Announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine late last month, Vladimir Putin offered a detailed presentation of his vision of the world — and of history. The Russian president explained that Ukrainians do not exist, that their identity is a mere invention, and that the Ukrainian state is a mistake. More than that, he cast it as an illegitimate creation, an act of theft against Russia.

Putin had special venom for Vladimir Lenin and his conception of the Soviet Union as a federal state — painting this as a time bomb that contributed to the collapse of the USSR, “the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century.” He was also frank about his sympathies for Joseph Stalin, since, in renouncing Lenin’s ideas, he had been able to build “a strictly centralized and totally unitary state” within the borders of the old tsarist empire. Putin criticized Stalin only for not having revised Leninist principles more thoroughly — that is, for not having gotten rid of the Soviet republics’ formal autonomy.

Even among those who do not question Ukraine’s historical right to be an independent state, it is commonly assumed that its internationally recognized borders are, in essence, artificial. Many do not question Putin’s claims that the southeastern regions of Ukraine were “stolen” from Russia for Ukraine’s benefit. Since 2014, Putin has claimed that these “historically Russian” regions were attached to Ukraine in the 1920s. But does this really have anything to do with the historical facts?