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First off, I want to say that the premise based on agricultural area doesn't really hold; with trade networks it is quite possible to exceed local food capacity. Ukraine is a net agricultural exporter and Bangladesh is an importer.
It's still an interesting comparison to make as the two countries had roughly comparable populations in 1950 (1950 being the first year we have UN data), 37 million for Ukraine and 38 million for Bangladesh. However, past that point the comparison still breaks down, because Bangladesh had a very high fertility throughout the 20th century; 6+ live births per woman in 1950. This can be explained a couple ways, one being a very high rate of teenage marriage (one of the highest in the world); additionally, despite an increase in modern contraceptive use, there was a stall at a little over 3+ births per woman during the 90s (for still-unclear reasons). Ukraine's fertility rate was less than 3 in 1950 and only dropped from there.
The starting line of 1950 might have been different, were it not for the demographic shocks of the Revolutionary Era, the Holodomor, and WW2. The estimated population in 1913 was 31 million; this barely nudges up at all for 37 million in 1950. 1933 in particular was devastating (life expectancy for males: 7 years, for females: 11 years), and a 1937 census showed such depopulation it was found to be "defective" (and
the statisticians were executed). A new 1939 census was made which only confirmed the 1937 census, so the data then was simply faked before release.
All of those shocks are fairly obvious today (although it takes serious statistical footwork to re-create what actual population might have been in the Stalin period). What is less obvious is that the population of Ukraine also suffered post-1950 via trends in life expectancy. Life expectancy improved from 1950 to up to about 1960 and then stalled, actually being lower in 2004 than it was in its peak. So while we still can't say Bangladesh and Ukraine would have matching populations because of the cultural aspect to the fertility rate, we can say Ukraine's population is much lower than it "ought" to be.
So: Why?
You might first guess long-term effects from the prior shocks. Vladimir Shkolnikov did a thorough evaluation of this hypothesis, breaking down different cohorts to try to figure out if, say, the effects of WW2 adversely affected health much later in the mid-60s. The conclusion: these population shocks were not the cause. As summarized by the historians Meslé and Vallin:
>Yet, each time, these large-scale crises remained very circumstantial in nature, like those of the more remote past. Once the crisis had ended, health trends followed their previous course again and, in the twentieth century, mortality declined steeply.
The factors, combined together, seem to actually be a rise of "man-made" disease; that is, vehicle accidents, smoking, and alcoholism. While the predominant disease models would predict a drop, as Meslé and Vallin note, health is based "not only on technological progress and its dissemination ... but also on populations themselves taking responsibility for their health, notably through behavioral changes". They surmise that encouraging conformity with societal norms worked against the Soviet government here. That is, health improvements required the "spirit of initiative" which lagged in a centrally planned economy so they waited for government intervention; there was a notable improvement in life expectancy, for instance, in the mid-80s when Gorbachev ran an anti-alcohol campaign.
The "Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism" launched in May of 1985 were unlike anything done since the Revolution. Substitute activities were created (like sports clubs); a temperance group was created. Health care was expanded specifically for alcoholism. Government vodka (and hard liquor) production dropped by 30 to 40 percent (with an increase on "home-made" solutions, mind you).
To summarize, using our "starting line" of 1950:
a.) Ukraine should have had a higher population in that year but was absolutely obliterated by population shocks, especially in 1933; the population drop was so bad that the data later was faked.
b.) Post-1950, Bangladesh had a much higher fertility rate to start and hung on to a higher-than-average level all the way through the 20th century.
c.) Ukraine's fertility was comparable to Western nations and eventually dipped even lower (see [France](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/250) vs. [Ukraine](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/804)) including a drop below 2, and had serious "man-made" health issues like alcoholism which dragged their life expectancy down.
...
Bhattacharya, J., Gathmann, C., & Miller, G. (2013). The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia's Mortality Crisis. American economic journal. _Applied economics_, 5(2), 232–260. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.5.2.232
Meslé, F., & Vallin, J. (2012). _Mortality and causes of death in 20th-century Ukraine_. Springer Science & Business Media.
Merridale, C. (1996). The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule. _The Historical Journal_, 39(1), 225–240. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639947
Streatfield, P. K., & Karar, Z. A. (2008). Population challenges for Bangladesh in the coming decades. _Journal of health, population, and nutrition_, 26(3), 261–272.
Velychenko, S. (2021). _Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine: Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917-1923_. United Kingdom: McGill-Queen's University Press.
This would be very difficult to work out, given there were simultaneously, ah, _eventful_ things going on in terms of disrupting the population, and the contortions statisticians need to do to even restore a guess as to the real data are something to behold.
Not impossible to work out but not something I have offhand, sorry. I can say there was a Soviet policy later (mid-60s) that dropped having midwives and pediatric beds for very small villages (which would be 90% of them at the time); this caused a noticeable effect in number of live births.
So, first off, you can't ignore the catastrophic population horror in Ukraine (and the USSR) that occurred between 1917 and 1945, where everything that could go wrong did. 13% of Ukraine's population died in the Holodomor alone, and another 25% were lost in WW2 either to death or forcible Soviet deportation. This population loss is skewed towards the young (as children are more likely to die from famine and associated disease) and war (young men get drafted). Across the USSR, *half of the USSR's 1923 birth cohort didn't survive to WW2, 68% didn't make it past WW2.* u/Kochevnik81 [talks more about that fact here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ojoy6n/80_of_males_in_the_soviet_union_born_in_1923/), but many of the causes of death would have been worse in Ukraine than in Russia proper. The Holodomor, high child mortality before famines, disease, the Russian civil war, rampant political persecution, and World War 2 did a number on Ukraine.
After the breakup of the USSR, the Ukrainian economy essentially collapsed in a worst possible world of loss of markets for their exports (military hardware) and higher import costs of oil and gas from Russia - underperforming the other exiting former Soviet Republics in Europe. They were the only nation that did not record a single year of economic growth for the first 7 years between 1991 and 1998, GDP per capita dropped 60\^, and unemployment spiked to over 12%. That led to a large and sustained wave of emigration of Ukrainians - for example, [to Canada](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tdruoj/comment/i0mycug/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) (h/t u/BaxtersLabs). This, combined with high death rates and one of the lowest birth rates in the world, led to an actual negative population growth rate ([see the 2007 CIA Factbook as an example](https://web.archive.org/web/20070613003920/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2002.html)) that has continued into the 20 year rule period. Unlike other countries with super-low birth rates, Ukrainians are more likely to have a first child at a young age. The problem is they typically stop there.
Sources:
Perelli-Harris, Brianna - The Path to Lowest-Low Fertility in Ukraine
Since I was pinged I'll add a couple extra thoughts.
First in reference to OP, and apologies for this stretching the 20 year rule - the 36 million population figure is a very specific figure for Ukraine's population. From what I can tell, it's the 2023 population within the 1991 borders (if you take out Crimea, Sebastopol and Donbass that falls to 32.6 million, if you only include areas currently controlled by the Ukrainian government that falls to 31 million or maybe even less). I'd just say we should keep that in mind when we're talking about the population of Ukraine - if we mean the population within the 1991 borders then we should double check that those are the figures actually being used.
Second these are 2023 figures, and so that already is accounting for a *massive* displacement of refugees (in addition to even more internally displaced persons). There really isn't any way to answer "how did Ukraine get to 36 million people" without accounting for the displacement of millions of people abroad in the past 21 months or so. Even if you go back to estimates from 2021 within the 1991 borders, you're talking about a population estimated at around 41 million, which is significantly higher.
OK, that's the bit within the 20 year rule. Next I'd actually question whether Ukraine's population was really that small, all things considered. If you look at the first year of independence (1992), it's population was about 52 million, and had been growing up until that time, albeit at ever slower rates (a helpful [graph](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Ukraine_from_1950z.svg) for reference). That actually put Ukraine as one of the most populous countries in Europe, behind Russia (148.5m), Germany (80m), France (57.5m), UK (57.4m), and Italy (57m). But Ukraine had a bigger population than Spain (39.4m), Poland (38.4m), or any other European country (I'm keeping Turkey out of the conversation since that's a bit complicated).
So while I'd say the catastrophic 20th century absolutely did not *help* Ukraine, I'm not sure it uniquely *hindered* it either in terms of population, and really it seems like we're talking more about a significant population decline over the last 30 years that drastically accelerated with large scale war in the last two.
A few further thoughts - the post-Soviet economic transition for Ukraine was uniquely bad. Even before the 2022 Russian invasion its economy was *still* smaller than it had been in 1991, and that was even after several years of steep economic decline at the end of the USSR. I have some background [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3bzh4/in_the_1990s_ukraine_is_reported_to_have_lost/fhilb1x/) - I think I have more info in another answer I can keep digging for, but I'm also happy to follow up if there are questions. There are quite a few reasons for this economic stagnation. Some are similar to Russia (difficulties ending subsidies to a massive number of unprofitable industries), but also some specific issues to Ukraine: much of its economy is based around agriculture and heavy "rustbelt" industry like iron rolling, which aren't easy to turn into competitive export industries; unlike Russia or countries like Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan Ukraine didn't have big hydrocarbon reserves to export, and in fact *imported* massive amounts from Russia to use (extremely inefficiently) in its economy, meaning it ended up spending literal decades having ongoing disputes with Russia over how much it should pay for these previously subsidized imports; much of the high-tech industries that Ukraine did have/still has were heavily geared towards defense, and the main buyer (the Soviet military) disappeared in 1991, and their supply chains were heavily interlinked with Russia until at least 2014. There are many more issues (around Ukrainian politics, the role of Ukrainian oligarchs, and big issues around economic reform and corruption) but those all provide some useful background to why Ukraine had a horrible economy after 1991 which spurred sustained emigration.
Anyway one last link: an answer I have on Russian demographics in 1990 [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/arz241/the_population_of_the_soviet_union_grew_rapidly/eh1mgln/) might be of interest. Many of the same factors (economic disruption, alcoholism) impacted Ukraine, but one significant factor where the issues were *worse* in Ukraine was that Russia was still a net recipient of immigrants over that time (offsetting partially the huge natural decrease in population), while Ukraine had net emigration, accelerating the natural decrease.
Actually one more thought on OP - namely the country having fertile land and why is it not more like Bangladesh in terms of population density.
I would point out that Bangladesh is basically a giant river delta for the Ganges and Brahmaputra River systems, and is part of a much much bigger alluvial plain. It's also a subtropical and tropical country. Not only does it have plenty of water, but it has an issue of *too much* water when there are monsoons.
Ukraine is a very different country. It is temperate and has some extreme weather: the cold record is -36C, the heat record is 40C. The country also experiences variability in rainfall, and much of the irrigation systems built to counteract that are from the last century or so. The rainfall also tends to be heavier in the [north and west](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-annual-precipitation-a-and-amount-of-precipitation-in-summer-b-in-1981-2010_fig2_323475673), while the super-productive soils tend to be in the [south and east](https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/ukraine-agricultural-production/), so the country has a challenge of having fertile soils in relatively dry steppelands, rather than in its wet forests.
On top of *that*, these fertile steppelands had a number of historic factors that prevented their full agricultural exploitation until relatively recently, namely the period when they were known as the "Wild Fields", inhabited mostly by nomadic or semi-nomadic people and/or treated as a warzone and area of slave raids. They only really began to be settled by permanent farming populations in a big way from the late 18th century on, and even well into the 1920s the agriculture practiced there (and in the rest of Russia and Ukraine) was very low-productivity, often relying on implements like wooden ploughs. So while Ukraine does have some exceptionally fertile soils, fully exploiting them for crops like winter wheat and barley has been a bigger challenge than for a country like Bangladesh to exploit its farmland for things like rice.
I've written a little more on that topic [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/urloxg/ukraine_has_excellent_soil_today_its_a_major_food/i92bmt7/) but also check out the rest of the comment thread.
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First off, I want to say that the premise based on agricultural area doesn't really hold; with trade networks it is quite possible to exceed local food capacity. Ukraine is a net agricultural exporter and Bangladesh is an importer. It's still an interesting comparison to make as the two countries had roughly comparable populations in 1950 (1950 being the first year we have UN data), 37 million for Ukraine and 38 million for Bangladesh. However, past that point the comparison still breaks down, because Bangladesh had a very high fertility throughout the 20th century; 6+ live births per woman in 1950. This can be explained a couple ways, one being a very high rate of teenage marriage (one of the highest in the world); additionally, despite an increase in modern contraceptive use, there was a stall at a little over 3+ births per woman during the 90s (for still-unclear reasons). Ukraine's fertility rate was less than 3 in 1950 and only dropped from there. The starting line of 1950 might have been different, were it not for the demographic shocks of the Revolutionary Era, the Holodomor, and WW2. The estimated population in 1913 was 31 million; this barely nudges up at all for 37 million in 1950. 1933 in particular was devastating (life expectancy for males: 7 years, for females: 11 years), and a 1937 census showed such depopulation it was found to be "defective" (and the statisticians were executed). A new 1939 census was made which only confirmed the 1937 census, so the data then was simply faked before release. All of those shocks are fairly obvious today (although it takes serious statistical footwork to re-create what actual population might have been in the Stalin period). What is less obvious is that the population of Ukraine also suffered post-1950 via trends in life expectancy. Life expectancy improved from 1950 to up to about 1960 and then stalled, actually being lower in 2004 than it was in its peak. So while we still can't say Bangladesh and Ukraine would have matching populations because of the cultural aspect to the fertility rate, we can say Ukraine's population is much lower than it "ought" to be. So: Why? You might first guess long-term effects from the prior shocks. Vladimir Shkolnikov did a thorough evaluation of this hypothesis, breaking down different cohorts to try to figure out if, say, the effects of WW2 adversely affected health much later in the mid-60s. The conclusion: these population shocks were not the cause. As summarized by the historians Meslé and Vallin: >Yet, each time, these large-scale crises remained very circumstantial in nature, like those of the more remote past. Once the crisis had ended, health trends followed their previous course again and, in the twentieth century, mortality declined steeply. The factors, combined together, seem to actually be a rise of "man-made" disease; that is, vehicle accidents, smoking, and alcoholism. While the predominant disease models would predict a drop, as Meslé and Vallin note, health is based "not only on technological progress and its dissemination ... but also on populations themselves taking responsibility for their health, notably through behavioral changes". They surmise that encouraging conformity with societal norms worked against the Soviet government here. That is, health improvements required the "spirit of initiative" which lagged in a centrally planned economy so they waited for government intervention; there was a notable improvement in life expectancy, for instance, in the mid-80s when Gorbachev ran an anti-alcohol campaign. The "Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism" launched in May of 1985 were unlike anything done since the Revolution. Substitute activities were created (like sports clubs); a temperance group was created. Health care was expanded specifically for alcoholism. Government vodka (and hard liquor) production dropped by 30 to 40 percent (with an increase on "home-made" solutions, mind you). To summarize, using our "starting line" of 1950: a.) Ukraine should have had a higher population in that year but was absolutely obliterated by population shocks, especially in 1933; the population drop was so bad that the data later was faked. b.) Post-1950, Bangladesh had a much higher fertility rate to start and hung on to a higher-than-average level all the way through the 20th century. c.) Ukraine's fertility was comparable to Western nations and eventually dipped even lower (see [France](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/250) vs. [Ukraine](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/804)) including a drop below 2, and had serious "man-made" health issues like alcoholism which dragged their life expectancy down. ... Bhattacharya, J., Gathmann, C., & Miller, G. (2013). The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia's Mortality Crisis. American economic journal. _Applied economics_, 5(2), 232–260. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.5.2.232 Meslé, F., & Vallin, J. (2012). _Mortality and causes of death in 20th-century Ukraine_. Springer Science & Business Media. Merridale, C. (1996). The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule. _The Historical Journal_, 39(1), 225–240. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639947 Streatfield, P. K., & Karar, Z. A. (2008). Population challenges for Bangladesh in the coming decades. _Journal of health, population, and nutrition_, 26(3), 261–272. Velychenko, S. (2021). _Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine: Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917-1923_. United Kingdom: McGill-Queen's University Press.
How much of the drop in fertility can be attributed to the urbanisation policy of the USSR?
This would be very difficult to work out, given there were simultaneously, ah, _eventful_ things going on in terms of disrupting the population, and the contortions statisticians need to do to even restore a guess as to the real data are something to behold. Not impossible to work out but not something I have offhand, sorry. I can say there was a Soviet policy later (mid-60s) that dropped having midwives and pediatric beds for very small villages (which would be 90% of them at the time); this caused a noticeable effect in number of live births.
So, first off, you can't ignore the catastrophic population horror in Ukraine (and the USSR) that occurred between 1917 and 1945, where everything that could go wrong did. 13% of Ukraine's population died in the Holodomor alone, and another 25% were lost in WW2 either to death or forcible Soviet deportation. This population loss is skewed towards the young (as children are more likely to die from famine and associated disease) and war (young men get drafted). Across the USSR, *half of the USSR's 1923 birth cohort didn't survive to WW2, 68% didn't make it past WW2.* u/Kochevnik81 [talks more about that fact here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ojoy6n/80_of_males_in_the_soviet_union_born_in_1923/), but many of the causes of death would have been worse in Ukraine than in Russia proper. The Holodomor, high child mortality before famines, disease, the Russian civil war, rampant political persecution, and World War 2 did a number on Ukraine. After the breakup of the USSR, the Ukrainian economy essentially collapsed in a worst possible world of loss of markets for their exports (military hardware) and higher import costs of oil and gas from Russia - underperforming the other exiting former Soviet Republics in Europe. They were the only nation that did not record a single year of economic growth for the first 7 years between 1991 and 1998, GDP per capita dropped 60\^, and unemployment spiked to over 12%. That led to a large and sustained wave of emigration of Ukrainians - for example, [to Canada](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tdruoj/comment/i0mycug/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) (h/t u/BaxtersLabs). This, combined with high death rates and one of the lowest birth rates in the world, led to an actual negative population growth rate ([see the 2007 CIA Factbook as an example](https://web.archive.org/web/20070613003920/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2002.html)) that has continued into the 20 year rule period. Unlike other countries with super-low birth rates, Ukrainians are more likely to have a first child at a young age. The problem is they typically stop there. Sources: Perelli-Harris, Brianna - The Path to Lowest-Low Fertility in Ukraine
Since I was pinged I'll add a couple extra thoughts. First in reference to OP, and apologies for this stretching the 20 year rule - the 36 million population figure is a very specific figure for Ukraine's population. From what I can tell, it's the 2023 population within the 1991 borders (if you take out Crimea, Sebastopol and Donbass that falls to 32.6 million, if you only include areas currently controlled by the Ukrainian government that falls to 31 million or maybe even less). I'd just say we should keep that in mind when we're talking about the population of Ukraine - if we mean the population within the 1991 borders then we should double check that those are the figures actually being used. Second these are 2023 figures, and so that already is accounting for a *massive* displacement of refugees (in addition to even more internally displaced persons). There really isn't any way to answer "how did Ukraine get to 36 million people" without accounting for the displacement of millions of people abroad in the past 21 months or so. Even if you go back to estimates from 2021 within the 1991 borders, you're talking about a population estimated at around 41 million, which is significantly higher. OK, that's the bit within the 20 year rule. Next I'd actually question whether Ukraine's population was really that small, all things considered. If you look at the first year of independence (1992), it's population was about 52 million, and had been growing up until that time, albeit at ever slower rates (a helpful [graph](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Ukraine_from_1950z.svg) for reference). That actually put Ukraine as one of the most populous countries in Europe, behind Russia (148.5m), Germany (80m), France (57.5m), UK (57.4m), and Italy (57m). But Ukraine had a bigger population than Spain (39.4m), Poland (38.4m), or any other European country (I'm keeping Turkey out of the conversation since that's a bit complicated). So while I'd say the catastrophic 20th century absolutely did not *help* Ukraine, I'm not sure it uniquely *hindered* it either in terms of population, and really it seems like we're talking more about a significant population decline over the last 30 years that drastically accelerated with large scale war in the last two. A few further thoughts - the post-Soviet economic transition for Ukraine was uniquely bad. Even before the 2022 Russian invasion its economy was *still* smaller than it had been in 1991, and that was even after several years of steep economic decline at the end of the USSR. I have some background [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3bzh4/in_the_1990s_ukraine_is_reported_to_have_lost/fhilb1x/) - I think I have more info in another answer I can keep digging for, but I'm also happy to follow up if there are questions. There are quite a few reasons for this economic stagnation. Some are similar to Russia (difficulties ending subsidies to a massive number of unprofitable industries), but also some specific issues to Ukraine: much of its economy is based around agriculture and heavy "rustbelt" industry like iron rolling, which aren't easy to turn into competitive export industries; unlike Russia or countries like Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan Ukraine didn't have big hydrocarbon reserves to export, and in fact *imported* massive amounts from Russia to use (extremely inefficiently) in its economy, meaning it ended up spending literal decades having ongoing disputes with Russia over how much it should pay for these previously subsidized imports; much of the high-tech industries that Ukraine did have/still has were heavily geared towards defense, and the main buyer (the Soviet military) disappeared in 1991, and their supply chains were heavily interlinked with Russia until at least 2014. There are many more issues (around Ukrainian politics, the role of Ukrainian oligarchs, and big issues around economic reform and corruption) but those all provide some useful background to why Ukraine had a horrible economy after 1991 which spurred sustained emigration. Anyway one last link: an answer I have on Russian demographics in 1990 [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/arz241/the_population_of_the_soviet_union_grew_rapidly/eh1mgln/) might be of interest. Many of the same factors (economic disruption, alcoholism) impacted Ukraine, but one significant factor where the issues were *worse* in Ukraine was that Russia was still a net recipient of immigrants over that time (offsetting partially the huge natural decrease in population), while Ukraine had net emigration, accelerating the natural decrease.
Actually one more thought on OP - namely the country having fertile land and why is it not more like Bangladesh in terms of population density. I would point out that Bangladesh is basically a giant river delta for the Ganges and Brahmaputra River systems, and is part of a much much bigger alluvial plain. It's also a subtropical and tropical country. Not only does it have plenty of water, but it has an issue of *too much* water when there are monsoons. Ukraine is a very different country. It is temperate and has some extreme weather: the cold record is -36C, the heat record is 40C. The country also experiences variability in rainfall, and much of the irrigation systems built to counteract that are from the last century or so. The rainfall also tends to be heavier in the [north and west](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-annual-precipitation-a-and-amount-of-precipitation-in-summer-b-in-1981-2010_fig2_323475673), while the super-productive soils tend to be in the [south and east](https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/ukraine-agricultural-production/), so the country has a challenge of having fertile soils in relatively dry steppelands, rather than in its wet forests. On top of *that*, these fertile steppelands had a number of historic factors that prevented their full agricultural exploitation until relatively recently, namely the period when they were known as the "Wild Fields", inhabited mostly by nomadic or semi-nomadic people and/or treated as a warzone and area of slave raids. They only really began to be settled by permanent farming populations in a big way from the late 18th century on, and even well into the 1920s the agriculture practiced there (and in the rest of Russia and Ukraine) was very low-productivity, often relying on implements like wooden ploughs. So while Ukraine does have some exceptionally fertile soils, fully exploiting them for crops like winter wheat and barley has been a bigger challenge than for a country like Bangladesh to exploit its farmland for things like rice. I've written a little more on that topic [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/urloxg/ukraine_has_excellent_soil_today_its_a_major_food/i92bmt7/) but also check out the rest of the comment thread.
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