"Artificial Country": The cause of the war was Putin's obsession with history - WSJ

According to journalists, Putin considers Ukraine a "false country" and all its further actions, since 2014, emerge from this belief. The seizure of Russian President Vladimir Putininistory of Ukraine and the Slavic peoples has long been known. This is what became one of the reasons for the start of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. About it writes the edition of The Wall Street Journal.

In 2008, during a meeting with the then US Ambassador William Burns, who is now the director of the Central Intelligence Administration, Putin clearly expressed his point of view on this issue. According to Burns, Putin treats Ukraine as "not a real country". Thus, all subsequent actions of Putin since 2014, starting with the annexation of Crimea to the full -scale war in 2022, emerge from this point of view.

Putin's belief is that Ukraine is an "artificial" country, leads to almost two -year -old persistent resistance from Kiev against Moscow's attempts to destroy its independence and regain control of half of the temporarily occupied territories. The source states that Putin's historical views are not unique to him, but have deep roots in the historical context of the Russian Empire, which preceded the 1917 revolution.

During this period, the name "Ukraine" and publications in Ukrainian were prohibited, and Ukrainians were denoted by the term "Little Russia". According to Western special services, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian president paid considerable attention to the reading of historical texts. As a result of this activity, a treatise called "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians" was created, which was published in July 2021.

This treatise was read before the invasion of every serviceman of the Russian Armed Forces. Although focus in ancient events can be surprising, the question of Ukrainian identity remains a key element of Russia's main myth, defining its modern policy. "According to Putin, Ukrainian identity is the invention of the enemy of Russia-Austria-Hungary of the early XX century,"-said The Wall Street Journal.