After the time of Kievan Rus, the Ukrainian territories came to be ruled by three external powers. They were the Golden Horde, the grand duchy of Lithuania, and the kingdom of Poland.
The steppe and Crimea came under the direct rule of the Golden Horde of Tatars. They were successors of Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire, with their khan living at Sarai on the Volga River. The Golden Horde started to disintegrate by the mid-15th century. The Crimean khanate, one of its successor states accepted the supremacy of the Ottoman sultans. However, the Crimean Peninsula and large areas of the steppe continued to be ruled by the khans, until they were annexed to the Russian Empire in 1783.
A new power that rose in the 13th century spread its dominance to the North-western and central Ukraine. It was the grand duchy of Lithuania, which occupied Chernihiv and adjacent areas in the 1350’s, and Kyiv Pereyaslav and Podolia (Podillya) in the 1360’s.
There was competition between Lithuania and the kingdom of Poland over the former Galician-Volhynian principality, which ended in the 1380’s with a partition. Lithuania then took over Volhynia and Poland gained possession of Galicia. Thus, most of the Ukrainian lands were once under the control of Lithuania.
Then, in 1569, Poland and Lithuania formed a constitutional union as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For a hundred years after that, the Ukrainian lands were exposed to the direct impact of Poland, politically and culturally.
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