Since the last decades of the 18th Century, the geographical situation of the Ukraine on the threshold of two continents has been growing from an unfavorable position to one that may be described as very favorable.
It was for the most part with Ukrainian forces that Russia finally destroyed the nomads of the Ukrainian steppes. This fact has been of great significance for the Ukraine. Since that time the vast, tho almost imperceptible, colonization movement of the Ukrainian people to the east, southeast and south, has been in progress. This movement extended the Ukrainian boundaries twice within a single century. For the second time, and in a peaceful way, the Ukraine reached the delta of the Danube, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. All this is only an outcome of its geographical situation. In another situation the Ukrainians could not so easily dispose of unsettled lands. This expansion of the Ukrainian people has by no means reached its maximum, but it has surely passed its climax. To be sure, the migration of the Ukrainian element to the east and south is still very large, but there are no longer so many uninhabited districts open to settlement as in former times, and the emigration in masses has had to stop.
Nevertheless, the geographical situation opens a very fine prospect for later Ukrainian colonial expansion. Ciscaucasia and many regions on the lower Volga and Ural are, culturally considered, really a bonum nullius. Russian colonization is directed to other regions, chiefly for climatic reasons, and other competing races need hardly be considered because of their smallness. Even at present the Ukrainians constitute a very noteworthy minority; in the sub-Caucasian country most probably an absolute majority. In the course of a few decades of rather unsystematic colonization, extensive regions of the sub-Caucasian country, with their wealth of natural resources, will become Ukrainian; the entire Kuban region already is part of the compact national territory of the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian language has become an international language for the small mountain races of the Western Caucasus.
The geographical situation of the Ukraine on the threshold of Asia is distinctly favorable to the immigration of Ukrainians into Central Asia and Southern Siberia. In a strip of thousands of kilometers, chains of Ukrainian settlements extend along the southern border of Siberia to the Japan Sea. Along this immeasurable strip the number of Ukrainian settlements is continually growing. This colonization, which leads tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasant-settlers to the far east every year, has attracted the attention of wider circles only within the last two decades. In reality it is much older, for as early as the seventies of the past century, German explorers found Ukrainian colonies at the northern base of the Altai and on the Chinese border, etc. The establishment of these old and new colonies of the Ukrainians in Asia is proceeding in all quietude, and is quite analogous to that splendid colonization movement of the Ukrainians at the begining of the 19th Century, which, at one time, quite imperceptibly doubled the national territory of the Ukrainians.
Yet the colonial expansion of the last century brought the Ukrainian nation many disadvantages along with the advantages. For more than a century it drained the entire energy of the nation and deprived it of tens of thousands of the most active and energetic individuals every year. All the strength of the nation was turned to the one task of settling new lands and cultivating them according to ancient usage. From this cause, the political idea and the cultural efforts of the Ukrainians have suffered very keenly.