Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, traces the medieval origins of the Kyiv state in this fifth lecture of his Ukraine history course. He examines how Viking traders, the slave routes running through the region, and early legal codes shaped the polity that later generations would claim as their own. The lecture sits within Snyder's broader argument about what makes a nation exist, structures, actions, or both, and how the Kyiv state's multiethnic, multilingual character complicates simple national narratives claimed variously by Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians. Snyder draws on his command of the region's languages and sources to place Kyiv within Viking-era trade networks stretching from Scandinavia to Byzantium. Captions are available in Ukrainian and Russian. The class is part of a full Yale course on Ukrainian history, with a public syllabus and reading list.