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emiliya The notion that Ukraine is not a country, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of Russian leadership. Competing interpretations of history have turned into a key ingredient of the deepening dispute between Russia and the West and a subject that Putin in particular appears to feel unusually passionate about. In this article, Dr Björn Alexander Düben explores the question, is it historically accurate to claim that Ukraine has never truly been a nation or state in its own right??
For more than twenty years, Vladislav Surkov was a known quantity in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. Dubbed the ‘Grey Cardinal’ and the Kremlin’s main ideologist, Surkov is commonly regarded as the mastermind of Putin’s Ukraine policy which plunged Moscow into open conflict with the West. By late February 2020, however, he had apparently fallen from grace and was unexpectedly sacked from his position as personal advisor to the president. [...] True to form, within days of his dismissal he stirred up fresh controversy by publicly questioning the existence of Ukrainian statehood. In an interview published on 26 February, Surkov stated that “there is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind. An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme.” Surkov went on to claim that Ukraine is “a muddle instead of a state. […] But there is no nation. There is only a brochure, ‘The Self-Styled Ukraine’, but there is no Ukraine.”
“Ukraine is not even a state”
Surkov is not the first Russian official to make such a claim. The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.
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SOURCE: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine-fact-checking-the-kremlins-version-of-ukrainian-history/
If you want... I can give you more sources.
I also advice you to look into Alexander Dugin and his 4th political theory, who also advocates for neo-Eurasianism and pushes for Russian Imperialism. Putin is just one of those leaders that are pretty close to almost full out Fascistic, it's not even a hyperbole if you start figuring out how schools are now pushing militairism in the classrooms and just teaching a romantic myth about how great Russia is, devoided of all it's short commings. And how they have the right to reclaim their lost territories.
But you just keep pretending that everything is normal... in Russia. Where journalists and dissidents randomly fall out of windows, get poisoned by radioactive material, shot on the street or get imprisoned and just die in their cells.
