Right-bank Ukraine

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Right-bank Ukraine (Ukrainian: Pravoberezhna Ukrayina; Russian: Pravoberezhnaya Ukraina; Polish: Prawobrzeżna Ukraina), a historical name of a part of Ukraine on the right (west) bank of the Dnieper River, corresponding with modern-day oblasts of Volyn, Rivne, Vinnitsa, Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad and Kiev, as well as part of Cherkasy and Ternopil.

In 1667 under the Treaty of Andrusovo, left-bank Ukraine was incorporated into Muscovy, while right-bank Ukraine (except for the city of Kiev) remained part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Five years later in 1672, Podolia was occupied by the Turkish Ottoman empire, while Kiev and Braclav came under the control of Hetman Petro Doroshenko until 1681, when they were also captured by Turks. After the Christian victory in the Battle of Vienna (1683), in 1699 the Treaty of Karlowitz returned those lands to the Commonwealth. During the eighteenth century, two Cossack uprisings took place. In 1793 right-bank Ukraine was finally annexed by the Russian Empire in the Second Partition of Poland, becoming part of the guberniya ('governorate') of Little Russia.

In the nineteenth century, the population of right-bank Ukraine was mostly Ukrainian, but most of the land was owned by the Polish or Polonized gentry. Many of the towns and cities were heavily Jewish. While the Polish gentry was mostly Roman Catholic, to the 1830s, the Ukrainian peasantry was mostly Uniate or Eastern-Rite Catholic. After the suppression of the Uniate Church by Tsar Nicholas I, the peasantry largely went over to Orthodoxy. To the end of the imperial era, the region was divided into three provinces, each with its own administration: Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia.