Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, examines how successive global empires, including Polish, Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman, shaped the territory and peoples that became modern Ukraine. Part of his Yale lecture series on Ukrainian history, this class asks what it means for a nation to exist and traces how imperial rule left overlapping legacies of language, religion, and identity across the region. Snyder connects this imperial past to Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding, arguing that each group's history is bound up with experiences in Ukrainian lands. He situates the emergence of a modern Ukrainian nation within broader questions about how any nation forms and why some national projects succeed while others fail. The lecture is part of a fuller course with a public syllabus and multilingual captioning, delivered in Snyder's usual dense, argument-driven style rather than as a simple chronology.