“They see Ukraine as by rights a part of the historic Russian empire, that an independent Ukraine has no legitimacy. Russia cannot be whole until its borders are restored, not so much to Soviet times, but to its pre-Soviet territory.”
It is my understanding that the “Rus” have developed a split. That which has been under Polish influence is Ukrainian. Modern Russia comes from the expanding control and area of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
Ukraine as a political entity dates from the time of the Russian Revolution, when the cultural entity of Ukraine was expanded to become a political entity by Ukrainians, who saw an opportunity to do so with the dowwfall of the Czar and the occupation of area by the Central Powers. The Russians in Moscow were fighting for survival and had to accept a new political entity called Ukraine.
Most of the territory now occupied by Russian forces was once held by Moslems. This is not the first invasion of these areas by Russian forces.
A very interesting point made by Orlando Figes in his various works is that Ukraine and Russia differed greatly in the prevalence of serfdom.
Russia’s peasantry was almost all serfs, living communally in ancient Slavic style without individual rights to the land. The “owner” of the land was the village, not the individual. Plots were allocated by the village leaders according to need, or actually the internal politics of the village. And even such matters as to who got conscripted (mainly a death sentence in those days) was up to the village leaders. See Maxim Gorky on all that.
And the villages themselves were the actual property of a nobleman or the church. The individual Russians were thus not just serfs, but owned by two layers of “owners”, both or either of which had the power of life and death over individuals.
Ukraine was vastly different. Serfdom mainly didnt exist. There were great landowners, and villages, but the people on the land were sharecroppers, with individual arrangements with their landlords. And there were large numbers of individual small landowners, akin to the British yeomanry. Ukraine was therefore much more agriculturally productive per unit of land or per farmer than Russia.