Ukraine Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This Ukraine trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the country's geography (the Dnieper, the Carpathians, the black soil that made it Europe's breadbasket), its long history (Kyivan Rus, the Cossack Hetmanate, the Holodomor, Chernobyl, independence in 1991, the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan) and its culture, from borscht and pysanky to Taras Shevchenko, three Eurovision wins and the boxing brothers who promised their mother they would never fight each other. Questions run from easy (which river runs through Kyiv? what colours are the flag?) to hard (how deep is Arsenalna station? what did Shevchenko's freedom cost?), with the difficulty shown on each one so you can build an easy round or a hard one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which shallow sea, joined to the Black Sea by the Kerch Strait, washes Ukraine's south-eastern coast?
Sea of Azov
Sea of Azov. It is the shallowest sea in the world, nowhere more than about 14 metres deep, because the Don and Kuban rivers keep filling it with silt.
Q 02Which river, the longest in Ukraine, flows through the capital Kyiv on its way to the Black Sea?
Dnieper
Dnieper. For centuries its rapids stopped boats from sailing its full length, until a giant hydroelectric dam drowned them under a reservoir.
Q 03Hoverla, Ukraine's highest peak at 2,061 metres, rises in which mountain range?
The Carpathians
The Carpathians. Ukrainians climb Hoverla in mass ascents every year, and the crowds leave its high meadows trampled and strewn with litter.
Q 04Chernozem, the rich soil covering about two-thirds of Ukraine, takes its name from which colour?
Black
Black. The word is Russian for 'black earth': dark with humus, it is among the most fertile soils on the planet, and the reason Ukraine is called the breadbasket of Europe.
Q 05Which of Ukraine's seven land neighbours lies directly to its north?
Belarus
Belarus. The frontier runs just north of Chernobyl, so in 1986 the wind carried much of the fallout straight across it.
Q 06What is Ukraine's currency?
Hryvnia
Hryvnia. Named after a weight of silver that served as money in medieval Kyivan Rus, it replaced the karbovanets a few years after independence at a rate of 100,000 to one.
Q 07After Kyiv, which is Ukraine's second-largest city?
Kharkiv
Kharkiv. The Bolsheviks made it, not Kyiv, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, and the government only moved to Kyiv in 1934.
Q 08Which Christmas favourite began life as 'Shchedryk', a Ukrainian New Year song arranged by Mykola Leontovych?
Carol of the Bells
Carol of the Bells. The original has no bells in it: it is about a swallow promising a household a prosperous spring, and the bells arrived with Peter Wilhousky's English words in 1936.
Q 09Kyiv's Arsenalna metro station ranks among the world's what?
Deepest
Deepest. Its platforms lie about 105 metres below the street, and in 2022 Kyivans took shelter there from Russian bombs and missiles.
Q 10Which Soviet emblem was removed from the shield of Kyiv's 102-metre Motherland statue in 2023?
The hammer and sickle
The hammer and sickle. Ukraine's own coat of arms took its place, turning a steel giant built to mark Soviet victory in 1945 into an emblem of resistance to Moscow.
Q 11Which tree has become the emblem of Kyiv, lining the city's main street Khreshchatyk?
Chestnut
Chestnut. Soviet Kyiv made the chestnut the centrepiece of the coat of arms it adopted in 1969; in 1995 the city dropped that design and restored its old emblem, the Archangel Michael.
Q 12Which prince, by the chronicle's account, seized Kyiv in 882 and made it the capital of Kyivan Rus?
Oleg
Oleg. He is said to have tricked and killed the city's rulers, Askold and Dir, and then declared that Kyiv would be 'the mother of Rus cities'.
Q 13Which ruler of Kyivan Rus (980-1015) brought Christianity to the region and put his emblem on his coins?
Volodymyr the Great
Q 21What name was given to Ukraine's mass protests of 2004-05, which overturned a rigged presidential election?
The Orange Revolution
The Orange Revolution. Orange was the campaign colour of Viktor Yushchenko, whose supporters filled central Kyiv until the Supreme Court ordered a rerun, which he won.
Q 22Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, had been transferred from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 under which leader?
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev. The handover was presented as marking 300 years since the Pereiaslav agreement bound the Cossacks to the tsar, at a time when the border was an internal Soviet line.
Q 23What symbol appears in gold on the blue shield of Ukraine's coat of arms?
Volodymyr the Great. He agreed to be baptised as the price of marrying a Byzantine emperor's sister, then had Kyiv's pagan idols thrown into the river.
Q 14Which Cossack leader's 1648 uprising led to the founding of the Cossack Hetmanate?
Bohdan Khmelnytsky
Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Needing an ally against Poland, he turned to Moscow and in 1654 had his Cossacks swear an oath of allegiance to the tsar.
Q 15What does the word Holodomor mean?
Death by hunger
Death by hunger. The word joins holod, hunger, and mor, extermination: in the famine of 1932-33 whole villages were blacklisted from receiving food and peasants were forbidden to leave the republic to look for any.
Q 16On Holodomor Remembrance Day, the fourth Saturday of November, what do Ukrainians place in their windows?
A lit candle
A lit candle. The custom was the idea of James Mace, an American historian who settled in Kyiv and urged every household to light one in its window.
Q 17What was under way at Chernobyl's reactor 4 when it exploded in 1986?
A safety test
A safety test. To run it, technicians had shut down the emergency safety systems and pulled most of the control rods out of the core, and the reactor ran out of control.
Q 18Which town, built to house Chernobyl's workers, was evacuated the day after the 1986 explosion and never resettled?
Pripyat
Pripyat. It stands empty inside the 30-kilometre exclusion zone, and a new town, Slavutych, was built outside it for the plant's workers.
Q 19As of 2025, what is the only nuclear accident besides Chernobyl rated level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale?
Fukushima
Fukushima. In 2011 an earthquake and tsunami cut the Japanese plant's power, the cooling failed in three reactors and their cores overheated.
Q 20Ukraine declared independence on 24 August 1991, days after which event in Moscow?
A failed coup
A failed coup. Days after the hardliners' putsch collapsed, parliament voted for independence almost unanimously, and on 1 December about 90 per cent of voters endorsed the decision in a referendum.
A trident
A trident. Known as the tryzub, it goes back to the princes of medieval Kyiv, and in 2023 it replaced the Soviet emblem on the shield of the capital's giant Motherland statue.
Q 24Which colour forms the top half of the Ukrainian flag?
Blue
Blue. The flag was banned under Soviet rule, when Ukraine flew a red banner instead; restored at independence, it is read as blue sky over golden wheat fields.
Q 25Which soup did UNESCO add to its urgent-safeguarding heritage list in 2022, citing Ukraine's culture of cooking it?
Borscht
Borscht. The name is thought to come from hogweed, the wild plant the soup was made from before beetroot took over; the listing came months after the 2022 invasion.
Q 26What are pampushky, traditionally served in Ukraine alongside a bowl of soup?
Garlic-glazed yeast rolls
Garlic-glazed yeast rolls. At Christmas the same name goes sweet: pampushky are then doughnuts filled with jam or poppy seeds.
Q 27The Antonov An-225 Mriya, the heaviest aircraft ever built, was designed to carry which Soviet spacecraft on its back?
Buran
Buran. When the Soviet shuttle programme ended the one-off giant was mothballed, then refurbished to haul loads no other aircraft could lift.
Q 28At which airport was the only An-225 Mriya destroyed in the first days of the 2022 invasion?
Hostomel
Hostomel. The Antonov company's own airfield was attacked within hours of the invasion beginning, and in 2022 Ukraine announced plans to complete a second, unfinished airframe.
Q 29Jamala's '1944', Ukraine's 2016 Eurovision winner, is about Stalin's deportation of which people?
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars. In May 1944 the entire people was deported to Central Asia and the Urals; Jamala is of Crimean Tatar descent and sings the chorus in the language.
Q 30Which song won Eurovision for Kalush Orchestra in 2022?
Stefania
Stefania. Frontman Oleh Psiuk wrote it as a tribute to his mother; with Ukraine unable to host in wartime, runner-up Britain staged the 2023 contest in Liverpool.