The Chairman of the Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, met with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, on May 23. At the meeting, he brought a map drawn up under the French king Louis XIV, and said that there was no Ukraine on this map. Putin said: “Of course.”
“Well, we know that these lands were simply part of the Commonwealth of Nations, and then they asked to be part of the Moscow kingdom. That’s all. And they turned out to be part of the Moscow kingdom. And only later, after the October revolution, all kinds of quasi-state formations began to form, and the Soviet power created Soviet Ukraine,” Putin said.
At the same time, as the journalists of “Verstka” pointed out, Crimea is not part of Russia on this map, the peninsula is circled as a separate state. In the 17th century, the Crimean Khanate was located there, which in alliance with the Ottoman Empire fought against Russia. Crimea was included in the Russian Empire only at the end of the 18th century. At the same time, the Russian authorities, justifying the annexation of Crimea in 2014, called the peninsula “primarily Russian” territory.
In addition, the journalists noted that the territory where St. Petersburg will later be located is designated as Ingria and belongs to Sweden.
“Polygon.media” publication writes that on the map that Zorkin showed, Ukraine still exists. It is called “Ukraine pays des Cossacks” or “Ukraine, land of the Cossacks” in French. At that time it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Putin repeatedly – including in the speech that preceded the beginning of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year – argued that Ukraine was allegedly created by Vladimir Lenin, but it did not exist before the formation of the Ukrainian SSR. Many historians criticized this interpretation of historical events, both in relation to the distant past and the 20th century, when the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic was established after the 1917 revolution.