A year into Russia’s illegal and failed invasion, the below is an assertion of historical facts, deftly crushing the false narratives peddled by Putin and his paid stooges installed in Western countries.
Kyiv was a thriving commercial centre in Eastern Europe as early as the 5th century.
Let’s go back even further though, to when early humans first domesticated horses in the area that is now Ukraine somewhere around 32,000 years ago. Communities along the Dnieper River cultivated trade networks across the Eurasian steppe, influencing human industry and successful settlement in the area for millenia, giving rise to the Kyivan Rus’ culture. They eventually established Kyiv as the capital of the first East Slavic state.
Meanwhile, Muscovy remained a backwater village inhabited by tribal hunter-gatherers, unworthy of historical note until the mid-9th century.
It lingered as a minor settlement on the steppe’s fringe, only becoming a fortified gorod (stronghold) in the 12th century, 7 centuries behind Kyiv’s ascendancy.
Both were subject to invasion and Kyiv was even completely destroyed by Mongols, but recovered and resumed functioning as a hub of human industrial proliferation for a further few centuries. It endured strained leadership struggles, coming under Lithuania, Poland and eventually a burgeoning Russia.
Throughout and despite this tumult Kyiv thrived as an important centre of human development, even coming to the rescue of Moscow against further waves of Mongolian aggression.
Soviet intrinsic pillaging
Much later the Soviet project, in all its iterations, was built on extraction, plundering the resources and spirit of its neighbours. All those literary titans and space exploration scientists claimed by imperialist Russia are actually ethnically Siberian, Ukrainian and Baltic.
After the inevitable and welcome collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine regained its independence and resumed flourishing into a modern market economy and electoral democracy.
Meanwhile for most of the 1990s, Russia under the leadership of a perpetually drunk Boris Yeltsin, inspired alcoholism and sedentarism in great swathes of the non-urban population of the former empire.
Thus long has Russian resentment been simmering. Ukraine’s innovation and resilience expose the hollowness of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia – a state whose identity hinges on denial and appropriation.
Putin’s great shame
During his 25 years in power, Putin’s bitter envy has metastasised into violent delusion.
Devoid of genuine strength, his regime clings to a hyper-macho image that in no way masks blatant national inadequacy.
Revered domestically as a strongman, Putin’s appeal stems less from achievement than from the population’s chronic deprivation of opportunity and progress. That simmering pot of inadequacy has come to a frothing, sadistic boil, exemplifying the complete dearth of Russian potency.
The population continues to readily swallow all the propaganda, lies and home-brewed “vodka” afforded to them by the likes of Medvedev, Lavrov, and the neofascist pseudo-historian Aleksandr Dugin.
Globally, Russia offers little of value. Its economy limps along, propped up by coercive energy pricing. Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, infrastructure decay and agricultural neglect paint a bleak picture of arrested development. Beyond gas, its exports are negligible: beetroots hardly suffice nor are uniquely cultivable on Russian soil.
Manufactured Russian might and victimhood
It would be comical (were it not for the tragedy) how blithely unaware Putin and his admirers are of the obvious contradiction: a world power somehow also being the victim of their smaller, less-armed “illegitimate” neighbour’s oppression.
To justify aggression, the Kremlin peddles revisionist myths: that Ukraine lacks historic legitimacy, and that Russia is somehow the aggrieved party.
These narratives are not just false, they’re desperate attempts to rewrite a history in which Ukraine has consistently outpaced its eastern neighbour in vitality, creativity, and human progress.
The invasion reflects Russian fragility
Every missile launched, every civilian killed, every city shelled is not just a war crime, but a desperate attempt to mask Putin’s impotence.
Putin’s initial annexation of Crimea, and subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine are akin to toddler tantrums.
The more Ukraine resists, the more his illusion of control unravels.
Each Ukrainian death is a tragedy. But for Putin, it’s also a personal humiliation and objective, ontological proof that his “empire” cannot inspire, only coerce. His ego, built on lies and projection, takes another hit with every act of defiance, every liberated village, every global condemnation.
Ukraine’s endurance exposes the truth: Russia’s power is performative, its pride brittle, and its leader terrified of a future where Ukraine and the rest of the world thrives without it.
Russian world vs Russian peace – an Orwellian nightmare in any language
In a convenient linguistic manoeuvre, the philosophy of “Russian peace” is a grotesque misnomer, an Orwellian inversion of truth. The Russian words for “peace” and “world” are phonemes (they sound the exact same): мир (mir).
Putin, Dugin and their admirers collectively believe this masks their ambitions – to spread the absolute dearth of human achievement and quality of life from Vladivostok to Lisbon – behind a veneer of benevolence.
That linguistic overlap allows propagandists to blur the lines between conquest and harmony, framing a scorched-earth strategy as some noble pursuit of global unity.
When Kremlin-aligned voices call for “bringing peace to Europe”, what they actually mean is the absorption (or more accurately, obliteration) of Europe into a Russian-dominated sphere. It is not a call for coexistence, but a euphemism for erasure.
This rhetorical sleight-of-hand is no accident. Simply by exploiting the semantic ambiguity of mir, the narrative recasts aggression as salvation, occupation as order. The result is a chilling paradox: the more territory reduced to rubble, the more population deprived and uninspired, the more “peace” is claimed to prevail.
It’s linguistic camouflage for imperialistic violence and control.
Thankfully plenty people fluent in language and history can correctly identify this for what it is, a linguistic smokescreen designed to mask imperial conquest as co-operative integration.
This was made plain when Putin made a “presentation” of historical maps attempting to show Ukraine as historically Russian territory, which in reality clearly labeled it as the land of the Cossacks. Once again, this would be comical (and was briefly enjoyed for about 5 minutes in the entire world outside Russian influence) were it not so dangerous and terrifying.
This is not an opinion piece, yet
Sorry that history is so grim, but that’s the historical record, observable reality, and the documented consequence of a regime built on theft and denial. This has been an factual account with some personal reflection.
I’ve been to Moscow and St. Petersburg and seen Red Square, Lenin’s Mausoleum, GUM Department stores, the Moscow State Circus, the Hermitage (the contents of the which are of course, all stolen), Statue Park, an underwhelming space museum, and countless other art and historical sites worthy of note, and admired and appreciated them all. I stayed at the hotel just off Red Square that spanned a couple of time zones, it’s been demolished and there’s now a city park but what a feat of engineering it was.
I’ve worked with, am friends with and admire hundreds of Russians and Belarusians who admonish themselves of the Putin regime and his current “ambitions”.
Insofar as I offer an opinion: I personally look forward to a future where Russia’s “empire”, delusions and parasitic grip exist only as a cautionary tale.
Only Ukraine are fighting for that future, and the developed world will owe them forever.