Dnieper

so in scutari the cossacks sang their tears rolled down their wailing rang bosphorus groaned at the cossack cry and then he raised his waves on high and shivering like a great grey bull his waters roaring far and full into the black sea's ribs were hurled the sea sent on great bosphorus cry to where the sands of the delta lie and then the waters of dnieper pale in turn took up the mournful tale the father dnieper rears his crest shakes the foam from off his breast with laughter now aloud he calls to spirits of the forest walls Hortesa, sister river, deep, time it is to wake from sleep.

Brother forest, sister river, come our children to deliver.

And now the Dnieper is clad with boats.

The Cossack song over the water floats.

In Turkey over there are wealth and riches rare.

Moscovite poison gave thee to drink.

O friend of mine, unforgotten friend, Ukraine to thee doth welcome send.

Let thy spirit fly with Cossacks bold Along the shores of Dnieper old.

In the midst of all these military enterprises, Sigismund found time to foster learning, to encourage agriculture and industry, to free the navigable streams of tolls, and to redeem numerous royal estates and sources of income that his predecessors had pawned.

It was he who gave a permanent organization to the Zaporozhian Cossacks along the rapids of the Dnieper, and made of these bold warriors an excellent defense against the Tartars.

It must be said, however, that the peasantry, the Kmiec, were more completely enslaved under his reign than before, and deprived even of the right to send their children to school or to have them taught a trade.

In his old age, he died at 82, he fell entirely under the influence of his wife, Bona Sforza, a daughter of the ducal house of Milan, who provoked many uprisings by her intrigues and her fierce attacks against the rise of the nobles.

The Poles proceeded by violent measures to introduce Catholicism into Livonia, installing Catholic priests and bishops, handing over the schools to the Jesuits, and doing their best to do away with the German element.

Is it a wonder that the Livonians turned longingly to Sweden for help? Finally, the union of the larger part of the Lithuanian Church with Rome excited the wrath of the Cossacks, who were intensely attached to the Greek Church.

These plundering hordes of the middle and lower Dnieper had been organized by King Stephen Bathory as a barrier against the Turks and the Muscovites, and their country had for this reason received the name of Ukraine, borderland.

Their numbers had increased rapidly, and they now formed an army of 40,000 warriors, distributed into 20 regiments.

It was not these people who were to set their imprint on later ages.

It was rather what were then merely untutored and unknown wandering tribes of Aryans which, working their way through the great plains of the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Danube, eventually forged their way into the Balkan and the Italian peninsulas.

There, with the sea barring their further progress, they took on more settled habits and formed, at some distant epoch, cities, among which Athens and Rome were to rise to the greatest celebrity.

And about the year one thousand BC, or a little later, Greece emerges from obscurity with Homer.

The very first thing we're going to do, you can tell these are like highly informed military tacticians because they don't start with like, okay, the front in this war is here.

You know, we need to cross the Dnipro River to do that.

No, no, no. It's the first thing we need to do is imprison anyone who disagrees with us.

And then we need to send everyone else's kids to go die because those guys are not obviously participating in a physical sense in this war.

The Cossacks.

Back somewhere in the middle distance of European history, when the Ukraine was under Polish rule, though ever harassed by the devastating raids of Turks and Tartars, there developed bands of guerrilla fighters in the wild border-land beyond the rapids of the Dnieper.

Sometimes fighting against the Tartars, sometimes in alliance with them, they became known by the name Cossack, a word of uncertain origin.

Fierce banditti they were, many of them serfs who had run away from their Polish masters, but they often developed great military power.

Oh, breeze, there is none, Nor do the waters run From our Ukrainia's land.

Perhaps in council there they stand To march against the Turk demand; We hear not in this foreign land.

Blow, winds, blow across the sea, Bring tidings of our land so free; Come from Dnieper's delta low, Dry our tears and chase away our woe.

Roar in play, thou sea so blue, In yon boats are Cossacks true; Their caps above are dimly seen, Rescue for us this may mean.

And so you could see how right there from the beginning, if you just play out the thought experiment, from the moment they invade, they're essentially taking everyone in Ukraine who likes them out of Ukraine and making them Russians now by drawing this new border around the Donbass.

Then... through the war, essentially, if they only go that far, now they're leaving a bunch of people who don't necessarily, you know, have any favorable opinion toward Moscow, but are culturally Russian and speak Russian and everything, who are now a much smaller minority left between the Dnieper River and the Donbass in Zaporozhye and Kherson in the south, but in Dnieper, Petrovsk, or however the hell you say that.

I'll never learn how to say that word.

Kharkiv and Sumy and the rest.

as this

kid point of view, now we got to protect all of these people, everybody east of the river and maybe some people west of the river, too.

And then so now, even if they have some kind of peace deal, first of all, they share a border with Kiev is right there on the Dnieper River in the middle of the country.

So they have a huge.

Ruthenian is a language intermediate between Russian and Polish, but quite independent of both.

Its territory embraces, roughly speaking, the vast plain which lies between the Carpathians, the watershed of the Dnieper, and the Sea of Azov, with Lemberg and Kiev for its chief intellectual centers.

Though it had been rigorously repressed by the Russian government, it is still spoken by more than 20 millions of people.

It possesses a noble literature, numerous folk songs, not inferior even to those of Serbia, and, what chiefly concerns us now, a copious collection of justly admired folk tales, many of them of great antiquity, which are regarded, both in Russia and Poland, as quite unique of their kind.

And by dawn she had reaped the wheat and cooked the roll and brought it to him and said, "Now, take it to her hut and put it on her table." Then the old she-dragon awoke and came to the door and was amazed at the sight of the field, which was now all stubble, for the corn had been cut.

Then she said to Ivan, "Yes, thou hast done the work well, but now see that thou doest my second task." Then she gave him her second command.

"Dig up that mountain yonder and let the Dnieper flow over the site of it, and there build a storehouse, and in the storehouse stack the wheat that thou hast reaped, and sell this wheat to the merchant barks that sail by, and everything must be done by the time I get up early next morning." Then he again went to the fence and wept, and the maiden said to him, "Why dost thou weep?" And he told her all that the she-dragon had bidden him do.

"There are lots of bushes, but where are the berries? Go and lie down.