evidence: In fact, the territory of contemporary Ukraine "used to belong to several empires or states, so some versions of Ukrainian identity do not even have anything to do with Russia at all," said Eugene Finkel, an associate professor with Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who studies Eastern Europe. [...] Resistance to Polish domination came from the Cossacks, a group with historically opaque ethnic origins. In 1654, they allied with Russia to establish a territory under their control, called a Hetmanate; it was an early form of what would become Ukraine, and it included Ukraine’s modern-day capital, Kyiv. Mapmakers of that time labeled Cossack areas as Ukraine. [...] The independent government in Kyiv had claimed the eastern provinces as part of the new nation, but this spawned its own tensions. Although the Donbas region was majority Ukrainian, "many ethnic Russians had moved in," Sysyn said. There was an effort to set up a separate pro-Russian Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, which presaged the struggle a century later in the eastern portions of Ukraine.