Previous Subchapter → 6.4 Is Putin a Communist
And this is another very common trick Putin and his supporters love to play in the propaganda war over Ukraine;
Distorting history, claiming that Ukraine only is what it is today thanks to ever so benevolent Russian leaders, and that the Russian leaders of today have a right to revoke these Russian “gifts” as they please.
Maps like this have become a common prop of Pro-Russia commentators, think tanks, and even just bystanders who probably don’t know any better, they’re often used to argue for Ukraine’s dismemberment. But on closer examination you can see that they’re, to put it generously, economical with the truth, to put it less generously they’re complete bullshit.
[Editor’s Note: The think tank example has been removed from the citations as it is from Katehon, a sanctioned institution, due to EU regulations barring the reproduction of sanctioned content.]
Once again we can turn to the first chapter of this series to examine the claims presented by these maps, right off the bat we can see an obvious lie, the Russian Tsars never gifted even an inch of land to Ukraine, because under the Tsarist era they didn’t even recognise Ukraine’s existence, in this era Ukraine was known by other names like “Malorossiya” - Little Russia, or “Novorossiya” - New Russia, the same name Pro-Russian separatists use today, to Russia’s rulers Ukraine was just another part of Russia, so rather than “gifting” land to Ukraine, they were “gifting” land to themselves, doesn’t sound so generous when you put it that way, does it?
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And as for the rest? Everything on this map except Crimea was part of the territory of the Ukrainian and West Ukrainian People’s Republics, declared by Ukrainians themselves in the aftermath of World War 1, the Soviet Union simply recognised the same claims when they formed their own rival Ukrainian government, and put them into practice in the aftermath of World War 2, and why were these territories included in Ukraine? It’s pretty simple, because Ukrainians lived there.
As for Crimea, the transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine was encouraged by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, a Russian born near the Ukrainian border, but the decision was ultimately signed off by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, whose Chairman was Kliment Voroshilov, guess where he was from? Bakhmut, Ukraine.
So put simply, Ukrainians have nothing to thank Russia for when it comes to territory, they had to fight for recognition and they had to fight for longer than other nations that emerged from the corpse of the Russian Empire, the only people who have a right to decide what land is Ukrainian and what land is Russian are the people who live on that land, not politicians in Moscow or anywhere else.
And if the Russian think tanks want to look to the 1600s to suggest what nations should look like today, I would say be careful what you wish for, because Russia was a lot smaller back then too.
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