Treaty of Pereyaslav: How Vladimir Putin justifies his campaign against Ukraine
Created: 2022-08-04 12:31 p.m
By: Stefan Krieger
Vladimir Putin firmly believes that Ukrainians and Russians have always been one people.
MOSCOW – After Ukraine voted for independence in 1991, Gennady Burbulis, then Deputy Prime Minister and a close adviser to Boris Yeltsin, remarked that “it is inconceivable to our brains, to our minds, that [Ukraine's independence] should be an irrevocable fact becomes".
But the Russian government at the time resisted calls by senior military officials and politicians like former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov to "retake" Crimea or "reshape" Ukrainian territory.
But it was not only the military and politicians who found it difficult to accept Ukraine as a sovereign state.
Even the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the talk of a separate Ukrainian people having existed since the ninth century a "recently invented lie".
He condemned the "cruel" division of Ukraine and Russia and proposed the creation of a "Russian Union" that would include Russia (excluding the Caucasus), Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan.
Vladimir Putin has always been against the division of Ukraine and Russia.
© Dmitri Lovetsky
Ukraine war: Putin sees himself as the successor to the Romanovs
Vladimir Putin is now also referring to this, thereby justifying the Ukraine war.
In his 2021 essay on Ukraine, the Russian leader quoted Bohdan Khmelnytsky's 1654 letter to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. orthodox world under the strong and high hand of the tsar'.
This means that in their appeals to both the Polish king and the Russian tsar, the Cossacks identified and defined themselves as the Russian Orthodox people.”
In contemporary Russian history, the early Romanovs are often portrayed as heroes who brought Russia back from the abyss, restored state power, and reclaimed Russian territories.
In this context, the Pereyaslav treaty plays with the idea of a “lawful reunification” or return of Ukraine and Russia.
War in Ukraine: Ukrainians and Russians "always one people"
School books, church officials, television documentaries, and even recent telegram mails from Russian government officials use similar language to promote the idea that Ukrainians and Russians have always been one people, historically and spiritually part of one nation.
Vladimir Putin refers to this again and again when he speaks not of a war but of a "special operation".
also read
Warning of "patchwork" in Corona rules from autumn
Lavrov announces plans to overthrow Ukraine – expert sees signs of Russian “insecurity”
The Ukraine War in Pictures - Destruction, Resistance and Hope
View photo gallery
Ukraine war: state television speaks of "civil war"
Remarkably, even that no longer seems to be official language.
The editor-in-chief of the Russian state television
RT
, Margarita Simonian, only spread a new theory on the Ukraine war in June, immediately after meeting Putin on a talk show on Russian television.
"It is obvious to everyone that there is no war between Russia and Ukraine.
This isn't even a special operation against the Ukrainian army.
This is a civil war in Ukraine,” the
RT
editor-in-chief allegedly claimed, according to the US news portal
Dailybeast
.
“Part of the Ukrainians who are anti-Russian and anti-Russian – just as the fascists were anti-Semitic – are destroying another part of their own people.
Russia only supports one side of these warring factions,” Simonyan said.
Which certainly did not argue against Vladimir Putin's doctrine.
(Stefan Krieger)