In July last year, President Vladimir Putin penned a major essay on Russia, Ukraine, and things Slavic in general. “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” offers an intimate look into the mind of the master of the Kremlin.
According to Putin, there is really no Ukraine. There is just Russia. Ukrainians are really Russians, even if they don’t know that yet. In fact, everything is Russia.
Where did he get that nonsense from? Sadly, Putin is a product of the Russian state school of historiography. The school usually does not teach much of the following basic information.
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are eastern Slavic people occupying a rimland between Baltic and Black seas. Before Christianity, they indeed were one folk with their own arrangements, including local self-government, which would eventually blossom, particularly in Novgorod the Great.
By the 9th century the eastern Slavs came to be dominated by the Swedish Vikings, or “Rus” — rowers, later Latinized as Ruthenians. The country they occupied became also known as “Rus” or Ruthenia. That was the term applied to all inhabitants, not just the Vikings.
Before they settled, the Vikings plied the eastern Slavic rivers to trade and to slave for a few hundred years. They kidnapped Slavic people and sold them to Muslims and pagans on the coasts of the Black and Caspian seas.
The “Rus” either conquered Kiyv in mid-9th century or were invited there to settle local disputes. They became the ruling class. Eventually, their rulers began sending junior princes out to set up minor principalities elsewhere in Ruthenia.
These, in turn, dispatched their cadet princely offspring for the same purpose further afield. One of the juniors, Prince Yuri Dolgoruki, founded Moscow in the 11th century. That’s Putin’s claim to fame.
Meanwhile, like the Normans in England, the Vikings introduced a separate law to apply to themselves; the people continued to adhere to Slavic legal customs. Hence, a legal separation between the ruled and rulers occurred which persists until today, albeit now informally.
Next, Kyiv accepted Byzantine Christianity with its caesaro-papism. That means that unlike in the West there was no division between the Church and State in Ruthenia: the Emperor was simultaneously pope.
Nonetheless, the Ruthenian rulers kept in close touch with Western Christendom. Their houses intermarried with royal households elsewhere, most frequently Poland and Hungary, but also nomadic chiefdoms of the steppes.
Then the Mongol/Tatar invasion in the middle of the 13th century obliterated Kyiv and most other Ruthenian principalities, in what is now contemporary Ukraine particularly, while inflicting lesser damage on the remaining statelets.
This was a major watershed. The Mongol horror paved the way for the evolution of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nations out of the original eastern Slavic Ruthenians. Separate institutions, systems, and languages developed.
Moscow survived the Mongols relatively unscathed. It then promptly offered its services as overseers, tax collectors, and slave drivers for the conquering Mongols. Only those Ruthenian principalities, located in the northeast, which sought the shelter of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania escaped the clutches of the Tatars and their Muscovite henchmen.
The khans appreciatively awarded the Muscovite rulers the title of “grand dukes” and backed them whenever needed. The grand dukes emulated the Mongol style of rule: Oriental Despotism. Only the despot mattered. Everyone was his slave and everything in his patrimonial state belonged to him.
Muscovy managed to use the khans to destroy many of its Ruthenian competitors and peers to emerge as the strongest regional state as the Mongol/Tatar power waned by the end of the 14th century.
In the middle of the 15th century, Moscow further proclaimed itself the successor to the Byzantine Empire which, meanwhile, had succumbed to the Ottoman Turks and their Islam.
Now, a grand duke of Moscow dubbed himself “tsar,” which, unbeknownst to most Europeans, derived from “ceasar.” Thus, the lords of the Kremlin (which is a Mongol word for the main fortress and court of the ruler) styled themselves as emperors.
They duly embarked on an empire building project. Ruthenian principalities enslaved under the khans became springboards to further conquest. The Muscovite state expanded 55 miles per day for 500 years.
It resulted in the Russian Empire, the largest state on earth, superseded by its successor, the Soviet Union, and, now, the Russian Federation, which is reduced to a “mere” nine time zones.
Putin needs more. Therefore Putin needs Ukraine. And then some.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is Professor of History at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of statecraft in Washington D.C.; expert on East-Central Europe's Three Seas region; author, among others, of "Intermarium: The Land Between The Baltic and Black Seas." Read Marek Jan Chodakiewicz's Reports — More Here.