Does Putin Have a Claim to Ukraine?
We have all heard Vladimir Putin’s repeated claims to Ukraine’s land. In his now-infamous essay, “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published in July 2021, Putin goes so far to deny Ukraine any claim to nationhood and makes his intentions to integrate Ukraine into Russia very clear.
It is now even more relevant to make this case for Ukrainian sovereignty, as pundits like Candace Owens, among others, have been swallowing Putin’s propaganda and proclaiming it to millions of keen listeners.
To be fair, maybe some of us have also wondered whether Putin’s claims are, at least partially, correct. We remember stories of the Kievan Rus and how empires collided on Ukrainian territory. When we hear the Ukrainian language in the news, we hear its phonetic similarity to Russian. They share the Cyrillic alphabet, Azbuka. Their economies are integrated. Many Russians have families in Ukraine. So, we may wonder to ourselves, to what extent are Ukraine and Russia historically linked?
Putting aside questions of language, in this article, I would like to focus on a brief historical retelling of Ukrainian’s recent history and why Putin is horribly wrong in his historical revisionism.
Ukraine and Russia indeed share a history. But their history is not as unique as Putin implies. In fact, Ukraine also shares…
