It was not until the 17th century that Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rebelled, throwing off Polish rule and willingly reuniting with Russia.īut by the 19th century, the tsars had quite enough of the Ukrainian national spirit, which they saw as undermining their rule, and banned the Ukrainian language from many walks of public life. Russia and Ukraine, as well as Belarus, share a common ancestry in Kievan Rus’, a loose federation of medieval city-states with its capital in Kyiv.īut in the 13th century, the area which became Russia was conquered by the Mongol Golden Horde, while western portions later fell to the Polish-Lithuanian Empire.įrom there, three separate languages, and national identities, evolved. To find out how accurate these statements are, as well as the roots of the current crisis, a closer look at the two countries’ shared history is needed.
In it, he accused modern Ukraine of an “anti-Russian project” in which longstanding ties with Russia are cast aside, Nazi collaborators are glorified and the Russian language, spoken by around a third of Ukraine’s population, is shunned from public life. In 2021, Putin wrote an essay titled, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, explaining his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people divided artificially by borders and outsiders. In a televised speech, Putin reiterated his concerns about a possible NATO expansion into Ukraine, describing it as a “direct threat” to Russia’s national security, and made provocative interpretations of Ukrainian history.Īmong other things, the Russian president asserted that “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood,” and that the nation now known as Ukraine was carved out of Russia by Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. St Petersburg, Russia – On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his armed forces to deploy on what he called a peacekeeping mission to Donbas, eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed rebels have been fighting the central government in Kyiv for the past eight years.
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