Vladimir Putin’s speech on February 21 will go down in history for the most ominous of reasons. In announcing recognition of the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics, his address moreover provided a prelude to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that followed on Thursday. In the speech, Putin served up all manner of nationalistic, Great Russian resentment. Here we will focus on just one important aspect: his historical digression on the emergence of Ukraine — and the possible consequences this digression could have.

According to Putin, Ukraine was “for us” (he claimed to speak for the Russian people), “not just a neighboring country” but “an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. These are our friends, our relatives; not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members.” Modern Ukraine, however, was created entirely by Bolshevik, Communist Russia “after the October putsch,” as Putin called the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At the time of its greatest weakness, Putin said, Vladimir Lenin “met all the demands, all the wishes of the nationalists inside the country.”

But, he insisted, “in terms of the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples, the Leninist principles of state-building were not only a mistake, but far worse than a mistake.” Putin was here referring to the right to self-determination the Bolsheviks proclaimed for the nations of the Russian Empire, up to and including the right to secede. With the collapse of the USSR, Putin said, Ukrainian governments began “to build their statehood on the denial of everything that unites us, they tried to distort the consciousness and historical memory of millions of people, entire generations living in Ukraine.” But he further alleged that Ukraine has essentially no stable tradition of genuine statehood. Moreover, since 2014, he said, Ukraine has been under the political and economic protectorate of the West and has been “reduced to the level of a colony with a puppet regime.” He consistently maintained that Ukraine was a traditionless entity that had been arbitrarily separated from Russia. But the reality was and is different.