This is a list of individuals who were born and lived in territories currently in Ukraine, both ethnic Ukrainians and those of other ethnicities. Throughout Eastern European history, Ukrainian lands were ethnically and culturally diverse, with a number of other ethnic groups living among the Ukrainians. Originally united with Belarus and Muscovy under the state of Kievan Rus', a schism took place after the Mongol invasion, as the Muscovite lands stayed under Mongol/Tatar rule for another century and Ruthenian lands were taken over by the ascendant Duchy of Lithuania, as it helped Ruthenians drive out the Mongol invaders. During this time a language separate from Old East Slavic evolved on the territory of the progenitor Russian principality Muscovy, while a Ruthenian language continued evolving on the territory of central Kievan Rus' , whose people were known as the Ruthenians. While Muscovy stayed under Mongol control for over a hundred years, it absorbed much Mongol vocabulary, thus separating modern Russian from modern Belarusian and Ukrainian. Lithuania's unification with Poland into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth further added a Polonization factor to most of Ruthenian lands. In the 1930s, the Holodomor and the Stalinist purges decimated the Ukrainian population in eastern Ukraine. As ethnic Russians were brought into areas depopulated of Ukrainians, this led to increased Russification in the east of Ukraine.
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