Article by Vladimir Putin ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“
en.kremlin.ru"I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia."
Indeed. Under Russia's warm brotherly embrace, Ukraine will have full sovereignty, as long as Russia approves. And seeing the marvel of human civilization that Russia is today, who would say no to such a deal? High incomes, long peaceful happy lives, a representative government... The list goes on. Clearly all anti-Russia sentiment is a product of western deviousness.
I heard a joke when I was in Ukraine in 1996: A Russian and a Ukrainian find $100. The Russian says, “come, brother, let’s split this like family.”
The Ukrainian says, “no, let’s split it 50-50.”
I think both sides are fully aware of what Russia’s “warm brotherly embrace” will be like.
I’m assuming sarcasm but it’s hard to tell because RT sources would say the exact same thing
The reality is Russia has done far better economically then Ukraine. So that line of reasoning is not totally unfounded. And that was even more the case before many of the sanctions and so on against Russia before this all started.
So that part of the argument isn't actually wrong.
Yeah, that quoted sentence is pure Orwellian double-speak.
I love how it’s basically 99% history lecture. Very little concern for what actual Ukrainians think or feel. Which makes sense, since this guy thinks that what everyone else thinks is a result of plans within plans of other countries and states and their devious anti-Russia schemes.
This is the Politics of Eternity as Timothy Snyder calls it. The idea that we are replaying history, that Russia is in a historical cycle of victimhood, that everything always remains the same, with the same threats lurking. Just like Groundhog Day, any attempt of change is futile and in fact stupid as we supposedly know what is going to happen.
It's obviously absurd - he didn't have to attack Ukraine and ruin relations with the West; but by distracting with cherry-picked historical facts it creates an air of deep knowledge and sophistication. He chose to perpetuate the cycle of confrontation.
It is not a 100% honest belief, as the Kremlin has a long tradition of falsifying history to fit its agenda. And given the importance of "history", controlling the past is an attempt to control the present and future. One classic example of how history is changed to fit narratives is Zhukov's memoirs. You would think they wouldn't change much, but they have 12 editions that contradict each other. Each edition claims that his daughter has found new sheets of paper or that they've simply restored what the previous editors had removed.
It is really frustrating how uncritically these views of history are accepted, critical thinking out of the window. Western historians are more often worse than reading Russian historians as the former stick to extremely biased 'official sources'.
In the Groundhog Day eventually the main character learns something and breaks out the cycle. I wonder how many times it has to repeat for that to happen in our case, but I know for sure no rethinking of the past and future is possible under Putin.
I’m Polish, and watching everything happen from our own ever eroding democracy I often feel a sense of dread. These leaders are the way they are because of our own culture, and that evolves very slowly.
Real historian Klim Zhukov made an analysis of this letter. It's on youtube but only in Russian.
From Zhukov's analysis most of historical facts are true but conclusions are wrong.
Nationalities are always changing, growing, evolving. If we look sufficiently far then Slavs and Germans should be counted as cousins
> And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.
Given the current situation, that sounds like a threat.
The current policy seems very much aimed at not letting it's citizens decide unless their decision is acceptable to Moscow.
It is. Putin's strategy appears to be to encourage it to either be neutral, a puppet of Russia or failing that to break it - drive to to become a failed state.
It somewhat parallels the US's approach to Cuba.
The US's approach to Ukraine is that much like Georgia it's a cheap way to stir up trouble for Russia and sap its military strength but actually protecting its citizens isnt considered worthwhile, although this seems to have escaped the notice of at least half the citizens and its President.
Zelenskyy is kind of getting played by both powers and Ukraine is slowly getting torn to pieces as a result.
V.V. Putin: "Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole". Great, so lets kill some Ukrainians and sack their land. It makes sense, does it? Just typical Russian brotherhood...
Article by ipnon "On the Historical Unity of Americans and Russians"
"Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans are all descendants of Ancient Sahelanthropus ... We all come from the same Hominid species out of Africa"
See that was easy? Oh wait, I don't have thousands of nuclear weapons and an army of millions.
We are sadly seeing the return of might equals right, and history is written by the victors. But the difference this time is that the strong have the option of ending everything for everyone if they so choose. Assuming Putin is crazy like Hitler, then who knows if this is what he will decide to do.
The military options available to great powers today gives the most leverage to the most deranged. Americans and the West have lost their appetites for war and imperialism. The costs are too great and the benefits are marginal. The depravity of the Russian ideology-state doesn't have these limitations.
MAD means Russia wins as long the conflict is a military one. The only way out of this now turning Ukraine into Russia's Iraq/Afghanistan. An endless insurgency that grinds down resources and public opinion. It's a hybrid war of plausible deniability, disinformation, and cyber warfare. Europe is in this situation because the West is fighting fire with water guns.
The Bear will stalk eastwards until we play the same game.
> Americans and the West have lost their appetites for war and imperialism.
Let's wait for at least 10-20 years without invading other countries before even start talking about end of imperialism.
> at least 10-20 years without invading other countries
Lots of academic discussion to be had about what exactly constitutes an invasion, but the U.S. has not taken a mass of its armed forces into a country to fight that country's recognized government since 19 years ago in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Things I don't consider invasions, from strongest to weakest: steaming through international waters that China considers its own; fighting Daesh on Iraqi soil at the explicit invitation of the Iraqis; helping Saudi Arabia in its fight against Houthis in Yemen at the invitation of the Yemeni government; enforcing a no-fly in Libyan air space; special forces fighting Daesh on Syrian soil. Reasonable people may disagree on some of these but I believe my view is the mainstream. When people think of "a military invasion," the term certainly has a connotation, and maybe a denotation, of heavy armor and infantry divisions rolling in for the purpose of occupation.
> helping Saudi Arabia in its fight against Houthis in Yemen at the invitation of the Yemeni government;
And by the Yemeni government you mean of course the Saudi puppet with literally no legitimacy what so ever. Even the very, very little legitimacy he had as the Vice-President of the former dictator, that dictator had already been rejected and disposed.
Of course they tired a totally unconstitutional Napoleonic style election to give justification for their actions. But it speaks volumes that 'the Yemini government' by now is a guy sitting in a hotel in Saudi Arabia having been kicked out repeatedly from multiple cities in Yemen because not even the supposed allies of the Saudi coalitions want him.
And they are both blockading Yemen economically and had actual US troupes fly over Yemen. And helping in lots of other ways.
Its in my opinion as despicable an set of action as any invasion.
> special forces fighting Daesh on Syrian soil
The total of American presents in Syria is far more then what we would usually special forces. I guess you can just define anything as 'special' if you want to.
In reality they are occupying large parts of Syria against the will of the internationally recognized government long after even the flimsy excuse of an emergency situation is no longer valid.
> When people think of "a military invasion," the term certainly has a connotation, and maybe a denotation, of heavy armor and infantry divisions rolling in for the purpose of occupation.
Imperialism is not just innovation. The British Empire didn't invade a lot of places that it considered essentially or explicitly part of the empire.
So instead of quibbling about what constitutes an 'invasion' lets just recognize the essential reality.
>We are sadly seeing the return of might equals right
Seeing its return? It never went away.
(2021)
It's entertaining to think Putin would spend time to write such a long and biased article although it's obvious by its contents that that's not the case. (ex: a person that avoids technology like the plague mentioning using open-source documents)
I'm curious why the need for this sort of attribution is needed. The same sort of thing used to happen in the past in Romania with our glorious leader's wife...
As for contents, it reads like usual propaganda with a clear goal, justify Ukraine/Russia are the same people with a perhaps distorted view of history. Reading it is a little useful exercise in structure and manipulation
I agree that it is propaganda, but ghostwriting is kinda common for politicians. Reagan's famous "Tear done this wall" speech was written by Peter Robinson. [1] Hillary Clinton's book "It Takes a Village" was written by an uncredited ghostwriter named Barbara Feinman. [2] There are many other examples.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Robinson_(speechwriter...
Open-source documents aren’t about technology. It is a term of art in intelligence.
If you've watched him speak for 30min regarding geopolitics, such writing doesn't seem too farfetched...
Hate him for whatever, he's not uneducated, unintelligible etc.
I don't doubt that he is capable of writing this considering his background and achievements. I doubt that he wrote it considering the time investment needed and him being busy with invasion preparations...
I was curious as to reasons why do this, why such a long article, why under his name.
His target is likely the average russian, he is cultivating his image as a unifier of people?, is that also justification for war?
If he had written it, perhaps it would have shed some light in his way of thought. Without that assumption it's just another propaganda piece.
It certainly is propaganda. But it is not that different from any longer piece from a political leader. We should assume that given that it is signed by him, he has been influencial in what it says, even if it is mostly ghost-written, it reflects his views and opinions. Someone like Putin can dictate an article while getting a bath or travelling in his airplane. He does not need to type it into a computer.
I respect it for what it is, something with his name above it published on a Kremlin site. Propaganda is worse when it is hidden or disguised or pretends to be something it is not.
It was written on July 12, 2021.
If it isn't written by Putin himself then Aleksandr Dughin probably wrote it at the Kremlin leder's request. Putin is certainly capable writing such a piece. Which tells a lot about the education he was given, because he genuinely believes what he wrote.
Better let the historians and journalusts write history.
This doesn't seem a sign of strength, it's weird that it's translated to English though.
Russia greatly missed their approach to Ukraine. Because of gray zone tactics, Russian approval rate within east-Ukraine dropped from 54% to 14% and Ukraine got ( over the years) more efficient resisting those tactics.
This is a propaganda piece, because Ukrainians and Russians have a reasonable amount of relatives on both sides as far as I know. The risk he's taking is considerable, not only from externally but also internally.
As a reference, Ukraine has a population of 44 million and Russia of 144 million. The Ukrain independence referendum ( with 92% in favor) was in 1991, which isn't even 1 generation ago. That's a big variable to take into account.
Not only could fleeing Russians that they migrated become anti-Russia ( they received 10 k. Roebels =114$ to move from their home, which almost seems as a bad joke).
They could be cut off from any sort of trade happening to them, which would decimate their economy with unforeseen consequences.
Be aware that Russia has roughly the GDP of Spain and a huge area to maintain. They spend 6% to military and their GDP is declining + Europe ( and the world) is slowly abandoning natural resources.
But they currently have money reserves from record prices the last years.
Additionally, the last year there have been uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan, one of the few remaining partners of Russia that originated from the USSR.
There is serious unrest within Russia too, Navalny is currently in jail after the poisoning attack failed and they were able to document every step of the Russian agents in detail.
I think the mishandling of the vaccine ( the entire world wants Pfizer and Sputnik had a lot of production issues + bribes associated with it) didn't increase any influence, much to their dislike ( they were very quick to claim "dibs" without sufficient clinical trials ).
Additionally, the very low vaccination rate is "proof" to me that there is great distrust in the government and that the propaganda isn't working as well as many belief.
Putin is highly disturbed by this all and I think he wants to set an example to reduce problems. But I think he will just make it worse.
Important note: One of the main root causes of this entire situation is that Ukraine could render Russia's entire naval fleet useless, since it's highly dependent on the Black Sea that is overlapping, almost completely, with Ukraine. Which was the main goal of the "gray zone war", occupying East-Ukraine.
He's definitely been planning this for a long time:
- increasing propaganda
- increasing cyber attacks
- military experience over different countries ( Afghanistan, Syria, ... )
- decoupling of the west
- closer ties to china
- testing internet isolation ( similar to the great firewall)
- testing war responses in countries of Europe over the years.
- ...
I believe they prefer to act now, now that Europe is still sufficiently dependent on Russia. But we ( Europe) are 35% of their GDP because of gas imports.
They are also frustrated with Nordstream 2 that hasn't been completed. .
But I think, all in all, this is a position of weakness and not of strength and he's trying to change something while he can.
I don't know if they really want to invade Ukraine though.
Some part of me thought that they were bluffing and wanted to weaken US influence by calling them out and in the end that they would not attack. But the military presence and shelling are severely countering that opinion.
Just my 2 cents. I'd be glad to hear where I'm wrong or other opinions.
AFAIK Navalny is pretty irrelevant in Russia itself, he's much bigger in the West.
Also I don't think that unrest in Kazakhstan was anti-Russian, the old dictator was actually moving away from the Russian sphere of influence.
As far as I'm aware, Navalny succeeded in a loophole that didn't caught the eye of the government with 'Smart Voting'. Which made him "internal enemy #1" at the time, as it wasn't a vote "for a particular political party", but against the current one.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-regional-elections-br...
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-09-14/explai... (first google result i could find) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Voting
Concerning Kazakhstan, I didn't say the unrest was anti-Russian, though I see why it could be misinterpreted. I think Russia jumped in to affirm that it's useful to have them as an 'ally'. At least that was my gist of it. But I didn't follow that in detail.
https://www.economist.com/asia/kazakhstans-president-vows-to...
Edit: Fixed an error about Smart Voting.
I don't know if you're right or wrong, but I do appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts!
>Putin is highly disturbed by this all and I think he wants to set an example to reduce problems. But I think he will just make it worse.
In the Netflix series "How to Become a Tyrant" there's literally a scene where the narrator says something like "Things not going well at home for you? start a war overseas!"
If we want to end this we need to stop working on ads and SaaS, and start working on cyber security and disinformation networks.
Yes, I agree. Where are the networks of people working on this stuff?
Look harder.
I was shocked to learn recently how diverse various parts of Russia is. There's hardly anything common uniting Russia including language. Russia is so huge simply because they did not had mountains to protect from marching invaders and the kings solution was to keep marching until they found mountains to define the boundaries. Along the way they made treaties with all sorts of culture and it became Russia.
This is an incredibly wrong understanding of Russian history.
There are in fact mountains going North-South threw Russia and apparently they didn't stop there.
And of course like any huge country it does not have uniform culture.
Is there any common thing that unites Russia. For example majority of the population in china believe they are the descendants of chinese emperors from Han dynasty.
Because someone already wrote a text on the historical unity of the Germans and the Austrians?
Could you please not post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
How is that unsubstantive? It may not be wholly accurate, but it is apposite in discussion of international relations between similar ethnic groups across national boundaries. Is there some word count that a comment has to hit before it can be considered substantive?
It's unsubstantive because it's a snarky reference to the ultimate flamebait.
Perhaps this one is too obvious, but I think historical parallels are illuminating.
Ok, but you need to follow the site guidelines when posting here. This one, for example:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
and this one:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
and this one:
"Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If there's a substantive comment to be made about that historical parallel, it would look very different from what you posted. The more flame-prone a topic is, the more flame retardant you need to avoid the obvious, predictable trollish effects.
<q>If there's a substantive comment to be made about that historical parallel, it would look very different from what you posted.</p>
Given that you seem to have the authoritative editorial position on these comments, can you give us an example of what you might consider substantive in this particular case? So that we, in the peanut gallery, could have something to go on when crafting our responses? We're not mind readers.
Are you asking me to point you to a substantive internet comment drawing an interesting parallel between some divisive contemporary situation and Nazis, while managing not to be flamebait? I don't know of one. Note that word "if".
Now joke aside, it had been informative to read about the recent developments in the region from both Western and Russian sources. For instance this report (https://tass.com/world/1406503) about a declaration from the EU (!) from Tass was interesting and painted a more nuanced picture of what's happening there. I failed to see this report mentioned in my other regular Western news feed. US, UK or french newspapers all seem to reduce the whole situation into "Russia is willing to start a war, the only problem with recent increase of shelling in Ukraine is that it could be used as an excuse by Russia". Reading so obviously simplistic account about the situation is saddening.
Also, it made me realize that pro-russia nationalists in Ukraine have their own distinct agenda.
Now, disclaimer, I have no horse in this race, I'm just a random westerner, but I've been lied too often and I'm sick of it.
French newspapers are a lot more nuanced (some of them at least) because a significant part of the French left is deeply opposed to NATO, distrust and dislike the USA and is sympathetic to the Russian views that NATO eastern extension is a form of aggression and should be stopped.
Could you suggest any links to articles - hopefully with English translation, from the French?
This is even better, articles from Russia which aren't Kremlin propaganda.
It is indeed, thank you for the link!
Which is