Author | Vladimir Putin |
---|---|
Original title | Об историческом единстве русских и украинцев |
Language |
|
Genre | Propaganda Pseudohistory |
Publisher | Office of the President of Russia |
Publication date | 12 July 2021 |
Publication place | Russia |
| ||
---|---|---|
| ||
On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians [a] is an essay by Russian president Vladimir Putin published in Russian on Kremlin.ru website 12 July 2021. [1]
The essay was published on shortly after the end of the first of two buildups of Russian forces preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In the essay, Putin describes his views on Ukraine and Ukrainians. [2]
According to RBK Daily, the essay is included in the list of mandatory works to be studied by the Russian military. [3] In 2021, the essay was also published as a book with no author indicated. [4]
In the essay, Putin argues that Russians and Ukrainians, along with Belarusians, are one people, belonging to what has historically been known as the triune Russian nation. [5] To support the claim, he describes in length his views on the history of Russia and Ukraine, [6] concluding that Russians and Ukrainians share a common heritage and destiny. [7]
Noting the large number of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Putin compares "the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia" to a use of weapons of mass destruction against Russians. [8]
Putin openly questions the legitimacy of Ukraine's contemporary borders. [9] According to Putin, the modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands, [9] and is an "anti-Russia project" created by external forces since the seventeenth century, and of administrative and political decisions made during the Soviet Union [5] (a BBC article traced the term "anti-Russia project" to some Russian conspiratorial writing of 2011–13). [10] He also discusses the Russo-Ukrainian War, maintaining that "Kiev simply does not need Donbas". [11]
Putin places blame for the current crisis on foreign plots and anti-Russian conspiracies. [9] According to Putin, the decisions of the Ukrainian government are driven by a Western plot against Russia as well as by "followers of Bandera". [12]
Putin ends the lengthy essay by asserting Russia's role in modern Ukrainian affairs. [9]
According to an April 2023 investigative report by the Russian website Vertska, one draft of the essay included a direct threat of military action against Ukraine, although it was removed from the final version. [13]
A few days later, the Kremlin website published an interview with Putin about the article. [14]
Several months later, Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, also published an article on Ukraine in the Russian daily Kommersant . In it, he agrees with Putin's essay, and declares that there will be no negotiations with Ukraine until the Ukrainian government is replaced. [15] The article, endorsed by the Kremlin, was criticized for its denigrating and antisemitic tone. [16] [17]
Vladislav Surkov, the personal adviser (2013–2020) of Putin, also published an article concerning Ukraine and other ex-USSR territories on the website Aktualnye Kommentarii. In the article, he questions the legitimacy of the western border of Russia (including the borders with Ukraine and the Baltic states), claiming that it was born out of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, arguing that Russia should abolish the "wicked peace" that keeps it confined by the borders. [18] [19]
In a speech on 21 February 2022, following the escalation in the 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis, Putin said that "modern Ukraine was wholly and fully created by Bolshevik, communist Russia". [20] Sarah Rainsford wrote in BBC News that Putin's speech was "rewriting Ukraine's history", and that his focus on the country was "obsessive". [21] Vitaly Chervonenko from the BBC noted how carefully Putin kept silent about the independent Ukrainian state formations of 1917–1920 and Kyiv's war with Lenin's Bolshevik government, whose purpose was to include Ukraine in Bolshevik Russia. [22]
Of course, Lenin did not create Ukraine. In 1918, he started a war against an independent Ukrainian state and then replaced it with a puppet state called the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. What Lenin really created was the Russian Federation, a state that received its constitution in 1918 and became part of the USSR four years later. In 1991, Yeltsin removed this entity created by Lenin from the USSR, thereby contributing to the collapse of the Union. Lenin was the creator of modern Russia, not Ukraine, and should be considered as such.
Plokhiy recalled that Lenin invaded Ukraine and then took away even formal independence from Ukraine by integrating it into the Soviet Union in 1922. [23]
The article "The Advance of Russia and of a New World" by Petr Akopov was briefly published in several Russian state news sites on 26 February 2022, two days after Russian forces openly invaded Ukrainian-controlled territory, but was soon deleted. Its original publication on RIA Novosti at precisely 8:00 a.m. suggests it may have been automatically published by mistake. [24] The article celebrates the "gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together—in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians", and Vladimir Putin's historic responsibility for "resolution of the Ukrainian question". [25] [26] [24]
The same state-owned RIA Novosti published another article in April 2022, this time without any backtracking. Titled "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine", the article openly accused the entire Ukrainian nation of being Nazis who must be wiped out and in some cases re-educated. [27] [28] [29]
On 29 March 2022, Rossiyskaya Gazeta , the official government gazette of the Russian government, published an article that claims that European elites support the Ukrainian Nazis because of their bitterness over the loss in the Second World War. [30] The article quotes Ukrainian priest Vasiliy Zenkovskiy, "Ukraine must become a part of Russia, even if Ukrainians are against it". [31]
The article was also almost simultaneously published in German in journal Osteuropa under the title Über die historische Einheit der Russen und der Ukrainer. [32] [ importance? ] (Vladimir Putin is fully fluent in written and spoken German).[ importance? ]
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, criticized the essay on 13 July, comparing Putin's view on the brotherhood between the nations with the story of Cain and Abel. [33] Former president Petro Poroshenko also sharply criticized the essay, describing it as a counterpart of Hitler's Sudetenland speech. [34] Former president of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves similarly likened it to Hitler's 1938 rhetoric justifying the partition of Czechoslovakia. [35] Ukraine's envoy to United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya commented, "fables about the 'one people' ... have been refuted in Donbas battlefields". [36]
According to the Institute of History of Ukraine, the essay represents the historical views of the Russian Empire. [37] The Ukrainian World Congress compares Putin's view of Ukraine "as a non-nation" to that of Joseph Stalin under whose watch at least five million Ukrainians perished during the Holodomor. [6]
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the essay a "historical, political, and security predicate for invading [Ukraine]". [38] The Stockholm Free World Forum senior fellow Anders Åslund branded the essay as "one step short of a declaration of war." [9] According to Foreign Policy , the essay is a "key guide to the historical stories that shape Putin's and many Russian's attitudes". [39] Historian Timothy Snyder has described Putin's ideas as imperialism. [40] British journalist Edward Lucas described it as historical revisionism. [41] Other observers have noted that the Russian leadership has a distorted view of modern Ukraine and its history.[ clarification needed ] [5] [9]
In Romania, a part of the essay caused outrage. The fragment in question describes how, in 1918, the Kingdom of Romania had "occupied" (and not united with) the geographical region of Bessarabia, part of which is now in Ukraine. Romanian media outlets such as Adevărul and Digi24 commented on Putin's statements and criticized them. Remarks were also made regarding Northern Bukovina, another former Romanian territory now part of Ukraine. [42] [43] Alexandru Muraru, then a deputy of Romania, also replied to Putin's essay, declaring that Bessarabia was not occupied but "reattached" and "reincorporated" following "democratic processes and historical realities". Muraru also commented on Northern Bukovina. [44]
A report by 35 legal and genocide experts cited Putin's essay as part of "laying the groundwork for incitement to genocide: denying the existence of the Ukrainian group". [45]
In his 2022 Yale lecture, Timothy Snyder argues that Putin's essay is a piece of "bad history". [46]
Russian nationalism is a form of nationalism that promotes Russian cultural identity and unity. Russian nationalism first rose to prominence as a Pan-Slavic enterprise during the 19th century Russian Empire, and was repressed during the early Bolshevik rule. Russian nationalism was briefly revived through the policies of Joseph Stalin during and after the Second World War, which shared many resemblances with the worldview of early Eurasianist ideologues.
There are currently no diplomatic or bilateral relations between Russia and Ukraine. The two states have been at war since Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula in February 2014, and Russian-controlled armed groups seized Donbas government buildings in May 2014. Following the Ukrainian Euromaidan in 2014, Ukraine's Crimean peninsula was occupied by unmarked Russian forces, and later illegally annexed by Russia, while pro-Russia separatists simultaneously engaged the Ukrainian military in an armed conflict for control over eastern Ukraine; these events marked the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In a major escalation of the conflict on 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large scale military invasion across a broad front, causing Ukraine to sever all formal diplomatic ties with Russia.
The foreign policy of Vladimir Putin concerns the policies of the Russian Federation's president Vladimir Putin with respect to other nations. He has held the office of the President previously from 2000 to 2008, and reassumed power again in 2012 and has been President since.
Great Russian chauvinism is a term defined by the early Soviet government officials, most notably Vladimir Lenin, to describe an ideology of the "dominant exploiting classes of the nation, holding a dominant (sovereign) position in the state, declaring their nation as the "superior nation". Lenin promoted an idea for the Bolshevik party to defend the right of oppressed nations within the former Russian Empire to self-determination and equality as well as the language-rights movement of the newly formed republics.
An urban district or urban raion is the second-level administrative division in certain cities in Ukraine. There are 118 districts in 20 cities across Ukraine. The cities that contain districts are mostly administrative centers in addition to the two cities with special status. The number of city districts per region varies between a minimum of two and a high of 21 in Donetsk Oblast. The maximum districts for a single city in the country is Kyiv, which has 10 districts. Cities which have abolished their urban districts are marked in italics below.
On 18 March 2014, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a speech to both chambers of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation in connection with the request for admission by the Crimean parliament of the republic in the Russian Federation. He spoke in the St. George Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace in the Moscow Kremlin.
The Normandy Format, also known as the Normandy contact group, is a grouping of states who met in an effort to resolve the war in Donbas and the wider Russo-Ukrainian War. The four countries who make up the group—Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and France—first met informally in 2014 during the 70th anniversary of D-Day celebrations in Normandy, France.
InformNapalm is a volunteer initiative to inform Ukrainian citizens and the foreign public about the Russo-Ukrainian War and the activities of the Russian special services as well as the militants of DPR, LPR, and Novorossiya. The team members are engaged in a wide range of other volunteer activities. Authors publish materials in 30 languages, including Japanese and Chinese.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia was briefly blocked in Russia in August 2015. Some articles of Wikipedia were included into various censorship lists disseminated by the government. Further threats to block were made following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Cyber Alliance is a community of Ukrainian cyber activists from various cities across Ukraine and around the world. The alliance was formed in the spring of 2016 through the merger of two cyber activist groups, FalconsFlame and Trinity, later joined by the group RUH8 and individual activists from the CyberHunta group. These hacktivists united to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Proekt is an independent Russian media outlet specialising in investigative journalism. In 2021, Proekt was relaunched as Agentstvo, but restored its original name in 2022, while Agentstvo became a news website.
The International Criminal Court investigation in Ukraine or the Situation in Ukraine is an ongoing investigation by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) into "any past and present allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide committed on any part of the territory of Ukraine by any person" during the period starting "from 21 November 2013 onwards", on an "open-ended basis", covering the Revolution of Dignity, the Russo-Ukrainian War including the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, the war in Donbas and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ICC prosecutor commenced these investigations on 2 March 2022, after receiving referrals for the situation in Ukraine from 39 ICC State Parties.
"On conducting a special military operation" was a televised broadcast by Russian president Vladimir Putin on 24 February 2022, announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"Address concerning the events in Ukraine" was a televised address by Russian President Vladimir Putin on 21 February 2022, announcing that the Russian government would recognise the Ukrainian separatist regions of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic as independent. During the speech, Putin also made a number of claims regarding Ukrainian history and Ukrainian domestic politics. Genocide experts, historians and other experts have shown these claims to be false and possibly justifying a genocide. The speech, which marked a significant escalation in the culminating Russo-Ukrainian crisis, was followed three days later by another speech declaring "a special military operation" in Ukraine—announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is extensively covered on Wikipedia across many languages. This coverage includes articles on and related to the invasion itself, and updates of previously existing articles to take the invasion into account. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects' coverage of the conflict – and how the volunteer editing community achieved that coverage – has received significant media and government attention.
Look for Your Own is an Internet project created on the initiative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine to identify captured or killed soldiers of the Russian army during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It was launched with the website domain name 200rf.com and currently operates as a Telegram channel.
"Where have you been for eight years?", "Where have you been for the last eight years?", or "Why have you been silent during the past eight years?" is a rhetorical question widely used by Russian propaganda in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in support of Russia, mainly pointing out what Ukraine has been doing to the Donbas during the war in Donbas (2014–2022), and that the Russo-Ukrainian War has been ongoing since the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. It has been described as Russian pro-war propaganda.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in late February 2022, more than 300,000 Russian citizens and residents are estimated to have left Russia by mid-March 2022, at least 500,000 by the end of August 2022, and an additional 400,000 by early October, for a total of approximately 900,000. This number includes economic migrants, conscientious objectors, and some political refugees.
The appeal to the State Duma of Russia to charge Vladimir Putin with treason is an initiative of council deputies of the Smolnynske municipal entity in Saint Petersburg and the Lomonosov municipal district of Moscow, on September 8, 2022, which called for the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, to be charged with treason. The next day, seven deputies were called to the police.
This timeline of the prelude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine covers a period of heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine from early 2021 until the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
По данным «Вёрстки», статья менялась много раз, и в одном из вариантов была прямая угроза о возможности начать военную операцию. Но в окончательный вариант угроза не попала.[According to Vertska, the article was changed many times, and in one of the versions there was a direct threat about the possibility of launching a military operation. But the threat was not included in the final version.]