Ukraine's best-known Christmas song turns 110 this winter. Mykola Leontovych's Shchedryk, which Americans sing as Carol of the Bells, was first performed on 29 December 1916 in the Merchants' Assembly Hall in Kyiv, the building that now houses the National Philharmonic.1
The carol is one of 15 places where Ukraine appears in YouPickBest rankings. The others cover borscht and varenyky, three Eurovision winners, an embroidered shirt, a pole vaulter, three heavyweight champions, three pianists, two opera houses and a video game set in the Chernobyl zone.
Ukraine is strongest on lists that reward staying power, and weakest on the one list that measures a single bad move.
Borscht vs Ramen: Ukraine's soup among 32
The ranking of the best soup puts borscht in a field of 32 with ramen, pho, French onion, clam chowder, gazpacho and tom yum.
Borscht has a status no other entry holds. On 1 July 2022 UNESCO inscribed the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking as heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.2 The listing covers the tradition around the soup: family recipes and regional versions. In Poltava one of those versions comes with halushky dumplings.
Ramen has the numbers on its side. It is sold in every Japanese city and in instant form almost everywhere else, and the ranking asks voters to set that reach against beetroot, sour cream and a grandmother's method.
Carol of the Bells vs All I Want for Christmas Is You
The 22 Best Christmas Songs of All Time mixes carols and pop: Silent Night and O Holy Night beside Mariah Carey, Wham!, Brenda Lee and the Pogues.
Carol of the Bells began as a New Year song. In the Ukrainian original a swallow flies into a house and promises the family a rich year. Alexander Koshetz's Ukrainian National Chorus sang it at Carnegie Hall on 5 October 1922, and Peter Wilhousky's English words were copyrighted in 1936.1
Leontovych never heard it in New York. He was shot dead in 1921, the year before the Carnegie Hall concert, and Wilhousky's English words turned his swallow into bells.
All I Want for Christmas Is You is the modern rival. Mariah Carey released it in 1994, and it returns to the charts every December.
Carol of the Bells is also recognisable without words. Home Alone used it in 1990, and a generation of filmgoers learned the four-note figure from John Williams's score.
Ruslana, Jamala and Kalush Orchestra: Ukraine's Eurovision winners
The ranking of the best Eurovision winning performances holds three Ukrainian entries among 21, next to ABBA's Waterloo, Céline Dion, Lordi and Loreen twice.
Each Ukrainian winner sounded different. Ruslana won in 2004 with Wild Dances, built on the music of the Hutsuls of the Carpathians. Jamala won in 2016 with 1944, a song about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Kalush Orchestra won in 2022 with Stefania, a rap written for the singer's mother.
Loreen's Euphoria is the performance the others are measured against. It won in 2012, and Loreen won again in 2023 with Tattoo.
Ukraine vs Sweden: the best country at Eurovision
The Eurovision country ranking compares nations instead of songs: Sweden, Ireland, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and this year's first-time winner, Bulgaria.
Ukraine's case is consistency. It debuted in 2003, and it is the only country that has qualified for the Grand Final every time it has taken part.3 Three of those finals ended in a win.
Sweden's case is volume: it shares the record for victories with Ireland.
Vyshyvanka vs Kimono: the best traditional costume
The traditional-costume ranking covers 32 national dresses, from Japan's kimono and Korea's hanbok to the Scottish kilt and the Mexican charro.
Ukraine's entry is the vyshyvanka, the embroidered linen shirt. Each region has its own patterns and colours, and a shirt's stitching can tell a Ukrainian where it was made. People wear it well beyond folk festivals, to weddings, graduations and to work on Vyshyvanka Day each May. The kimono leads the same double life.
Varenyky vs Pierogi: the best dumpling in the world
The 22 Best Dumplings in the World starts in Eastern Europe and goes as far as Shanghai's xiaolongbao, Georgian khinkali and Tibetan momo.
Varenyky are Ukraine's contribution: half-moons of boiled dough filled with potato, cheese, cabbage or sour cherries, served with sour cream and fried onion.
Pierogi are the closest relative. Poles and Ukrainians fill and fold them in nearly the same way, and both countries count the dish as their own.
Ukraine has a second entry, the halushky dumplings of Poltava, and the city has put up a monument to them: a bowl of giant halushky on a pedestal.4
Andriy Shevchenko vs Ronaldinho: the best Ballon d'Or winner of the 21st century
Thirteen names compete for best Ballon d'Or winner of the 21st century, from Luís Figo and Pavel Nedvěd to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Andriy Shevchenko won it in 2004 with AC Milan, and the award had been won by Ukrainians before. Oleh Blokhin in 1975 and Ihor Belanov in 1986 both took it as Dynamo Kyiv players.5
Ronaldinho followed Shevchenko as the 2005 winner. For a list that measures style, the Brazilian has the obvious claim. For one that measures goals in Serie A, the Ukrainian scored 127 of them for Milan in his first spell.
Shevchenko at Chelsea: the biggest Premier League transfer flops
The 14 Biggest Transfer Flops in Premier League History is the unflattering list, and the Ukrainian striker is on it for the same reason he was on the last one: he was too good to fail quietly.
Chelsea paid AC Milan £30.8 million for him in 2006, far above the Premier League's average fee that season.6 He scored 9 league goals in 48 appearances before going back to Milan on loan.7
Fernando Torres is the other Chelsea name on the list, and his move from Liverpool in 2011 cost more. Both strikers arrived as finished stars and scored far less in blue than they had before.
Lobanovskyi's Dynamo Kyiv vs Sacchi's AC Milan
The greatest-team-era ranking sets Valeriy Lobanovskyi's Dynamo Kyiv against Sacchi's Milan, Cruyff's and Guardiola's Barcelona, and the Real Madrid of the 1950s.
Lobanovskyi coached Kyiv like a laboratory, with fitness data and set patterns decades before either was common. In 1975 his team became the first Soviet side to win a major European trophy, the Cup Winners' Cup, and it won the same trophy again in 1986.5
Arrigo Sacchi's Milan, built around Gullit, van Basten and Rijkaard, is the natural comparison. Both were coached by men who treated the pitch as a system, and Sacchi's side converted that into two European Cups.
Oleksandr Usyk vs Muhammad Ali: the greatest heavyweight champion
Of the 15 champions in the greatest-heavyweight ranking, three are Ukrainian: Oleksandr Usyk and the brothers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko.
Usyk's claim rests on one night in Riyadh. In May 2024 he beat Tyson Fury to hold all four major heavyweight belts at once, the first undisputed champion since Lennox Lewis in 2000.8 He had already been undisputed champion at cruiserweight, and he beat Fury again that December.
Muhammad Ali is the standard every name on the list is compared with. His case is his opponents, Frazier, Foreman and Liston, and the three years he lost to a boxing ban at his peak.
Sergey Bubka vs Mondo Duplantis: the greatest track and field athlete
The 23 Greatest Track and Field Athletes of All Time includes Usain Bolt, Carl Lewis, Jesse Owens and Paavo Nurmi, and one Ukrainian pole vaulter.
Sergey Bubka set 35 world records, 17 outdoors and 18 indoors. On 13 June 1985 in Paris he became the first man over six metres, and he won six straight world titles in the event.9
Mondo Duplantis is the only athlete on the list who can take Bubka's place in his own event. The Swede broke Bubka's 26-year-old outdoor record in 2020 and has kept raising the mark since.
Bubka's counter-argument is duration. He held the world record, in one form or another, from 1984 to 2014.
His weak spot is the Olympics. Bubka won the pole vault only once, in Seoul in 1988; a boycott, injury and missed attempts cost him the other Games, so on Olympic gold alone he is far behind Bolt and Lewis.
Vladimir Horowitz vs Glenn Gould: the best pianist of the 20th century
Thirty-two players compete for best pianist of the 20th century, and three of the most famous were born in what is now Ukraine: Vladimir Horowitz in Kyiv, Sviatoslav Richter in Zhytomyr and Emil Gilels in Odesa.
Horowitz is the one American audiences knew best. He left the Soviet Union in 1925, settled in the United States and returned to Moscow only once, for a televised recital in 1986.
Glenn Gould is the contrast. The Canadian gave up concerts at 31 and worked only in the recording studio from then on, most famously on Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Odesa Opera House vs Palais Garnier: the most beautiful opera house
The 22 Most Beautiful Opera Houses in the World holds two Ukrainian theatres among La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, Teatro Colón and the Sydney Opera House.
The Odesa opera house was rebuilt in 1887 to a design by Fellner and Helmer, the Viennese firm behind dozens of theatres across Central Europe. It faces the old city centre, a few streets up from the port.
The Lviv Opera opened in 1900. Zygmunt Gorgolewski crowned it with bronze statues of Glory, Poetry and Music.
The Palais Garnier in Paris, opened in 1875, is the model of the type, with its gilded foyer and, since 1964, a ceiling by Marc Chagall.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. vs The Last of Us: post-apocalyptic games
The 20 Best Post-Apocalyptic Video Games of All Time holds Fallout in four versions, The Last of Us twice, Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding, and four games that began in Kyiv studios.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl came out in 2007 from GSC Game World in Kyiv. Its world is the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl plant, mapped from real places. The studio returned to it with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in 2024.
Metro 2033 has a Kyiv origin too. 4A Games was founded there in 2006 by developers who had left GSC.10
The Last of Us is the obvious rival: the genre's great story game, where S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is its great survival game.
Wladimir Klitschko vs Vasyl Lomachenko: the greatest Ukrainian boxer
The 11 Greatest Ukrainian Boxers of All Time is the one list here made entirely of Ukrainians, so the question becomes which of its fighters stands tallest.
Wladimir Klitschko had the long reign. When Tyson Fury beat him in 2015, he had defended his heavyweight titles 18 times in a row.11
Vasyl Lomachenko had the purest record. He went 396–1 as an amateur, avenged the one loss twice and won Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012.12
Oleksandr Usyk, the third name at the top, has an Olympic gold of his own from 2012 and the undisputed titles in two divisions.
A long game
Across these lists Ukraine does best where a record takes years to build: a pole vault mark held for three decades, a heavyweight reign, a Eurovision run with no missed finals, a soup handed down through families. Its weakest entry is two seasons in London. Every ranking on the site works by pairwise comparison, one pair at a time.
A ranking of your own is the quickest way to add a Ukrainian name or dish these lists have missed.
More rankings, more angles
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Sources
- Wikipedia — Shchedryk (song): first performed on 29 December 1916 in the Kyiv Merchants’ Assembly Hall; Koshetz’s Ukrainian National Chorus at Carnegie Hall on 5 October 1922; Wilhousky’s lyrics copyrighted in 1936: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-29)
- UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — Culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking, inscribed on 1 July 2022 (5.EXT.COM): ich.unesco.org (checked 2026-09-29)
- Ukraine.ua — Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest in 12 facts: debut in 2003, the only country to qualify for every Grand Final it entered, three wins: ukraine.ua (checked 2026-09-29)
- Authentic Ukraine — Poltava halushky and the monument to them in Poltava: authenticukraine.com.ua (checked 2026-09-29)
- FC Dynamo Kyiv — Valeriy Lobanovskyi: the 1975 and 1986 Cup Winners’ Cups, the Ballon d’Or for Oleg Blokhin (1975) and Igor Belanov (1986): fcdynamo.com (checked 2026-09-29)
- Sky Sports — Premier League transfers adjusted for inflation: Shevchenko’s £30.8m move to Chelsea in 2006/07 against an average fee of about £3.13m: skysports.com (checked 2026-09-29)
- Wikipedia — Andriy Shevchenko: career statistics, Chelsea 2006–2009, 48 league appearances and 9 goals: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-29)
- CNN — Usyk beats Fury to become undisputed heavyweight champion, 18 May 2024, the first since Lennox Lewis in April 2000: cnn.com (checked 2026-09-29)
- World Athletics — Hall of Fame profile of Sergey Bubka: 35 world records, first over 6.00 m in Paris on 13 June 1985, six world titles: worldathletics.org (checked 2026-09-29)
- Wikipedia — 4A Games: founded in Kyiv in 2006 by three developers who left GSC Game World: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-29)
- ESPN — Tyson Fury beats Wladimir Klitschko, 28 November 2015: 18 straight title defences before the defeat: espn.com (checked 2026-09-29)
- Wikipedia — Vasiliy Lomachenko: amateur record of 396 wins and 1 loss, Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-29)