History of Kyiv - Capitol of Kyivan Rus

[Neto]

[SOURCE: https://www.worldhistory.org/Kievan_Rus/]

c. 750
Scandinavian settlement of Staraja Ladoga founded as trade center.
862 - 879
Reign of Varangian King Rurik, founder of the Rurikid Dynasty of Kievan Rus.
862 - 1242
Federation of Kievan Rus controls areas of modern-day Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine.
879 - 912
Reign of Oleg of Novgorod, also known as Oleg the Prophet, in Kievan Rus.
c. 882
Oleg the Prophet moves capital of Kievan Rus from Novgorod to Kiev.
912 - 945
Reign of Igor of Kiev in Kievan Rus.
945
Assassination of Igor of Kiev by Drevlians.
c. 945 - c. 950
Olga seeks revenge on Drevlians for Igor's death.
945 - c. 963
Olga, wife of Igor, reigns as regent for their son Sviatoslav I.
c. 963 - 972
Reign of Sviatoslav I (Sviatoslav the Brave), who expands and enriches Kievan Rus through military campaigns.
972 - 980
Reign of Yaropolk I in Kievan Rus.
980 - 1015
Reign of Vladimir I (the Great) in Kievan Rus; converts region to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
c. 987
Vladimir I sends Varangian forces to help Basil II of Constantinople; creation of the Varangian Guard.
1015 - 1019
Reign of Sviatopolk I in Kievan Rus.
1019 - 1054
Reign of Yaroslav I (the Wise) in Kievan Rus; height of the federation in every respect.
c. 1054 - c. 1078
Yaroslav I's sons fight each other for control; Kievan Rus splinters.
c. 1078 - c. 1337
Kievan Rus broken into separate districts and polities. .
1237 - 1242
The Mongol Invasion; Kievan Rus conquered. .

[Bootstrap]

I recently read this interview with Ukraine historian Timothy Snyder.

Agreeing with the timeline you gave, he said this:

There’s 1,000 years of history of the land around Kyiv before there’s any contact between Kyiv and Moscow. 1,000 years, that’s a long time. And so this business of there being some kind of organic connection doesn’t make any sense historically. But there is a kind of mythical process which historians can look at and find interesting, which goes something like this.

When Kyiv and Moscow are finally brought into contact in the late 17th century after Poland lost a war, churchmen in Kyiv told churchmen in Moscow that there was this thing about this baptism around the year 1000. And that meant that Ukraine and Russia were part of some larger unity.

The baptism was a Viking warlord came from a clan of slavers known as the Rus, hence the word “rus.” The word “rus” comes from the name of a clan or a business, if you like, of Viking slavers in the ninth century, 10th century. And they’re the ones who converted to Christianity.

The one who did it was probably called the Valdemarr, which in modern Russian is Vladimir and in modern Ukrainian is Volodymyr. So it’s that guy, that Viking warlord who was mythologized 700 years later by Ukrainian priests who are trying to persuade Russian priests that Ukraine and Russia are together because they’re trying to secure their own place in this expanding Russian empire.

And then what Putin does with it — and this is the mystical part — is that he sees history just in terms of a kind of fragmented unity, which is his word by the way. He wrote this very long essay in July of last year, which we called “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine.”

And everything about it is wrong, starting with the title. But it’s revealing that he sees the past in terms of a lost unity. And so the things which don’t seem to fit that unity he dismisses immediately as artificial. If something shows you that Ukraine isn’t just part of Russia, that’s not really the past. That’s artificial. That should be stripped away.

The real past, although you can’t always see, it is this underlying unity. And that brings us very close towards the kind of ideas precisely that animate this war in Ukraine. In that essay and then his recent pronouncements, he stresses that Ukraine as a state, as a nation is not real. What he means is that all of the facts which you and I might see which might suggest that it is real, all those things are artificial.

Those things have to be stripped away in order to get to the underlying reality, which is that Ukrainians really do want to be part of Russia. They may not know it, but as soon as we get rid of their elites, as soon as we get rid of their state, they will realize all of that. So this notion of underlying unity, you know, it’s interesting, it’s an idea.

But it also has a kind of terrifying political implication. It is, technically speaking, a totalitarian implication, that what politics is all about is not just ignoring the facts, but destroying the facts insofar as they’re in the way of this vision which actually animates what politics is supposed to be all about.

[ohio jones]

It's probably more accurate to say that Russia was historically part of Ukraine, or at the very least that Kiev was superior to Moscow, during the period in question.

[PetrChelcicky]

Well, the idea that there has always been an "Ukraine", and it was always oriented to the West, is a myth, too.
The present Ukraine is a conglomorate of parts with a very different history and would have needed an extremely cautious political elite which might have united the country. In fact, they got these anti-Yanukovitch fanatics and their anti-Russian policy.

Snyder is the doyen of our present anti-Russian warmongers. His denunciation of a Russian myth doesn't imply that he has some more elevated ideas himself.