>>509524069
The Ukrainians (Укpaїнцi or Ruthenians - Pycини in older definition) may well claim to be the “original Rus’ians”. Theirs was the land where St. Cyril and St. Methodius converted the Slavic peoples in the 9th century, and that land, with Kyiv as the centre, became the starting point of Greco-Slavic Christianity. From 988 onwards it was the religious and political capital of whole Rus’. Great Russia (what we know today as Russia) was then merely a conglomerate, of Swedish, Finnish, and Slavic tribes.