Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro broke down the complicated history of Ukraine in the latest “Facts” episode, pointing out the flaws in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for invasion.
Shapiro began the episode, released Saturday, by talking about Putin’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson, where Putin said that his reason for invading Ukraine was based on historical claims to the land. In the episode, Shapiro analyzes Putin’s claims and lines them up to the historic record.
“Putin’s claim is that Ukraine is inherently Russian territory,” Shapiro said. “That’s a claim that requires two pieces of support. First, the idea that Ukraine is historically Russian controlled and Russian populated. And second, that Ukraine today has no claim to its independence.”
Shapiro explained how a state formed in the late 9th century known as Kyivan Rus which included some of today’s Russia, today’s Belarus, and part of today’s Ukraine. This state lasted for about 300 years before it broke into a series of loose principalities.
After the Mongols destroyed the region in 1349, Poland and Lithuania partitioned the territory now known as Ukraine and the Ukrainian language began to develop.
For the next several hundred years the area became entangled in a series of European and Russian conflicts with different parts of modern Ukraine being controlled by different powers. During this time a sense of Ukrainian nationalism began to develop, including in parts of Ukraine controlled by Russia.
After World War I, Ukraine was divided up between Russia and Poland, which was generally how things stood until the end of World War II when it became part of the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union dissolved, it became independent in 1991.
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“Those borders of Ukraine were essentially set until 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and occupied the Donbass region. So as you can see, the history of the region is pretty complicated,” Shapiro said. “A lot of moving borders, a lot of territorial claims. But Putin claims that because Ukraine’s borders have moved over time, because its territory and population was divided repeatedly, because Russia occupied some parts of Ukraine for some swaths of time, this means Ukraine has never existed.”
Shapiro noted that many Ukrainians have wished to maintain their independence despite Putin’s claims.
“The Putin argument for the invasion of Kiev and the dissolution of Ukraine as an independent entity are not only wrong historically, they are highly likely to lead to continued bloodshed and warfare in the region,” Shapiro said.
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