My historical research gravely offended Putin. He wants revenge

What have I done to be placed on the sanctions list of the Russian Foreign Ministry, alongside several distinguished historians of eastern Europe?

My normal hunting ground (not the right word for a maritime historian) is the Mediterranean and the oceans beyond. But maybe Russia’s mandarins know that I am now writing about the Black Sea.

Since the reign of Peter the Great in the 18th century, Russia has seen the Black Sea as a vital gateway to the wider world. The Ottoman sultans blocked Russian attempts to reach warmer waters via Istanbul. Russian ships bound for intended conquests had to creak their way out of the Baltic, entering the Mediterranean at Gibraltar.

The search for Mediterranean harbours became a central theme of Russia’s foreign policy, and Putin has not lost sight of it. Witness the Russian naval base at Tartus in Syria, not far from the British Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus.

The inclusion of historians on the latest list of people who are persona non grata reflects Putin’s certainty that he is Russia’s best historian. But is he? Much turns on the question of the origins of Russia. Was the early medieval principality of Rus a Slavonic foundation, as Putin told Tucker Carlson, or was it founded by Viking warriors?

The eminent Oxford historian Dimitri Obolensky, himself descended from the Viking prince Rurik, was happy to recognise them as Scandinavian warriors and traders who carved out territory in Ukraine and Belarus. Towards the end of the ninth century, they established themselves around a pre-existing settlement at Kyiv, making it into the capital of a principality whose rulers eventually adopted eastern Orthodox Christianity.

This created a bond with the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople that was perpetuated through the long centuries of Ottoman rule over Istanbul and the Black Sea.

Read George Vernadsky’s history of Russia. Also “Russia and the Golden Horde” by Charles Halperin. And especially “Children of Rus” by Faith Hills. It’s not as simple as a Britannica article. Not at all.

So I took look at that last book you referred to, “Children of Rus” by Faith Hillis:

And it substantiated everything that President Putin said.

The Ukraine is full of NAZI fascists and are proud of it. On top of that they Ukrainians claimed the Dnieper region was the spiritual heart of Russian civilization.

Here is an excerpt:

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Ukrainian nationalists beyond Soviet borders refused to permit Stalin to define their culture and the fate of their people, however. Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), the son of a left bank family of Cossack origins who had participated in illegal Ukrainian nationalist parties under tsarism and had served in the Skoropadsky government, spent the early thirties in Galicia developing an integral nationalist alternative to Stalin’s Soviet-Ukrainian project. Distancing himself from the “cosmopolitanism” and “humanitarianism” that he complained had guided Dragomanov and Ukrainian activists of the revolutionary period, Dontsov argued that the survival of the Ukrainian people and their culture demanded violent resistance against Russian and Polish nationalism, Jewish “exploitation,” and communism.46 Although Dontsov’s Russophobia and insistence on Ukrainian self-determination provided a sharp contrast to the views of prerevolutionary Russian nationalists, his vision of the nation as an organic and unbreakable unit, his antiliberal politics, and his interest in violence as a tool of transformation betrayed their influence.47 Dontsov relocated to Germany in 1939, but nationalist paramilitary groups that remained behind in Galicia championed his ideas.48 Some Ukrainian émigrés, too, celebrated the potential of integral nationalism to advance their aims. Although Skoropadsky and his followers struggled to maintain the independence of their national liberation movement under the Third Reich, they dreamed that the Nazi state would restore an independent Ukraine under the leadership of a Hetman.49
By the 1930s, growing numbers of émigrés who denounced communism and Ukrainian nationalism rallied behind fascism. Shul′gin, who by now had settled in Yugoslavia, along with other aging alumni of the Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists, joined the National Union of a New Generation, a youth group with chapters from Belgium to Australia to San Francisco.50 Championing the ideas of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco,51 this group aimed to incite a “national revolution” in the Soviet Union that would destroy the alien forces of liberalism and communism and create a strong
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nation-state serving the interests of East Slavic peasants and workers.52 The traces of the Little Russian idea are clear in the National Union’s ideology: the group railed against Ukrainian national separatism but also lavished attention on the local culture and needs of the Dnieper region, which it depicted as the spiritual heart of Russian civilization and the logical center of a future national state. The National Union adopted the trident—the insignia of St. Vladimir, which Ukrainian nationalists had also appropriated—as its symbol; it described the Ukrainian famine with horror; and it surveyed the Cossacks’ past efforts (and future promise) to liberate the children of Rus′.53 In his boldest attempt to adapt the Little Russian idea to the interwar context, Shul′gin went so far as to claim that the Dnieper region was the birthplace of fascism. In a pamphlet celebrating Hitler’s annexation of Austria, he described Khmelnytsky’s efforts to “reunify” the Rus′ lands and to expel foreign elements from Little Russia as the original Anschluss, the first effort to create “Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!”54 In the end, neither the residents of the right bank nor its native sons who had fled the region would determine its fate—that privilege would belong to the superpowers that would wage a total war for (and in) the borderlands. But the epic battle that unfolded in mid-twentieth-century Ukraine was not only a contest between Moscow and Berlin; it also became intertwined with a much older—and more local—struggle to determine the future of the right bank and the identity of its inhabitants.55 Ukrainian Party apparatchiks claimed the right bank as a distinctive yet fundamental part of a larger Soviet/imperial whole; radical intellectuals and paramilitary units fought to establish a Ukrainian nation based on integral nationalist ideas; and right-wing émigrés proclaimed the Dnieper region the cradle of a Russian nation whose longstanding opposition to socialism, cosmopolitanism, and foreign influence had presaged the fascist new world order. Although they would never admit it, each of these battling camps had repurposed for its own means the ideas and practices that had first emerged from the borderlands in the nineteenth century. The Little Russian idea and the antiliberal, mass-oriented, organic nationalist movement to which it gave rise were creations of the tsarist old regime, but they proved remarkably adaptable to the violent new world that took shape in the twentieth century.

Now what are you gonna do? Take a DNA test, go home, and stop the foolishness. We all know this is a stupid civil war between cousins sharing the same hearts and souls. But I guess that's why both sides are so pigheaded.

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