The most egregious lie underlying the UniParty’s proxy war in Ukraine is the claim that the latter is just another innocent sovereign nation suffering unprovoked invasion and despoilment at the hands of the world latest land-grabbing tyrant.
In fact, however, no nation or state by the name of “Ukraine” ever existed on the maps of the world from the middle ages until the 20th century. Only 100 years ago did modern history’s real tyrants—Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev – arbitrarily draw its borders on the region north of the Black Sea. But the territories impressed into these borders did not serve the cause of nationhood – only the administrative convenience of their own totalitarian rule and similar map-making caprice across the entire 6,000 mile expanse of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the current Washington narrative holding that Vladimir Putin’s Russian government in Moscow is laying siege to the freedom loving Ukrainian nation centered in Kiev embodies no small irony. That’s because Russia’s actual origin story starts in Kiev more than 1,000 years ago, when the like named “Vladimir the Great” declared the Kievan Rus for Christianity in 988 AD. The great Russian Orthodox extension of Christendom was thereby extended into central Eurasia and eventually became Czarist Russia.
As it happened, Kievan Rus had been the first major East Slavic polity, which took shape in the late 9th and 10th centuries. Viking warrior-traders known as the Rus’ established control over trade routes linking the Baltic to the Black Sea and Byzantium. By the early 10th century, under Prince Oleg and his successors, Kiev on the middle Dnieper River had become the dominant center of the incipient Russian nation.
But the Kievan Rus’ was never a tightly centralized state; rather, it was a loose federation of small principalities whose ruling elite belonged to one of history’s long forgotten dynasties called the Rurikid.
The populations they ruled was predominantly East Slavic, with Finnic, Baltic, and steppe nomadic elements on the periphery. The latter included primitive trading settlements to the northeast in the forested Volga region, which later became the center of Muscovy.
Over subsequent centuries the common language and culture of these East Slavs evolved into the distinct Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian branches which populated the yellow areas of the map below. Kiev itself remained the symbolic and ecclesiastical heart of Rus’ through the 11th and early 12th centuries, the period of its greatest prosperity and cultural flowering under Yaroslav the Wise.
