Ukraine and Russia are one people, according Russian president Vladimir Putin's 2021 essay, ON THE HISTORICAL UNITY OF RUSSIANS AND UKRAINIANS.
However, there are "forces" dividing Ukraine and Russia. "The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial – divide and rule," he wrote.
"[T]he overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another," he explains.
He is correct when stating that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus. In fact, Ukraine was the nascent Russia, according to many historians. Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was once the principle city of what grew into Russia.
Putin apparently views his invasion of Ukraine with interests similar to those that prompted Abraham Lincoln to use military force to reunite the Confederate States of America with the United States of America.
Who are these "forces" to whom he refers? The options are limited. He may be referring to NATO or "The West".
Then, again, he may believe the "forces" who are using the age-old divide-and-conquer strategy to be international Judaism or "the Jews."
The latter could be justified by noting that Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish as was the nation's prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, until August, 2019. For a brief time — May through August of 2019 — Ukraine was the only nation other than Israel in which the head of government and head of state were both Jewish.
Considering the historical animosity between ethnic Russians and Jewish interlopers, it may not be much of a stretch to assume Putin imagines himself rescuing his motherland from the "international Jew," as Henry Ford called them.
Putin did not expressly identify the "forces" dividing his people. So, we may want to check our inference confusion until more evidence becomes apparent.
Putin is certainly not a loose canon blindly firing in the dark of ignorance. At his disposal are the feared GRU and the Wagoner Group. The former is Russia's foreign military intelligence agency. The latter is a private military contracting agency; a mercenary force that employed about 6,000 in 2017, according to bloomberg.com.
Read Putin's opinion and explanation here:
ON THE HISTORICAL UNITY OF RUSSIANS AND UKRAINIANS
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