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Putin wrote for posterity
Putin is in his mid-70s, and Russian male life expectancy is still about ten years younger than that, which gives him a sense of history and of how he will be remembered. The essay was long, rambling, and ugly, and it held kernels of historical fact about the connection between Kyiv and Rus' and the Russia that exists today.
It treated control over Ukraine and its people as an entitlement for Russia and tried to ground that in history. By the summer of 2021, Putin's own aggression, including the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, had helped create a sense of Ukrainian nationhood and national purpose that didn't exist thirty or forty years before.
The ideas in the essay are not just spin. Putin wrote it himself, and he believes them.
Why does Kyiv matter in Russian history?
Kyivan Rus' was a medieval state centered on Kyiv from the ninth century. In 988, its ruler, Prince Volodymyr, accepted Christianity from Byzantium and baptized his people. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all claim this state as part of their heritage. Moscow rose to power centuries after Kyiv's decline.
How did Crimea end up in Ukraine?
In 1954, Soviet leadership transferred the Crimean Peninsula from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one. Within the Soviet Union, such a change was largely administrative. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the peninsula stayed with independent Ukraine. The 1954 transfer came as the Soviet Union marked 300 years since the Pereyaslav agreement between Cossack Ukraine and Muscovy.
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