A History of Ukraine and Russia

[George K]

Part 1:

I’ve been asked a number of times by Europeans where distinct Russian and Ukrainian identities come from. And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t familiar with the medieval to early modern history of the region myself.

It was Alfred Tennyson who famously wrote “[…] for a lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”. When Putin starts going on about the fundamental unity of the East Slavic peoples, he isn’t all wrong. Where he goes off the rails is where he uses this historical unity as a “justification” for “uniting” them under his “benevolent” rule: this facetious argument is roughly equivalent to justifying a German invasion of the Netherlands and Flanders [=the North half of Belgium], on the grounds that the people living there are Germanic and speak a sister language of Low German. (Actually, having spoken to Ukrainian and Russian immigrants here — in Israel, those are essentially all Russian-speakers — the Ukrainian and Russian languages are about as different as Dutch and standard [High] German.)

But I freely admitted being at a loss when exactly the gradual “bifurcation” happened. For that, I needed to take a deep dive into medieval Eastern European history.

I'll be interested to see if @Renauda has an opinion.

Part 2 is here.

More to come in the next few days.

[Renauda]

@George-K

So far seems like an accurate introductory summary of the history.

[George K]

How did Russia and Ukraine come about? A very brief history. 3. The Romanovs