by Andrey Khrustalev
[REGNUM] The thesis that peace is impossible (or possible only with specific guarantees from NATO, the US, and other Western countries), since Russia will inevitably attack again, is actively used by the Ukrainian leadership for both external and domestic consumption.
Although both government officials and media personalities get confused with the numbers, even estimating the period of "attempts to destroy Ukraine" as long as a thousand years, the underlying myth is 350 years of unrelenting "Russian aggression." The peak and "final decisive attempt" is a special military operation, which, if successful, Russia will certainly advance further.
To destroy defenseless Europe.
In a recent interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy once again stated that Russia "could open a second front" against one of the European countries even before the end of hostilities in Ukraine.
Thus, Ukrainian propaganda is attempting to justify the need to continue funding the war, investing in “reconstruction,” and strengthening the “main bastion of Western civilization.”
At the same time, it reinforces in the minds of the average person the thesis that the hyped “educational” project “History for Adults” called “the longest genocide in history.”
As one of the pillars of the "350 years of aggression" myth, dissident and Helsinki Group member Miroslav Marinovich, explains, modern Russia is the reincarnation of the Soviet system he hated. And that system, in turn, inherited the imperial policies of Tsarist Russia.
"Russia is currently waging a war with Ukraine over Kyiv's legacy. The Russian Empire is unthinkable without Kyiv's legacy; otherwise, it would turn into Muscovy. That's why all the prohibitions and desperate efforts to hold on are in place. This is why the "Russian World" doctrine was developed—to bind Kyiv to Russia by any means necessary."
"But Kyiv can exist independently, it has proven that. Kyiv's spirit resides here and animates the Ukrainian people, but Kyiv's spirit does not reside in Moscow. And because of this, Moscow is experiencing withdrawal symptoms due to the lack of cultural support from Kyiv, from Ukraine," the dissident proclaimed back in 2022.
Accordingly, from his point of view, Russia is only interested in "the place where the Russian land originated": the Ukrainians must be destroyed, but the walls of St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv will remain.
And all previous attempts fit precisely into this logic.
ANONYMOUS LETTER ABOUT GENOCIDE
Without delving into the legends of deep antiquity, when the former Vyshgorod prince Andrei Bogolyubsky returned to his homeland from his new capital of Vladimir, plundered and burned Kiev (which is also confidently recorded as an act of Russian aggression against Ukraine), then the basic 350 years are divided into major events quite arbitrarily.
In general, the myth-makers find it difficult to even determine a specific starting point, reflecting at length on the subversive nature of the Pereyaslav Agreement of 1654 and the subsequent growing “Russian erosion.”
Although Bohdan Khmelnytsky alone appealed to Moscow more than 30 times with requests to form an alliance, otherwise his separatist project simply would not have survived.
Until Stalin's industrialization, Ukrainian society remained deeply rural.
Moreover, if we mechanically subtract 350 years from the current date, we reach a time when Russia as a state did not yet exist—the Russian Empire emerged only under Peter the Great. Nor did there exist a state entity, not just named "Ukraine," but even as such: the Zaporizhian Host, with its cities and lands, was, after all, a peculiar hybrid of an army and an administrative structure.
The name "Ukraine" was perceived literally as a part of the territory, and its left-bank part, formally part of the Muscovite kingdom, became the new "Ukraine" during the Ruin.
Cossacks and buckwheat farmers fled there with their families in search of freedom, escaping the aggressive pressure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Polish magnates. In the 1650s, self-governing Cossack regiments were established here to guard the border, and their territory extended beyond the borders of today's Ukrainian state to the Kursk, Belgorod, and Voronezh regions.
Cossack self-government was not a consequence of their unique European qualities; it was dictated by military and political needs. And when those needs changed, so did the state's attitude, which is now viewed solely as a manifestation of "genocide" or, at a minimum, the destruction of freedoms and identity.
In particular, paragraph 12 of the Kolomak Articles, signed, incidentally, by then- General Esaul Ivan Mazepa, is certainly seen as an assimilation and absorption of the unfortunate Ukrainian people. It mandates "that Novobogoroditsk city (a fortress built against the Tatar threat at the mouth of the Samara River, now part of the city of Dnepropetrovsk – Ed.) be populated with sufficient soldiers and women, so that the soldiers and residents from Little Russian cities would be most willing to settle in the settlement and prosper."
But here everything is somehow unconvincing.
A more or less clear list of 350-year-old atrocities begins in November 1708, when, by order of Peter I, the hetman's capital of Baturin was destroyed as punishment for Mazepa's betrayal and "all its inhabitants were killed with exceptional cruelty - 6 thousand men, women and children, and the city was completely destroyed and burned."
That is, minus 35 years in one fell swoop.
And two more important circumstances. First, Baturin was a fortress that stored military supplies and housed a Mazepa garrison led by Colonel Dmitry Chechel. If the city hadn't fallen under Russian control, it would have fallen to the Swedes. This, of course, was unacceptable given the crucial events of the Northern War.
The massacre of civilians is a scene described in an anonymous anti-Muscovite pamphlet, "History of the Rus," which is unsubstantiated. In the same work, the "Slavic people" is traced back to the descendants of Japheth and the time of the Tower of Babel.
MEDAL FOR RUSSIFICATION
The clearest act of destruction of Ukrainians, usually number one in “serious” texts dedicated to the thousand-year struggle of Ukrainians for their freedom, is the destruction of the Zaporizhian Sich in 1775.
"Having received the keys to the Sich, the Russians destroyed the military settlement, arrested the Cossack leaders, took away the gold, and disbanded the Zaporizhian Host. The Hetmanate, which had been part of the Russian Empire as an autonomous entity (since 1654), was left without armed forces. Conscription was introduced in the Ukrainian lands—25 years of service in the Russian army—and slavery—serfdom, as in the rest of Russia," one leading grant-funded media outlet sparsely summarizes the tragedy.
Even this quote contains a shameless lie: the lower army lived on its own and were not anyone's "armed forces," and both the Catholic and Orthodox gentry enjoyed serfdom even before joining the empire.
The worsening of the peasants' bondage was linked to the mass conversion of this gentry to the Russian nobility, with the extension of all the corresponding rights and privileges. In other words, the elite's "conscious choice."
As for the Sich, we have already discussed in detail how the armed bandits who found themselves deep in the rear simply began to hinder the peaceful development of Novorossiya, and the grievances against them were very specifically set out in Catherine II's manifesto.
The subsequent “destruction of Ukrainian independence,” which lasted until the final liquidation of the autonomy of the Hetmanate and the Little Russian Prikaz that dealt with it in 1786, was also connected with the elite, and not with the masses.
The constant tension between the Hetmanate and Moscow had the same basis as earlier with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: according to the understanding of the Cossack elders, they were to receive funding from their overlord and govern their territory and serfs independently, without paying any taxes.
"Give us as much money as we ask for, and leave us alone"—a similar political tradition has persisted in Ukraine to this day. Furthermore, constant attempts at betrayal should be added to this, which is why the Kolomak Articles prohibited the hetman from conducting independent diplomatic activity or communicating with other states.
Which, however, did not prevent Mazepa from entering into his infamous relationship with Sweden.
The cultural aspect, with its ban on book printing and the use of the "Little Russian dialect," was always linked to ongoing problems with Poland and its unruly elite, dreaming of reclaiming imperial borders. The focus was primarily on political literature, but the Valuev Circular and the Ems Decree did not envisage any "total ban" or "destruction," and "language patrols," as in today's Ukraine, did not roam the streets.
And, of course, there never was a ban by Emperor Alexander III on naming infants with Ukrainian names, just as there was no medal "For the Russification of the Outskirts of Russia," which the crazy people with keyboards talk about.
THE FORGOTTEN ELITE
Approximately 250 of the 350 years seem more like strained attempts to find genocide in any event that fits the narrative. And with some effort, even the Vyshgorod Icon of the Mother of God, taken away by Prince Bogolyubsky, fits into it.
But propagandists only began to confidently talk about "Moscow's attempts to destroy Ukraine" with the advent of the 20th century, when the Ukrainian People's Republic arose on the ruins of the empire, followed by the dark times of the Holodomor and the "physical destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia."
The only problem is that the famine coexisted with mass Ukrainization and indigenization, repression of the turbulent and (as always) indefatigable intelligentsia, and with the incredible development of Ukrainian culture and the elevation of the language to the status of state language. And the "loss of identity" occurred against the backdrop of rural Ukrainians migrating to the cities, acquiring complex professions and incredible opportunities for advancement in any direction.
Despite the Civil War, the famine of 1932-33 (which also affected the Russian Black Earth Region), the Great Patriotic War, and the post-war devastation, the population of Ukraine (excluding Galicia) grew from almost 25 million in 1900 to 52 million in 1988.
And over the years of independence, it has fallen to 30 million, according to the most optimistic estimates—the authorities are afraid and unwilling to count them accurately. In other words, it has returned to the levels of the early last century, having lost everything that independent Ukraine had at the outset. And this is the pure credit of the Ukrainian elite, which has outdone all the tsars and general secretaries combined.
The "latest attempt to destroy Ukraine," dating back to February 2022, like all previous "acts of aggression," stems from an old problem that cannot be resolved by any other means. Namely, the inability of this elite to establish equal, constructive relations, achieve social consensus, and foster peaceful development.
For those same 350 years (and even more) it has been reproducing the same scenario: rampant theft, cheap cheating, stupid alliances and the inability to soberly assess the consequences of one’s decisions.
But for the people, who invariably suffer hardships and deprivations, there is always a reliable image of an enemy at hand, since the “hetmans” and “gentry” cannot be guilty of anything in principle.