Which of the following countries does NOT share boundary with Ukraine?

Correct — D, Lithuania. Ukraine has seven land neighbours — Belarus and Russia in the north and east, and Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova in the west and south-west. Lithuania is not among them: it lies further north on the Baltic, bordering Latvia, Belarus, Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. The gap between Lithuania and Ukraine is filled by Belarus in the east and by the narrow Polish-Lithuanian frontier known as the Suwalki gap in the west, so the two countries come close but never meet.

• (a)Romania — Romania does border Ukraine, and in two separate stretches — one in the north near Bukovina and one along the Danube delta in the south, with Moldova sitting between them.
• (b)Moldova — Moldova borders Ukraine on its north, east and south; its only other neighbour is Romania to the west. The Transnistria region lies along that Ukrainian frontier.
• (c)Poland — Poland borders Ukraine in the south-east, and that frontier has been the main land route for goods and people moving into and out of Ukraine since 2022.

Ukraine is the largest country lying wholly within Europe, and its position explains much of its history — open steppe to the east and south, the Carpathians in the west, and the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the south. Its seven neighbours run clockwise from Belarus through Russia, then along the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea to Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.

Baltic and Central European states are easy to blur, and the reliable fix is to fix the Baltic three in place. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania run north to south along the Baltic coast, and only Lithuania of the three touches Poland and Belarus. Ukraine sits a full country further south. Learning the seven Ukrainian neighbours as a clockwise ring is more durable than testing each candidate country separately.

• Ukraine borders Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.
• Lithuania borders Latvia, Belarus, Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
• Romania shares two separate stretches of border with Ukraine, split by Moldova.
• Moldova's only neighbours are Ukraine and Romania.
• The Suwalki gap is the short Polish-Lithuanian frontier between Belarus and Kaliningrad.

• Grouping all post-Soviet European states as neighbours of one another.
• Forgetting Slovakia, the shortest of Ukraine's seven land borders.
• Assuming Moldova is landlocked from Ukraine on only one side; it is bounded by Ukraine on three.

A neighbour-identification item, most reliably solved by learning the target country's full ring of neighbours rather than testing options one by one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  How many countries share a land border with Ukraine?

  • (a)Five
  • (b)Six
  • (c)Seven
  • (d)Eight

  Answer(c) Seven — Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following countries does NOT share a border with Lithuania?

  • (a)Latvia
  • (b)Belarus
  • (c)Poland
  • (d)Estonia

  Answer(d) Estonia — Latvia lies between Estonia and Lithuania.