For decades, if not more, English speakers the world over referred to Ukraine’s capital as Kiev, pronouncing it kee-yev.
Few people knew they were using the Russian name for the city. The city is pronounced keeiv in Ukrainian and is transliterated correctly into English as Kyiv.
In fact, until recently, the names of almost all Ukrainian places and people were transliterated according to their Russian versions.
After gaining independence in 1991, Ukrainians lobbied the international community to adopt native transliterations when speaking and writing about Ukrainian cities.
Their efforts were largely ignored for several decades as Ukraine struggled to shake its reputation as a former part of Russia. The needle began to move slightly in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine’s east and annexed Crimea.
With the outset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the world seemed to get the message. Most major news outlets, academic publications, and government bodies now refer to Ukrainian place names by their Ukrainian transliterations. There are still some hold-outs, however, most notably among media outlets that often parrot Kremlin narratives.
The Russian spelling and pronunciation of Kyiv throughout the ages was no accident. While the name gets its origin from an empire that predates Russia, a series of policies by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that sought to Russify Ukraine and the Ukrainian language distorted its roots.
Where does the name Kyiv come from?
Kyiv, located on the Dnipro River, was officially founded in 482 A.D., although archeological evidence suggests there has been a settlement on the site for about 2,000 years.
Various theories about its founding exist — with the founders being said to be Goths, Huns, and Turks, among others — but the most popular legend credits four royal siblings of an Eastern Slavic tribe with establishing the city in the 5th century.
Kyiv is thus said to be named after the eldest sibling, Kyi, similar to how the mythical Romulus inspired the name Rome.
In the 9th century, Kyiv became the capital and cultural center of Kyivan Rus, a medieval state spanning eastern and northern Europe, from which modern Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus all trace their origins.
During the “Golden Age” of Kyivan Rus, Kyiv emerged as a political, cultural, and religious center, with landmarks like Saint Sophia’s Cathedral and the Pechersk Lavra monastery complex reflecting its importance and prosperity.
Moscow, founded at the tail end of Kyivan rule in 1147 A.D., is more than 600 years younger than Kyiv. Over the eight centuries that followed the breakup of Kyivan Rus, Kyiv was controlled by the Mongols, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Russian Empire, and lastly the Soviet Union before becoming the capital of independent Ukraine.
Both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union drew their national identity from the legacy of Kyivan Rus. Authors of Russian history and the Russian state, including President Vladimir Putin, have envisioned their control over the city as a prerequisite for reuniting a long-lost empire.
This imperial preoccupation also underpins current Russian narratives; in Putin’s view, Kyiv is the mother city of a great Slavic kingdom that is destined to be reunified.
Why ‘Kiev’?
Under the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Russian cities, including Saint Petersburg and Moscow, dictated official language policies.
In Soviet times, Moscow required all 15 member republics of the Soviet Union to adopt Russian as their official language. The result was that over the last century, Westerners came to know Ukrainian cities by their official Russian-language transliterations: Kiev as opposed to Kyiv, Kharkov as opposed to Kharkiv, Lvov as opposed to Lviv, and Odessa as opposed to Odesa.
This lack of international awareness and recognition of the languages and cultures of individual Soviet member states meant “Russian” became a commonplace blanket term for all things Soviet.
This legacy carried on past the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Many foreign governments and media outlets continued to refer to Ukrainian cities by their Russian transliterations, bolstered by and contributing to the widespread stereotypes that “everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian” and the factually incorrect “Ukraine is a former part of Russia.”
After the 2014 EuroMaidan revolution and Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and invasion of Donbas, more institutions in the West began acknowledging Ukraine’s political and linguistic sovereignty.
By 2019, many diplomatic missions and English-language news outlets had switched to using Ukrainian spellings of Ukrainian proper names out of respect for the country.
Social media has also played a pivotal role in encouraging foreigners to switch to using Ukrainian names.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched the #ReformUA campaign in the late 2010s, with hashtags such as #KyivNotKiev, #LvivNotLvov, and #KharkivNotKharkov. The effort also discouraged referring to Ukraine as “the Ukraine” — which insinuates that it is a region in a larger nation, rather than an individual state in its own right.
Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 brought global attention to Ukraine and its capital city, prompting widespread adoption of “Ukrainian” spellings — or rather, since Ukrainian uses a Cyrillic alphabet, Latin alphabet transliterations that better reflect the Ukrainian pronunciation of names.
Kate Tsurkan
