Today's Ukraine is "completely and thoroughly a creature of the Soviet era," reads the essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," published in Russian on Russian President Vladimir Putin's website last June and Ukrainian language was published.

Putin, the putative author, accuses the Bolsheviks of "effectively robbing" Russia through their "lavish territorial 'gifts'."

Recent troop deployments on the border with Ukraine have lent alarming explosiveness to the question thus raised of how one could envisage a restoration of the alleged historical unity.

The editors of the magazine “Osteuropa” (Issue 7/2021, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag) have now not only translated Putin’s treatise in full into German, but have also had the Russia and Ukraine experts Andreas Kappeler and Jan C. Behrends comment on it.

The Viennese Emeritus Kappeler has published both a "Small History of the Ukraine" and a "Russian History" with CH Beck, as well as the book "Unequal Brothers - Russians and Ukrainians from the Middle Ages to the Present";

Behrends heads the research network "Legacies of Communism" at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

In the comments of the two historians, the extent to which the pamphlet, which is obviously aimed primarily at Ukrainians, ensnares them, goes down a bit.

“We know,” it says, “how hard-working and talented the people of Ukraine are.

It is able to achieve success and excellent results persistently and perseveringly.

These qualities, paired with openness, natural optimism and hospitality have not disappeared.” However, this benevolence seems to apply more to those who “not only have a good relationship with Russia, but treat it with great love”.

In a populist manner, the innocent people in the post-1991 economic downfall of Ukraine are portrayed as victims of a corrupt elite that accuses Putin of

There was a Ukrainian Soviet Republic

For Kappeler, the assertion that the Trinity was supposedly broken up is a “half-truth”.

In fact, unlike the tsars, the Soviet government not only recognized the existence of a Ukrainian nation and assigned it its own Soviet republic.

She also promoted the Ukrainian language and culture in the 1920s.

According to Kappeler, Putin's falsification of history begins even earlier.

He omits that the “Ukrainian nation-building began in the early modern period, continued in the national movement and intensified in the revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century, which resulted in the proclamation of the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic at the end of 1917 and the West Ukrainian People’s Republic year later culminated".

However, Putin does not ignore the turbulent events at the end of the First World War and immediately afterwards.

On the contrary, he describes how the Ukrainian National Council concluded a separate agreement with the Central Powers and then enjoyed the protection of German troops.

But he does so only to remind that the Germans ousted the National Council in April 1918 in favor of their own puppet government - which teaches the Kremlin chief a lesson: "It would suit those who left Ukraine entirely to external administration today kind to remember that a similar decision back then, in 1918, was fatal to the ruling regime in Kiev.”

The fact that from Putin's point of view, who at this point bluntly conjures up the old image of Germany as an enemy, there has long been a threat of an "external" takeover of Ukraine, is in line with his neo-Soviet and imperialist view of the neighboring country as an "anti-Russia" controlled by the West. .

Here, Kappeler sees a “bipolar worldview of a Soviet-socialized secret service agent” at work, which does not fit the idea that it is the democratically elected Ukrainian leadership that is striving for rapprochement with the EU and NATO – and that this initiative is not from the Western powers going out

Kappeler fears

Even more clearly than Kappeler, Behrends emphasizes that the Russian President believes that the cultural peculiarities that Putin concedes to Ukraine could only develop productively in a symbiosis with Russia.

Both scholars cite the passage where Putin not only warns against the "creation of an ethnically clean Ukrainian state," but compares its consequences to the "use of weapons of mass destruction against us."

One should follow the two historians' advice to take Putin's text seriously.