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In Putin’s Own Words, Why Russia Invaded Ukraine
There’s a Chinese nationalist that I communicate with, and he steadfastly defends the view that the Russia/Ukraine war is mostly America’s fault. This article is an attempt to show him that no, this is a war of aggression and conquest initiated by Russia at Putin’s command. All boldface is mine, added for emphasis.
An Examination of Putin’s Speech to Russia, February 22, 2022:
So let me start with the fact that modern Ukraine was created entirely by Russia, more precisely, by Bolshevik communist Russia. This process began almost immediately after the 1917 Revolution, and Lenin and his comrades-in-arms did it in a very crude way with Russia itself — by secession, cutting off parts of its own historical territories. Of course, no one asked the millions of people who lived there for anything.
Then, before and after the Great Patriotic War, Stalin already annexed some territories that had previously belonged to Poland, Romania and Hungary to the USSR and transferred them to Ukraine. As a kind of compensation, Stalin gave Poland some of the ancestral German territories, and in 1954, for some reason, Khrushchev took Crimea away from Russia and gave it to Ukraine. In this way, the territory of Soviet Ukraine was created.
