alternate names for some slavic countries?

I believe modern-day Ukraine used to be called Ruthenia.
Ruthenia was a rather broad term. Ruth and Russ got mixed around a lot in English. Northern Ukraine and Belarus would be decent enough an area for Ruthenia, going back tot heir history under the Poles. Apparently Ukraine's name comes from the time when Russians were settling it. Meant borderlands or something? Apparently they do not like it down there if you call it The Ukraine due to that reason.
 
Sarmatia. It was a poetic name for Poland-Lithuania (associated with the whole "Sarmatianism" thing the szlachta liked so much), and perhaps would make for a nice name for a restored Poland-Lithuania, which would basically be Intermarium--sounds nicer than Intermarium too. Although it would probably take a reinterpretation of Sarmatianism to call a reunited Poland-Lithuania in the 20th century (a mighty task already) by the name Sarmatia.
 
I believe modern-day Ukraine used to be called Ruthenia.

it is simply the Latin word for Rus' and was used for the Eastern Slav (Ukrainian and Belarusian) inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
 
"Some authors attempted to separate the image of Belarus from that of Russia in the eyes and ears of a foreign audience by linguistic means. Vakar had long stated that ‘as a rallying point of the new nationalism, the term “Belorussian” presented certain inconveniences. Semantically, it was too close to Russia’.134 When in English the name of the country used to be transliterated as ‘Belorussia’ the aforementioned inconveniences were all too obvious. While ‘Belarus’ sounds ‘better’ in this regard, it is the adjective ‘Belarusian’ that remains treacherous because in English it sounds nearly identical to ‘Belorussian’. In his 1993 book Zaprudnik attempted to purge the word of the ‘i’; the resulting term ‘Belarusan’ can be traced to Rus’, not by any means
to Russia. However, Zaprudnik’s lead does not seem to have generated much following.13" http://gioffe.asp.radford.edu/images/pubpdfs/belarusidentity.pdf

Here, by the way, is the quoted paragraph from Nicholas P. Vakar, *Belorussia: The Making of a Nation* (1956) in full (p. 4):

"As a rallying point of the new nationalism, the term Belorussian presented certain inconveniences. Semantically, it was too close to Russia. The early attempts to replace it by the term Kryvičan (from the name of an ancient Slavic tribe on the territory of present Belorussia) failed, but were renewed after the Revolution (Lastoŭski and others), and more recently by political émigrés after World War II (J. Stankevič and others). The use of the term Kryvičan, however, is prohibited in the Belorussian SSR and there is no evidence, at this writing, that it has been widely recognized by the Belorussians abroad."
 
Top