🇬🇧 🇺🇦 Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of UK-Ukraine diplomatic relations.

We are resolute in our support for Ukraine's sovereignty and freedom.

Read my piece in Ukrayinska Pravda @ukrpravda_news 👇@DmytroKulebahttps://t.co/VF68epMw1Q

— Liz Truss (@trussliz) December 30, 2021

We were one of the first to recognize Ukraine's independence after the end of the Cold War, which marked a new era in your country's life with great optimism. Back in the summer of 1990, visiting Kyiv, Margaret Thatcher said: "Britain has come to stay here for a long time."

(Post-) Imperium -- A Eurasian Story | Carnegie Endowment |

'Sapere aude'

Margaret Thatcher Speech at Ukrainian Government lunch in Kiev - June 9, 1990

The message which we bring you with this Britain festival in Kiev is one of friendship, of coming together to celebrate the end of the division of Europe. It is also a message of pride and confidence in our achievements.

Whatever form the new Europe takes, its foundation will remain the individual nations and peoples, each proud of their identity and their history and wanting to preserve them, while also being ready to work together to make themselves more prosperous and more secure. That is the spirit in which we come to Kiev: certainly not the first invasion in the history of the Ukraine, but definitely the most friendly!

But we don't want it to be just a one-off occasion, which after this month is over is little more than a pleasant memory. We want it to be the beginning of much closer and more regular contacts of every sort--trade, joint ventures, artistic and cultural events and so on.

If I may put it this way: Britain in one form or another is here to stay. That should be the pattern of the future.

We are particularly pleased that this event is taking place in the Ukraine and in Kiev. Kievian Rus was the first of the Russian states and Kiev itself is known as the mother of Russian cities. You were traditionally one of the great political and cultural centres of Eastern Europe and I am sure that will be so again as the barriers between East and West fall away.

The Early History of Kiev

The organizing center of Kievan Rus, the first great Slavic state, Kiev arose in the ninth century as a commercial hub on the trade routes connecting Europe, the Eastern Christian empire known as Byzantium with its capital at Constantinople, the glorious Abassid Moslem empire ruled from Baghdad, and the Khazar state of the lower Volga and northern Caucasus. At its zenith in the eleventh century, Kiev was the ruling center of the largest political entity in medieval Europe and one of the world's most splendid cities. Its population for the year 1200 has been estimated at fifty thousand or more. By comparison, Paris had about fifty thousand inhabitants at that time, while London had an estimated population of thirty thousand.

Slavic Tribes in VII - IX Century

Check the map ... Donbas and Crimea are not part of East Slavic people but are connected to the Turkic people.

Russia as Ukraine's 'Other': Identity and Geopolitics

'Sapere aude'

Hundreds of Ukrainian nationalists march in in honor of Nazi collaborator [_link]

— The Times of Israel (@TimesofIsrael) January 1, 2022

German SS and Ukrainian collaborators perpetrated the massacre of Jewish citizen in Kiev

'Sapere aude'