Eastern Europe

Kyivan Rus', a medieval federation centred on Kyiv, is claimed as an ancestor by Ukraine, Belarus and Russia alike. After the Mongol conquest of the 13th century its lands split: the west went to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland, the north-east grew into Muscovy, and the southern steppe belonged to the Crimean Khanate and the Ottomans.

Moldova's story is different: the principality of Moldavia was Romance-speaking and Orthodox, and its eastern half, Bessarabia, passed to Russia only in 1812. The strip east of the Dniester — today's Transnistria — was part of the Russian and then Soviet Ukrainian world.

By 1800 the Russian Empire ruled almost all of this area. Its western provinces held the Pale of Settlement, home to most of the world's Jews, which gave towns from Vilnius to Odesa a Yiddish-speaking character until the Holocaust.

All five were part of the Soviet Union. Collectivisation and famine struck Ukraine hardest in 1932–33; the Second World War killed about a quarter of Belarus's population; deportations emptied Moldovan and Crimean Tatar villages. Russian became the language of cities, industry and the army.

The Soviet state also built what remains: planned capitals like post-war Minsk, industrial belts in eastern Ukraine and along the Dniester, and a common rail gauge and road network. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster contaminated large areas of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the borders of its republics became international frontiers overnight — including the Dniester line in Moldova, where separatists backed by the Soviet 14th Army refused to follow Chișinău.

Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko from 1994 kept a Soviet-style state economy and moved into a Union State with Russia. Russia under Vladimir Putin from 2000 recentralised power and turned increasingly against the West. Ukraine alternated between pro-Western and pro-Russian governments and went through two revolutions, in 2004 and 2014.

Moldova lost control of Transnistria after the 1992 war and stayed poor, with huge emigration, but its politics tilted towards Europe: visa-free Schengen travel for Moldovans in 2014, EU candidacy in 2022 and accession talks in 2024.

Language and identity divided each society in different ways — Romanian versus Russian in Moldova, Ukrainian versus Russian in Ukraine, Belarusian culture sidelined in Belarus — and Russia used those divisions, along with energy supplies, as levers.

Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas in 2014 began the break; the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 completed it. Ukrainian airspace closed, Russian and Belarusian airlines were barred from the EU, and Western governments told their citizens not to travel to Ukraine, Belarus or Russia.

The land borders followed. Finland closed its crossings with Russia; the Baltic states and Poland restricted theirs and those with Belarus, closing some for months at a time; Ukraine sealed its border with Transnistria. The overland routes that once ran from Warsaw to Kyiv, from Vilnius to Minsk, or from Chișinău to Odesa are now either closed or advisory routes that this site does not plan.

Moldova, squeezed between the war and Romania, lost Russian gas transit in January 2025 and now looks west for energy and trade. It remains the one open trip in this subregion, reached from Romania — which is why the practical pages here start in Bucharest or Iași and end in Chișinău.

Four languages dominate: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian (all East Slavic) and Romanian, a Romance language, in Moldova. Russian served as the common tongue of the Soviet era and is still widely understood, but choosing it is now a political statement in Ukraine and Moldova, and speaking Belarusian in public can draw attention in Minsk.

Orthodox Christianity is the majority faith everywhere, but its institutions have split along political lines: Ukraine has an independent Orthodox Church recognised by Constantinople since 2019, and many Moldovan parishes have moved from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Romanian one. Greek Catholics in western Ukraine, Catholics in western Belarus and Muslim Crimean Tatars and Volga peoples add to the mix.

Smaller groups complicate every map: the Turkic-speaking Orthodox Gagauz and Bulgarians in southern Moldova, Hungarians and Romanians in western Ukraine, Poles around Hrodna. Their loyalties and languages have been used by all sides, which is why a visitor's opening word — Romanian, Russian or English — can matter.