In 1654 Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossack Hetmanate entered the Pereiaslav Agreement with the Tsardom of Russia. The agreement followed the Khmelnytsky Uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and remains historically contested in its meaning. It reshaped power across Ukraine, Poland-Lithuania, and Muscovy, with long consequences for identity and sovereignty.

The Cossack era fed Ukrainian oral epics known as dumy, which preserved memories of war, captivity, loyalty, betrayal, and frontier freedom. Later poets, especially Taras Shevchenko, returned to Khmelnytsky and the Hetmanate as symbols of both national aspiration and historical tragedy. Pereiaslav therefore belongs not only to diplomacy, but to the poetic struggle over who has the right to narrate Ukraine's past.