How Ukraine's history differs from Putin's version
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to justify the invasion of Ukraine with a number of reasons, but we’re going to focus on one with a very deep stem. In essence, he argues that Ukraine has no right to exist, that it is historically Russian land and a fictional country created by Russian Bolsheviks. In a speech earlier this week, Putin claimed that Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood. And last summer, Putin published an essay titled “On The Historical Unity Of Russians and Ukrainians,” where he insisted that Ukraine and Russia’s shared history makes them one nation.
Historians say Ukraine’s actual history tells a different story. To learn more, we called Timothy Snyder. He is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. And he is with us now to tell us more. Professor Snyder, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
TIMOTHY SNYDER: Very glad to.
MARTIN: As we just heard, President Putin questions Ukraine’s very existence. How do you respond to these statements?
SNYDER: Dictators in foreign countries don’t get to tell you who you are. So even if it were true that Mr. Putin is - were a historian, which is not, you don’t get to tell another country who they are on the basis of reading a couple of books or writing an essay yourself. But in any event, the history that he tells doesn’t make any sense. His claim that Russia and Ukraine and others, for that matter, are one country because of something that happened a thousand years ago just doesn’t hold up logically. There weren’t nations in the modern sense a thousand years ago. And between the thousand years ago and now, an awful lot of things happened in the meantime.