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I was wondering about this.

My conclusion was that “the Ukraine” refers to the geography and territory (it would read as The Borderland in East Slavic, between the steppe and the Carpathians) whereas Ukraine is the republic and nation that resides in the territory.

Since this war directly involves the population and the government, it is Ukraine the nation, not ‘the Ukraine’ the land.

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Ukraine means «Fortified area» in Ukrainian or Polish. It's «укріплення» (fortifications) + «край»(area)/«країна»(country) = «україна». A modern Ukrainian word with the same meaning is «укріпрайон» (fortified area). It's started by Poland as a set of fortifications to protect eastern Poland against nomads from the East. Multiple ukrains were built. Ukrainian Cossacks were used for defense. When lines of defense covered large territory, the whole protected area received the name «fortified area» (Ukraine).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Le_Vasseur_de_Beaupl... for details.

Russians are trying to downplay this and replace Oo at the beginning with Oh, to create Russian word Outskirt instead.

> My conclusion

As you can guess, there is no definitive article "the" in Ukrainian language:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171014083357/http://www.ukrwee...

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