Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 2013–14, Putin claimed that the people leading the huge protests were Western-backed fashisti (fascists) trying to tear Ukraine from its historical roots. Far from an innovation of the current crisis, Putin’s argument that Ukraine has always been one and the same with Russia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his worldview. But they were of more than casual importance. To many Western ears, Putin’s historical claims sounded bizarre. “It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” Ukraine’s borders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia.” “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us,” Putin said. But most of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. In it, he expressed familiar grievances about the eastward expansion of NATO, alleged Ukrainian aggression, and the presence of Western missiles on Russia’s border. ![]() ![]() On the evening of February 21, 2022, three days before Russian forces began the largest land invasion on the European continent since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech.
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