Moscow rulers spend huge amounts of money from russian taxpayers and overflow the European and global information space with false postulates aimed at justifying the concept of russian dominance in all post-Soviet territories.

Similarly, russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine was preceded by an aggressive information attack with attempts to convince russians and Ukrainians, as well as the world community, that Ukraine is a “russian historical territory” and, they say, russian troops have the right to take their own for russia.

Thus, the head of the kremlin in his opus “On the historical unity of russians and Ukrainians” in July 2021 reflected the entire concentrated narrative of the aggressor state and the aggressive essence of the ideology of russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine and the kremlin’s foreign policy.

The main purpose of the publication is to prove that Modern Ukraine is not a result of objective historical development, but a part of the russian national territory, and its russophobia is the result of Western politics and intrigues.

The article does not stand up to any criticism, and from the point of view of historiography is weak and frankly fake.

The basic idea expressed by the authors, involved by Putin in writing the article, is that a thousand years ago Kyiv was the capital of the state of russia, and Modern Ukraine cannot be considered a real country, because everyone there must be either russians, their descendants or fraternal peoples.

The truth about the “historical unity” of Ukrainians and russians is that the stories of the two peoples by civilizational affiliation were not only not common, but directly opposite.

Since the XVI century, Ukrainians have had a national identity.

The peoples of the so-called Ancient Rus spoke their own languages or dialects, from which the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages originated, which were significantly different from the so-called Church Slavonic language, which became the basis for the russian language, actually created artificially.

That is why a Belarusian can easily understand a Ukrainian or a Pole, but a russian will not understand either of them by 99%.

The same applies to the alleged “cultural unity” of both peoples. In fact, it was an assimilating “unity”, when russia imposed its own culture on Ukrainians for centuries, and oppressed the Ukrainian one.

In the russian sense, the concept of “fraternal peoples” means “subordinate”, “inferior”, “false” and “those whose relations of the russian federation are not covered by international law”.

More than 80% of modern Ukrainians do not believe in the myth of “fraternal peoples” and “historical and cultural community of Ukrainians with russians”.

It was initially shaken after the occupation of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas in 2014. And it was finally destroyed when, since February 2022, Ukrainians received from the “fraternal people” mass murder of civilians in Ukraine, bombing of civilian objects in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, mass sexual violence committed by the russian military, kidnapping municipal leaders and forced deportation of refugees to camps in the russian federation.

Putin’s “authors” also did not miss the opportunity to mention in the article about some “territorial gifts” to Ukraine from the russian federation.

But during Lenin’s time in the 20s of the last century, the territory of Ukraine was much larger than it is today.

Then it included Kuban, the city of Taganrog with its environs, parts of the current Rostov, Kursk and Voronezh regions, which were later separated from Ukraine.

Putin’s sadly infamous article about russians and Ukrainians is not just another example of russian great-power propaganda and ideological sabotage to promote the “russian world” doctrine. It’s an attempt to rewrite history in order to justify its aggressive foreign policy strategy, which the russian federation is now trying to implement in Ukraine.

It is not for nothing that on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, putin’s article was included as one of the mandatory topics for military and political training of russian servicemen.

Russia’s attempts to distort history, including through a propaganda article about the “historical unity of russians and Ukrainians,” are doomed to defeat, as they rely on outright falsification and manipulation.

Let’s fight the enemy and #infoterror together!