Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, examines the Ukrainian minority within interwar Poland. This class in his Yale course on the history of Ukraine looks at how Polish state policy treated Ukrainian populations in the 1920s and 1930s, including border dynamics illustrated by the strange case of a Polish guard helping a Ukrainian cross into the Soviet Union in 1933. Snyder situates this episode within larger questions the course keeps returning to: what makes a nation exist, how Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding are bound up with Ukraine, and how Soviet and Nazi terror later fell on Ukrainian territory with particular force. The lecture draws on Snyder's reading of interwar diplomatic and social history to trace how Ukrainian identity persisted and changed under Polish rule, setting up the catastrophes to come.