People

The Ukrainian melting pot

     Ukraine has long been a crossroads between Europe, Arabia and the Orient, and the modern Ukrainians have acquired a strong mixture of Asiatic and Arabic blood: giving them an average height, slender build and fair complexion.

     Strictly speaking, the popular-image beefy Slavic people are found mostly in the western Ukraine (bordering on Poland, Hungary and the Slovak states) and in the north and northeast adjacent to Russia. In Ukraine, ethnic Ukrainians make up more than three fourths of the population; Russians constitute around 17%, and there are Belarusian, Moldovan, Polish, Jewish, and other minorities. More than half the population is urban. For over a century, the official language was Russian. Since independence, Ukrainian is being promoted as the state language although Russian is still the most widespread, especially in the major cities. In villages people speak both Russian and Ukrainian. As a rule of thumb, you can manage by speaking Russian, although you may receive a bit of resistance from public officials who are being pressed to use Ukrainian.

     Ukrainians are passionately nationalistic- having only recently been freed from two centuries of Russian domination. They think of themselves as strongly pro-western (a legacy of Soviet domination) and they have a particular fascination with the United States. English is commonly taught in public schools and is rapidly becoming an informal second language.

Guests of Ukraine

     In Ukraine guests are given lots of attention. If you are someone's house guest, your hosts will likely take you around town and show you the sights for several days. Traditional Ukrainian attitudes dictate that guests be well-fed and entertained for as long as they stay at your home. Offering a guest a glass of ice water (common behavior in the U.S.) seems an absurdity to Ukrainians, the more so because ice water is thought to cause colds. In the business world, however, drinking bottled water has started to catch on, and being offered a glass of water is no longer an extreme rarity.

     The word "friend" in Ukrainian or Russian implies a closer relationship than in most other European languages. One has one or two "friends" and many "acquaintances"—quite the opposite of the U.S., where many people have dozens of "friends" but often have no really close friends. In Ukraine, it seems, such aloofness is unheard of. The tendency to form informal relationships easily is part of the national character.