A few days before the start of the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin released an institutional message with several references to the common history of Ukraine and Russia. “Ukraine has never had a real tradition as a state” or “modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia,” he assured in his speech. The Russian leader thus tried to justify the invasion, which began on February 24 and lasts almost two months. But this isn’t the Kremlin’s first mention of this shared past. Putin himself published an article last summer on the official website of the Russian government with the headline: In it he elaborates on this subject. But are these ideas historical? What is the common origin that Putin suggests? What time do we have to go back to remember this idea of unity?
In the video accompanying this story, José Maria Faraldo, a historian specializing in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, explains the common past between the two nations. Furthermore, Faraldo describes in detail how Putin spent the past few years, from participating in Ukraine’s independence parades to justifying the war, manipulating this narrative. The speech that led him to call it 1991 — the time when the Soviet Union broke up and Ukraine cut ties with Russia — was a “historic mistake.”
This video provides a visual tour of several maps that explain how Eastern Europe’s borders have fluctuated since the 9th century and what Ukraine-Russia relations were like during that period.
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Source: La Neta Neta
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