Something I find interesting..
Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, all share a common ancestor in an old kingdom named Kievan Rus, which stretched all the way from the border with Finland down to the Black Sea. As the name suggests, the capital city was Kyiv .
Kievan Rus was actually founded by vikings from Sweden, also known as the Varangians. They traveled east across the Baltic Sea to places like Lake Ladoga by modern-day St. Petersburg, down the Volkhov River to the settlement of Novgorod, and eventually down the Dnipro River to Kyiv.
The word Rus is derived from an old Norse term meaning "people who row," so the Varangian influence is still seen in places like Belarus and Russia, that have Rus in their name. Russia is literally called Rusland or Russland in several languages, aka Land of the Rus.
One of the reasons I find it interesting in the context of this conflict is that Putin wants to claim Ukraine "belongs" to Russia, and the Kievan Rus is supposed to be one argument in favor of that. But the heart of power was Kyiv, and Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg didn't even exist at the time. The most important place in Russia at the time, Novgorod, isn't even in the top 50 Russian cities by population these days.*
*I should add, all mentions of Novgorod are to Veliky Novgorod. There's a much larger Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, but that was established nearly 400 years later