Medicinal plants of the Ukraine: from Prince Volodymyr (10th century) to medicinal Cannabis (2026)

Ukraine has a unique ethnopharmacological heritage shaped by its exceptional floristic diversity, complex political history, and long-standing cross-cultural interactions with neighbouring regions. This narrative review provides a comprehensive and critical synthesis of the historical development of herbal medicine in the territory of modern Ukraine from the prehistoric and medieval periods to the early 21st century. This study is the first to integrate historical, ethnobotanical, and normative aspects and offers a comparative analysis of regional and temporal patterns of medicinal plant use, highlighting key stages in the transformation of medicinal plant use from empirical and ritual practices to institutionalised, evidence-based approaches. The analysis incorporates data from chronicles, monastic and church manuscripts, early herbals, pharmacopoeias, and modern scientific literature. Early stages of development, particularly those associated with Kyivan Rus’ (11th–13th centuries), are reconstructed mainly based on indirect and retrospective sources, reflecting cultural understanding of treatment rather than systematically recorded medical practices, highlighting the importance of recognising the limitations of these data. Beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, the development of university medicine, pharmacognosy, and pharmacopoeial regulation ensured increasingly reliable documentation of herbal medicine knowledge. During the Soviet period, extensive standardisation and industrial application of medicinal plants were introduced, and since independence, Ukraine has seen changes such as the creation of a national pharmacopoeia and increasing integration into European regulatory frameworks, including recent legislative changes regarding Cannabis sativa L. Combining historical reconstruction with a critical evaluation of reliability of sources and regional variability, this review demonstrates how Ukrainian herbal medicine has continually adapted to changing cultural, political, and environmental conditions. The study emphasises the value of historical ethnopharmacological knowledge for hypothesis generation and biodiversity conservation, as well as the need for careful interpretation of early sources within modern, scientifically sound paradigms. It lays the basis for more history-centred archival studies to understand these developments in a European and global context.