20 Hryven Severyn Nalyvayko

Severyn Nalyvayko led one of the most brutal Cossack uprisings against Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rule in the 1590s, raiding across Volhynia, Belarus, and Moldavia before his campaign collapsed. Captured in 1597, he was executed in Warsaw — by some accounts tortured to death publicly, which made him a martyr figure in Ukrainian historical memory long before independence gave that memory a coin.

This was among the earliest issues in the National Bank's commemorative silver program, launched in 1995 to establish a numismatic identity for a state barely four years old.