Much stronger ties connect the Ukrainian people with the rivers of its territory. The rivers have an anthropogeographical significance chiefly as ways of travel. The great main streams of the Ukraine, particularly the Dnieper and the Dniester, have always had the character of a transition between rivers and arms of the sea. At the time of the ancient Kingdom of Kiev, seafaring vessels sailing up the Dniester reached the royal city of Halich, and, in the time of the Cossacks, the Zaporog boats were pursued by the Turkish galleys as far as the rapids of the Dnieper. As far as ancient navigation was concerned, there was very little difference between river and sea; rivers were simply the extension of sea routes. In the ancient Ukraine, the Varangians were the first to use them in this sense. Their route "from the Varangian Land to Greece," which later became one of the. main paths of the old Kingdom of Kiev, led from the Baltic to the Black Sea by way of rivers and portages. These wanderings of the Varangians in the Ukrainian water system are of great historical significance. For altho we are now almost certain that the Varangians were not the founders of the Kingdom of Kiev, it cannot be denied that they played a great part in the forming of it.
Rivers are natural, and therefore, also the easiest and cheapest roads. Especially in countries of great area, as the United States, Russia and the Ukraine, the importance of rivers as roadways is very great. Rivers connect the nations. The Dniester and the Dnieper connected the Ukraine with the sea, with the highly-cultured Constantinople, with the entire Mediterranean and Oriental world of culture. The Dnieper, thru its much branched water-web,
connected the Ukraine directly with Poland and White Russia, and indirectly with the Baltic Sea and Northern Europe. Even today, altho the canals connecting the Dnieper with the Vistula, Niemen, and Dvina are entirely neglected, the Dnieper River plays a very significant part as a great vein of traffic connecting different lands, peoples and producing regions. It may become more important still if it is made accessible to sea vessels and connects two distant seas.
In the Cossack period a considerable portion of the Ukrainians became a river people. The life and work of the Zaporog Sich depended entirely upon the Dnieper River. It protected, fed and clothed them. So strongly were the Zaporogs bound to the Dnieper, so necessary did the great river become to them, that all attempts to found new Zaporog centers on other rivers simply failed. We need not wonder, then, that the Dnieper is celebrated in all the Cossack songs as a sacred possession of the nation.
Closely connected with the character of rivers as roadways, is their importance as the directing lines of the movements of races. The history of the Ukraine tells us how the ancient Kingdom of Kiev penetrated toward the south along the Dnieper, and how the Kingdom of Halich reached the delta of the Danube by way of the Dniester and Pruth. Most likely the first expansion of the Ukrainians proceeded along the Dniester, Boh and Dnieper, southward. At the time of the great shifts of the Ukrainian southeast border, the advance of the Ukrainians was always directed southeast, their retreat always northwest. The history of the 16th Century shows plainly how the first pioneers of the new colonization movement — the Cossacks — pushed along the Dnieper, toward the southeast, into the steppe region. Altho it is a commonplace, yet it may be established without doubt that the whole Ukrainian nation took its way southeast along the Ukrainian rivers. To this day the national territory of the Ukraine is advancing irresistibly in that direction.
But not only with the southeast has Nature connected the Ukraine. Important borderlands of the Ukrainian territory — Central Galicia, the region of Kholm, Podlakhia, Western Volhynia— with their river system, belong to the Baltic slope. At the same time, the transition from the Pontian river system to the Baltic system is very easy, the divides flat and low. The easy transition from the Dniester to the San and Buh, from the Pripet to the Vistula and the Niemen, was of great importance in the past, when western influences could easily penetrate these Ukrainian borderlands, and is of great importance in the present. If, in the near future, the now antiquated canals are improved and new ones built, the Ukraine will have as good connections with the west as it has with the east. Then the Ukraine may, from a hydrographic point of view, gain great importance as a transition country of important waterways.