Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, continues his course on Ukrainian history by examining the eighteenth century convergence of three declining and rising powers he calls the triangle: the retreating Ottoman Empire, the expanding Russian state, and the populist currents taking shape among Ukrainians caught between them. The class traces how these overlapping pressures shaped the social and political structures that later generations would draw on to argue for a distinct Ukrainian nation. Snyder situates this period within his larger argument about how modern nations emerge, asking what combination of structure and choice makes a people cohere into a polity. Delivered as a university lecture with closed captions in Ukrainian and Russian, it forms part of a full semester course with an accompanying reading list, and assumes some familiarity with the preceding classes on medieval and early modern Ukraine.