Hello and welcome to Battleground Ukraine with me, Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

As well as news and analysis, our aim is to bring some perspective

to what is a very complicated historical situation. We're going to do our best to try and

explain the Russian mindset as well as the Ukrainian. And helping us gain some idea of the

complexities and contradictions today is Professor Alando Feige's, who has very kindly agreed to talk to us.

He's a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, where he's built up a reputation as one

of our foremost historians of Russia with a deep knowledge and understanding of its history and culture.

His latest book, The Story of Russia, is out next week. I asked him about how Russia's

historical relationship with Ukraine explains the war, how he thinks the conflict is going,

and how he thinks it might end.

Putin's chief justification for the invasion of Ukraine is that it is not a real country,

as you put it in the book, but a historic part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow's

heartlands from the West. What is the historical basis for such a claim?

Well, this comes from Putin's article published by the Kremlin in July

2021 entitled on the relations between the Russians and Ukrainians, in which he argued that ever

since the founding of Kiev and Rus, which is essentially a 19th century term for the state formed

in the 9th century,

arguably by Slavs, some say by Viking marauders, others say by Asiatic tribes.

So definitely the reality is that Keevan Rousse was probably a multi-ethnic configuration.

But for Putin in that article, it's the foundation of the modern Russian state, therefore the Soviet Union, therefore the Russian Federation as the successor of that imperial entity.

And in that reading of history for Putin, Ukraine or little Russia, as it was called in

the imperial discourse of the 18th and 19th century, was just, as you say, a borderland of greater

...