Putin’s Russian history is a fantasy

As the first cracks appear in the Kremlin leadership, it it is becoming clear that this is Putin’s war against Ukraine. Nato’s expansion is a secondary factor, the pretext Putin used to get doubters like foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on his side. Putin’s aim is to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign nation and restore it as a vassal of ‘historic Russia’ – his twisted vision of the ‘family of peoples’ living in the lands of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus from the time of Kievan Rus in the first millennium. Putin’s war is a war over history. But his history is fantasy.

Like many Russians of his generation, schooled in Soviet views of history, Putin never really recognised the independence of Ukraine. In 2008, he told George Bush, the U.S. president, that Ukraine was ‘not a real country’ but a historic part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow’s heartlands from the West.