KYIV, Ukraine — In his speech to the Russian nation on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin buoyed his case for codifying the cleavage of two insurgent territories from Ukraine by arguing that the very thought of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction.
With a conviction of an authoritarian unburdened by historic nuance, Mr. Putin declared Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary chief, Vladimir Lenin, who he stated had mistakenly endowed Ukraine with a sense of statehood by permitting it autonomy inside the newly created Soviet state.
“Modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia, more specifically the Bolshevik, communist Russia,” Mr. Putin stated. “This process began practically immediately after the 1917 revolution, and moreover Lenin and his associates did it in the sloppiest way in relation to Russia — by dividing, tearing from her pieces of her own historical territory.”
As a misreading of historical past, it was excessive even by the requirements of Mr. Putin, a former Okay.G.B. officer who has declared the Soviet Union’s collapse the best geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.
The historic actuality of Ukraine is sophisticated, a thousand-year historical past of adjusting religions, borders and peoples. The capital, Kyiv, was established a whole lot of years earlier than Moscow, although each Russians and Ukrainians declare Kyiv as a birthplace of their trendy cultures, faith and language.
The historical past and tradition of Russia and Ukraine are certainly intertwined — they share the identical Orthodox Christian faith, and their languages, customs and nationwide cuisines are associated.
But the glad brotherhood of countries that Mr. Putin likes to color, with Ukraine fitted snuggly into the material of a larger Russia, is doubtful. Parts of modern-day Ukraine did certainly reside for hundreds of years inside the Russian empire. But different components fell below the jurisdiction of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or Poland or Lithuania.
“Putin’s argument today that Ukraine is historically subsumed by Russia is just not right,” stated Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political threat consulting group. While the themes of Mr. Putin’s speech weren’t new for the Russian chief, Mr. Kupchan stated, “the breadth and vehemence with which he went after all things Ukrainian was remarkable.”
The newly created Soviet authorities below Lenin that drew a lot of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would ultimately crush the nascent impartial Ukrainian state. During the Soviet period, the Ukrainian language was banished from faculties and its tradition was permitted to exist solely as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.
Mr. Putin additionally argued on Monday that the parable of Ukraine was strengthened by the crumbling Soviet authorities of Mikhail Gorbachev, which allowed Ukraine to slide freed from Moscow’s grasp. It was a weakened Moscow that “gave” Ukraine the best to grow to be impartial of the Soviet Union “without any terms and conditions.”
“This is just madness,” he stated.
It was not Moscow that granted Ukraine’s independence in 1991, however the Ukrainian folks, who voted resoundingly to depart the Soviet Union in a democratic referendum.
Now, with an estimated 190,000 Russian troops now surrounding Ukraine like a sickle, Mr. Putin’s declaration that Ukraine’s very existence as a sovereign state was the results of historic error threatened to ship a shudder by way of all of the lands as soon as below Moscow’s dominion. It additionally elicited expressions of contempt from Ukrainians.
“For the past few decades, the West has been looking for fascism anywhere, but not where it was most,” stated Maria Tomak, an activist concerned in supporting folks from Crimea, a Ukrainian territory Mr. Putin annexed in 2014. “Now it is so obvious that it burns the eyes. Maybe this will finally make the West start to sober up about Russia.”
It shouldn’t be clear whether or not Mr. Putin believes his model of Ukrainian historical past or has merely concocted a cynical mythology to justify no matter motion he plans subsequent. But his competition that Ukraine exists solely inside the context of Russian historical past and tradition is one he has deployed not less than way back to 2008, when he tried to persuade George W. Bush, after the previous president had expressed help for Ukraine’s NATO membership, of the nation’s non-existence.
Last summer season, Mr. Putin revealed a 5,300-word essay that expounded on most of the themes he highlighted in Monday’s speech, together with the concept that nefarious Western nations had by some means corrupted Ukraine, main it away from its rightful place inside a larger Russian sphere by way of what he referred to as a “forced change of identity.”
Few observers, although, imagine that historic accuracy is of a lot significance to Mr. Putin as he units forth justifications for no matter he has deliberate for Ukraine.
“We can be clear that Putin was not trying to engage in a historical debate about the intertwined histories of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples,’’ said Joshua A. Tucker, a political science professor at New York University and an expert on Russia. Instead, Professor Tucker said, the Russian leader was laying the groundwork for the argument “that Ukraine is not currently entitled to the sorts of rights that we associate with sovereign nations.” .
“It was a signal that Putin intends to argue that a military intervention in Ukraine would not be violating another country’s sovereignty,” he added.
Moscow had vowed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty as a situation of Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear weapons after the Soviet collapse. But Mr. Putin, analysts stated, has made clear that pledge is of little significance to him. In 2014, after protesters drove a Kremlin-backed authorities from energy in Kyiv, he ordered his navy to grab the Crimean Peninsula after which instigated a separatist battle that resulted Ukraine’s de facto lack of two insurgent territories within the east.
On Monday, Mr. Putin moved to formalize that separation by recognizing these territories, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, as impartial. Soon afterward, he ordered troops into the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine.
But Mr. Putin’s efforts to wrest Ukraine again into Russia’s orbit have, in some ways, had the other impact. In a nation that was as soon as ambivalent about NATO at finest, or overtly hostile at worst, polls present that a stable majority now favor membership within the American-led navy alliance.
In Kyiv, the place Ukrainians had been nervously awaiting Mr. Putin’s determination, the response to his speech was one in every of disgust and foreboding.
Kristina Berdynskykh, a outstanding political journalist, gathered with colleagues at a bar referred to as Amigos and sat round a cellphone watching Mr. Putin’s speech, by turns crying and cursing.
“It is hatred for all of Ukraine and revenge for the country’s movement toward the E.U. and NATO and democracy — albeit chaotic, with huge problems, slow reforms and corruption — but where people elect and change power in elections or revolutions,” Ms. Berdynskykh stated. “The worst dream for an old lunatic is both scenarios: fair elections and revolutions.”
Michael Schwirtz reported from Odessa, Ukraine, Maria Varenikova from Kyiv and Rick Gladstone from New York.
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