How Russian is Ukraine?

Moscow politicians continue to frame Ukraine as Russian for their own benefits

Vladimir Putin wall art
A boy stands by a wall sprayed with an image of Vladimir Putin in the disputed Crimean city of Simferopol
(Image credit: Yuri Lashov/AFP/Getty Images)

Olivia Durand, a postdoctoral associate in history at the University of Oxford, explores Vladimir Putin’s claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”.

A political pamphlet published in 1762 described a conversation between “Great Russia” and “Little Russia”. In the exchange, the latter refused to be simply reduced to part of Great Russia and put forward its own unique history and identity. At the time, the name “Ukraine” did not yet designate a state. But the noun ukraina – a word that meant “borderland” in several Slavic languages – was already used to describe its future territory: the vast steppe region surrounding the Dnipro (Dnieper) River and bordering the Black Sea.

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