Time: Ukraine, not the Ukraine (and Kyiv, not Kiev)

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U.S. President Barack Obama stood at a local elementary school in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to tout his new budget proposal. But after his opening remarks, the first question was inevitably about foreign affairs. In response to a reporter who asked about Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Obama eventually said this: “It is important that Congress stand with us. I don’t doubt the bipartisan concern that’s been expressed about the situation in the Ukraine.”


It’s likely that any Ukrainian Americans tuned to C-SPAN at that particular moment cringed, not at the prospect of the country’s salvation coming from Congress’s bipartisan expressions — unsettling though that thought may be — but from three little letters: the.

“Ukraine is a country,” says William Taylor, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. “The Ukraine is the way the Russians referred to that part of the country during Soviet times … Now that it is a country, a nation, and a recognized state, it is just Ukraine. And it is incorrect to refer to the Ukraine, even though a lot of people do it.”

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Taylor says that the diaspora, those Ukrainians now abroad and hearing reports about their homeland in English, are particularly sensitive to this definite article. “Whenever they hear the Ukraine, they fume,” Taylor says. “It kind of denies their independence, denies their sovereignty.”

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Taylor has another linguistic pet peeve that he fought to eradicate from the government’s vocabulary during his time as ambassador: spelling Ukraine’s capital as Kiev, rather than Kyiv. Kiev is the Russian transliteration, while Kyiv is the Ukrainian one. Taylor says he had to call on allies among multiple agencies, roping in the official geographer and Department of Defense, before he could get the spelling changed to Kyiv on official State Department documents. Using the Russian spelling, he says, affirms this “condescending view that Russians have” of the country. “You’re falling into the Russian habit, the Russian frame of mind,” he says. Today, State Department press releases still use Kyiv, though the White House is inconsistent on the issue

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