“There was no Ukraine in the Russian Empire,” he [Putin] declared. The Russian dictator went on to repeat many of his most notorious historical distortions, including the claim that Ukraine had been artificially created by Vladimir Lenin and the early Soviet authorities “at the expense of southern Russian lands.”

Medvedev remained vague about the scope of Russia’s territorial claims towards Ukraine. On one hand, he hinted that the Ukrainian state should be dismantled completely, commenting that its very existence was “fatal” to the country’s population and that “Ukraine is definitely Russia”. On the other hand, he ‘limited’ Russia’s claims to Ukraine’s southern and eastern regions. He illustrated his point with a map showing Russia stretching across Ukraine’s entire Black Sea coast all the way to the borders with Romania and Moldova (‘Novorossiya’) and across Chernihiv and Kharkiv oblasts located east of the Dnipro river (‘Malorossiya’), as well as Cherkasy oblast, which is located west of the Dnipro river.

The only reason they’re not claiming the whole of Ukraine at the moment is because they clearly lack the capability to take it and it benefits their info ops to portray Ukraine as the party that is unwilling to negotiate. It’s vranyo, a lie that nobody is supposed to actually believe but is used because it is convenient.