Niels Drost, a research fellow at the Security Division and the Center for Research on Russia and Eastern Europe (CREEC) at the Netherlands’ Clingendael Institute, stated that Putin systematically uses his own selective version of history as a tool to justify aggression against Ukraine and to build support for his actions both within Russia and abroad.
He said this in an exclusive comment to a Ukrinform correspondent in The Hague.
“Putin claims that Ukrainians, as ‘Little Russians,’ are one with the larger Russian people through a 1,000-year history. He uses his version of the past to claim that most of Ukraine is supposedly historical Russian territory, and that, in his view, Ukraine has no right to exist as a sovereign state. We need to understand what is going on in his mind and exactly how he uses history as a tool to promote these narratives. Because, using historical facts, one can also tell a completely different story about Ukraine as a free, sovereign, democratic state and about how it was formed precisely because of this history,” he said.
According to him, “history is a powerful weapon. Putin uses it to mobilize Russian society and create a compelling narrative for the outside world, which is unfamiliar with this history. For Ukrainians, this is a deeply personal issue—it is also their history. But Americans or Europeans often do not know it well enough. This became particularly clear, for example, during the interview with Tucker Carlson, when Putin spent half an hour presenting his version of history to justify his position. To an American or broader Western audience, this can sound quite complex and convincing.”
