Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, continues his lecture series on Ukrainian history by examining the region before it was framed as part of Europe. He asks what it means for a nation to exist, weighing structures against actions, and traces how Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding were shaped by experiences in Ukraine. Snyder connects these questions to February 2022, arguing that Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion presupposes an already-existing society and polity, then works backward to ask how and when a modern Ukrainian nation actually formed. He treats Ukraine as the territory most battered by Soviet and Nazi terror and uses that history to probe what those systems reveal more broadly. The lecture closes by asking whether Ukraine's post-colonial, multilingual character is a relic or a model. Delivered as part of Snyder's full Yale course on Ukrainian history, with a published syllabus and reading list available alongside the video.