Putin pretends to be a historian again: he says he must "return territories"

ROMAN PETRENKO - THURSDAY, 9 JUNE 2022, 17:46

Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided that he is destined to "return and strengthen territories".

Source: Putin after visiting the exhibition "Peter I. The Birth of an Empire", quoted by the Kremlin media

Putin: "It would seem that he (Peter I - ed.) fought with Sweden, took something away... He didn't take anything away. He returned... The same goes in the western direction, it concerns... his first campaigns there. What were you afraid of? He returned them, strengthened them. That's what he did.

We also had to return and strengthen. If we assume that these core values are the basis of our existence, we have certainly succeeded in solving the challenges we face…

Russia will not step on the same rake as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its economy will remain open."

Details: According to the President of the aggressor country, "Russia cannot be fenced off".

Background:

• Last year, on 30 June, Putin reiterated the propaganda thesis of a "single nation" that had existed since time immemorial in a trinity of "Great Russians, White Russians and Little Russians" that "they tried to pull apart and fragment", including the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria-Hungary. Putin also believes that the bill initiated by Volodymyr Zelenskyy "declares the Russian people not indigenous to the territory of Ukraine". He compared this document to a weapon of mass destruction.
• President Volodymyr Zelenskyy replied that Ukrainians and Russians are not one people, and if they were one, the yellow and blue flag would fly over the State Duma in Moscow.

Putin published an article in Ukrainian and Russian on the Kremlin's website "on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians". Putin wrote that the Ukrainian authorities do not need Donbas, as Donbas "will not accept current policy in Kyiv peacefully."