Russian imperialist governments and public agencies have for centuries promoted false narratives about Ukraine both to the domestic audience of Russia and abroad. There remains a consistent effort to marginalise Ukraine and Ukrainians, and to deny them a distinct identity and agency. 

The imperialists invoke specious historicist and dynastic arguments to legitimize their claims to rule over Ukraine, but ignore Ukrainian counter-claims to legitimacy on the modern bases of self-determination and democratic choice. The following are some of the main false narratives. 

Ukraine’s name 

Misconceptions about Ukraine start with the name of the country. Historians place the founding of the city of Kyiv variously from the fifth to seventh century AD, and the rule of Kyivan Rus by assimilated Scandinavians from the ninth century. The origins of the name Rus are unclear, being possibly the name of a Scandinavian clan that settled in the region. In medieval Latin, the territory that is now Ukraine was called Ruthenia or Rusia; but in the twelfth century the term Ukraina or Rus-Ukraina began to be used locally. 

The term krai or kraina is a Slavic cognate meaning country, environs, or territory. Russians present the term as “borderland,” thus ascribing to Ukraine a status peripheral to Russia. However, Ukraine is older than Russia and acquired its modern name when Kyivan Rus or Rus-Ukraina was at the height of its power, and was not the periphery of another state. What is now Russia was called Muscovy; but after the defeat of a combined Swedish and Cossack army in 1709, Czar Peter the Great appropriated the historical and cultural legacy of Kyivan Rus and re-named Muscovy as Rossia (Eng. Russia). 

Thus Rus, Rusia, or Ruthenia on the one side, and Rossia and Russia on the other, are not the same thing. Nor is Ukrainian a dialect of Russian; but rather the opposite. Ukrainians are the older ethnos, and literacy was spread by Christian missionaries from the south—from Greece, Byzantium, and Bulgaria to Kyiv before reaching farther north to Muscovy, first mentioned by historians in 1147. 

Ukrainians and Russians as one people 

The Ukrainian state centred around Kyiv, a city said to have had 200 churches, was one of the largest in Europe until the Mongol invasion of 1240, which depopulated western Muscovy and eastern Ukraine. A rump Ukrainian state called the Galician-Volynian Principality remained in the west, but then came under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1362, whose state language was Old Ukrainian/Old Belorusan. In 1596 the Duchy and most of the Ukrainian territories were subsumed by a Greater Poland. Though Poland of that era was exploitive, it was an elected constitutional monarchy and many Ukrainian towns acquired Magdeburg Law. In the meantime, Muscovy remained under Mongol vassalage until 1382, by which time it acquired the characteristics of absolute rule, political police, and “human wave” military tactics, all of which are still on display currently. 

It is evident that Ukraine and Russia did not have a close common origin (substantively irrelevant even if they did) nor a common public culture. The Ukrainian language is very close to Belorusan, and even to this day is closer to Polish, Slovak, and Czech than to Russian. 

Artificiality and denial of agency 

Russian nationalists argue that independentist Ukraine is an artificial creation of Polish, or more recently of Austrian and now American and European Union intrigue. However, Ukrainians demonstrated their agency during their long struggle for independence from Poland, achieved by a Cossack state in 1648. They demonstrated their agency again through the Ukrainian National Republic of 1918-1922 against Polish and Russian rule; and fought widespread guerilla actions against both the Nazis and Soviets during WWII. 

Given this historical record of struggle for independence, it stretches credulity for Russians to say that pro-democracy protesters stood for three months in freezing temperatures simply for love of Western imperialism during the Orange Revolution of 2004. The Ukrainians demonstrated their agency again during the Revolution of Dignity of 2014, when protesters risked freezing water cannon and even death by sniper fire from President Viktor Yanukovych’s Russified police. 

A variant on the artificiality theme is that of Jewish intrigue. Since Ukrainians and Russians are held to be one fraternal and happy people, it stands to reason in the Muscovite mind that clever Jews in the service of Western money were behind the estrangement of Ukraine from Russia. Some Russian propagandists assert that the real name of former president Petro Poroshenko (once a parishioner of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—Moscow Patriarchate) is Valtsman.   

For his part, Vladimir Putin intoned that Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, “is not a real Jew” because he ostensibly abnegated his identity in order to ingratiate himself with Ukrainian nationalists and “fascists.” Such a line of thinking is both racist and unintendedly humorous, for it implies that fraternal ethnic-Ukrainian and ethnic-Russian citizens of Ukraine are easily fooled by Western and Jewish intrigue because they are feeble-minded. 

Oppression of Russians 

An old saw is the purported oppression of Russians in Ukraine, this despite the fact that the Russian language dominates in most cities. Measures to implement education, public media, and restaurant menus in the native language of more than 80 percent of the population is considered by Muscovites ipso facto to be anti-Russian discrimination. 

Likewise, Moscow accuses Kyiv governments of ethnic intolerance more broadly. However, during Petro Poroshenko’s presidency of 2014-2019 the prime minister was Jewish (Volodymyr Groysman), the minister of the interior was Armenian (Arseniy Avakov), and the foreign minister was Russian-born (Pavlo Klimkin). Aside from the country’s current Jewish president, Zelensky, the first minister of defence was Jewish (Oleksiy Reznikov), and the current prime minister is also Jewish (Denys Shmyhal).  Tatar Muslim Rustam Umerov is the new minister of defence, and the new commander-in-chief of the armed forces is Russian-born Oleksandr Syrskiy. 

In their time, pro-Moscow candidates for the presidency, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych, divisively played the so-called “ethnic card” by accusing western Ukrainians of intolerance toward their country’s Russophiles. But since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, there has been a taboo about playing on the ethnicity or religion of candidates for political office; and all persons are considered to be loyal citizens of Ukraine unless their own actions are shown otherwise in a court of law. 

East-West divide 

Another standard of Russian propaganda is that Ukraine is intractably divided into a western and eastern part. This view was accepted by many in the West because maps of presidential elections from 1994 to 2010 seemed to indicate a sharp electoral line. In fact, the electoral results were shaded, with many western-oriented voters in the eastern part, and eastern-oriented voters in the western part. 

In his victory of 2014, Poroshenko received a majority or plurality in all regions, as did Zelensky in 2019; accordingly, the schematic east-west dividing line has been erased. Zelensky won 73 percent of the vote on an anti-corruption platform, which showed that clean governance was more important to the public than his ethnic background. 

Failed state 

Closely related to the above is the narrative of a failed state, roiling with ethnic and political divisions. However, Ukraine has regular and free elections internationally monitored, free political parties, a free parliament, and a free press. After resistance by Russophile president Kuchma in 2004, and especially by Yanukovych in 2014, the principle of orderly changes of government has been well established—under pressure from a vigorous civil society. The country is now into its sixth president since independence in 1991. 

Free elections and public discourse have increased civic informedness, political maturation, and moderation. In Ukraine’s case, democracy is working as democracy should, creating consensus around basic liberal values. Of course, the country’s impressive military defence against the huge Russian army speaks loudly about the viability of the Ukrainian state, and of the solidarity of its people. Russian bombs fall on all social categories without distinction, thus consolidating the state and people even further. These bombs fall especially on the “Russian-speaking” eastern cities, about whose citizens the Kremlin claimed to be particularly concerned. 

Fascism 

Yet another old saw is the country’s alleged fascism. But Ukraine lost ten million people in WWII, equal to the number in Russia, so its people have no reason to like this ideology. In the parliamentary elections of 2019, far-right candidates received less that two percent of the vote – vastly fewer than in most other European countries—and not a single far-right candidate was elected to parliament. 

An indictment of Western scholarship is that little attention is paid to left- and right-wing Russian extremism—which, according to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, has killed more people than German Nazism. 

Russia will win its Special Military Operation 

A newer narrative is that Russia can call up millions of recruits to its army and has infinite potential for ramping up its military industries. Accordingly, propagandists argue that a Russian victory in the current war is inevitable. This is an attempt to plant in Ukraine’s allies a self-fulfilling prophecy; for if Ukraine’s defeat is inevitable it is of no use to supply arms to Ukraine, and the country should be allowed to fall. Actual events at the front attest that a Russian victory is much in doubt. 

Siren song of peace 

And last is the siren song of peace. All the Ukrainians need to do to stop the terror bombing of their cities is to surrender. Withholding of weapons deliveries would thus be an act of mercy. However, Ukrainians know from areas of occupation that a Russian peace would mean widespread rape, torture, maiming, and execution, all covered by a Kremlin directive that permits and tacitly encourages “logistical self-sufficiency” by the occupiers. Ukrainian libraries, museums, and schoolbooks are systematically looted or destroyed. These acts are proof that surrender is not an option, and determination to continue to resist remains very high. 

It should be noted that dictatorial regimes usually kill more people in peacetime or in the hinterland than at the front during war, as did the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Thus, continuation of the present war, bloody as it is, produces fewer Ukrainian deaths than would the genocide that Putin holds in store. As Golda Meir stated, “it is futile to negotiate with someone who intends to kill you.” 

Dennis Soltys is a retired Canadian professor of comparative politics, with specialization in the former-Soviet region.  

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.