Putin rewrites history with rambling and ranting speech on Ukraine

For months western analysts and spies have been debating over Vladimir Putin’s state of mind.

Was he the same shrewd, rational international operator who managed to convince George W. Bush that he was “straightforward and trustworthy” in 2001?

Was he the same deft strategist who coaxed Barack Obama to forgo his “red line” on Syria after it used chemical weapons against civilians, only to place Moscow as the ultimate arbiter of the country’s fate?

Or, over the last couple years of pandemic-induced isolation, had he become a more isolated and volatile authoritarian acting on impulse?

The events of the last day have all but settled the question.

It was not so much his long-anticipated recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions now under the occupation of pro-Kremlin separatists as independent states, but the lengthy and unhinged speech that preceded it late on Monday.

In the rambling televised monologue, Mr Putin played amateur historian, rewriting the history of eastern Europe and denigrating Ukraine in order to justify his Sudetenland-like invasion of the country’s east in order to “protect” ethnic Russians.

“Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood,” he claimed, neglecting the fact that its path to statehood over the centuries had been derailed by repeated invasions by foreign empires, especially Russia.

Mr Putin accused Ukraine “mindlessly emulating foreign models,” as if Russia itself had not borrowed constitutional and political norms from other nations.

He insisted the government was not acting “with the interests of the Ukrainian people,” 92 per cent of whom voted for independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991. Today, more than 60 per cent want to join Nato and nearly as many if not more want to join the European Union.

Mr Putin made references to Catherine the Great, and other aspects of the Russian Empire’s past glories.

He repeatedly peddled falsehoods, claiming Vladmir Lenin “created” Ukraine out of Russian territory and that Kiev was seeking “nuclear weapons.”

The Russian president said that Ukraine’s leadership had squandered the bounty that it inherited from the Soviet Union and even the Russian Empire, ignoring Joseph Stalin’s engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainianes in the 1930s and the Chernobyl accident that turned a massive swath of northern Ukraine into a nuclear no-go zone.

At times, while he was describing his view of Ukraine, Mr Putin essentially described Russia under his own 22-year reign.

“Its electoral and other political procedures just serve as a cover, a screen for the redistribution of power and property between various oligarchic clans,” he said. “Politicians, journalists, and public activists were harassed and publicly humiliated. A wave of violence swept Ukrainian cities, including a series of high-profile and unpunished murders.”

By the time Mr Putin’s blood-curdling speech was finished, even some of the president’s most obsequious defenders were silenced.

Ukrainians themselves were aghast.

“The speech was clearly meant to be an insult to Ukrainians, so I felt insulted,” Jane Lytvynenko, a Ukrainian-Canadian researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a specialist on Russian disinformation, said in an interview.

“It was an attempt to rewrite history in ways that were totally dismissive of reality. It was also very clearly personal. All of it was with deep contempt toward Ukraine that he didn’t hide,” she told The Independent.

Across the world, the speech set off shock waves.

Kristina Kvien, the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, called it “​​delusional, reflecting a warped vision reminiscent, not of a global leader, but of Europe’s worst authoritarians”.

Jailed Russian dissident Alexey Navalny called it “a truly insane speech” and likened it to a “grandfather getting drunk at a family celebration and annoying everyone with his stories about how world politics actually works”.

Bill Browder, a longtime critic of the Russian president, called it “the most unhinged, most disconnected from reality and most dangerous speech I’ve ever seen” from Mr Putin.

Within hours of the speech and Mr Putin’s decree ordering troops into eastern Ukraine, Germany had halted its certification of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that was set to be a windfall for Moscow.

Other Western nations unleashed a wave of sanctions on Russia.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was defiant. “We are on our land, and we are not afraid of anybody or anything,” he said. “We owe nothing to nobody.”

But there was palpable fear. In Kiev, some residents began pinning their children’s blood types on them before sending them off to school. “Make no mistake,” Olga Tokariuk, a Ukrainian journalist wrote on Twitter. “This speech was perceived as a declaration of war on Ukraine.”

Even leaders of countries with little hostility toward Russia were unnerved by his speech and his subsequent decree. Turkey called it “unacceptable. China and Iran, among Russia’s closest allies, cautiously declined to take sides—likely spooked about how Putin’s aggressive drive to redraw maps could set a precedent for destabilising other parts of the world.

In an eloquent speech that touched upon Africa’s attempts to wrest free of the borders imposed on it by former colonial masters, ​​Martin Kimani, Kenya’s envoy to the United Nations Security Council said launching a war to reclaim ethnic lands was never the answer.

“We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires,” he said, “in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.