}

One of the most prominent Russians in Medieval Ukraine (at that time the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) was Ivan Fyodorov, who published the Ostrog Bible and called himself a Muscovite.

In 1599, Tsar Boris Godunov ordered the construction of Tsareborisov on the banks of Oskol River, the first city and the first fortress in Eastern Ukraine. To defend the territory from Tatar raids the Russians built the Belgorod defensive line (1635–1658), and Ukrainians started fleeing to be under its defense.

More Russian speakers appeared in northern, central and eastern Ukrainian territories during the late 17th century, following the Cossack Rebellion led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The uprising led to a massive movement of Ukrainian settlers to the Sloboda Ukraine region, which converted it from a sparsely inhabited frontier area to one of the major populated regions of the Tsardom of Russia. Following the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Ukrainian Cossacks lands, including the modern northern and eastern parts of Ukraine, became a protectorate of the Tsardom of Russia. This brought the first significant, but still small, wave of Russian settlers into central Ukraine (primarily several thousand soldiers stationed in garrisons, out of a population of approximately 1.2 million non-Russians).