Ukraine and Russia: What Caused the War?

In which John explores historical and political context to understand what caused the Russian government's invasion of Ukraine, and how we arrived at this awful now. There is a LOT of misinformation in comments, so why not read directly from SOURCES? But first, CORRECTIONS:

The official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian. "National languages" as a phrase was confusing. I should've just said that 30% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language. Also, the etymology of "Ukraine" is not settled as "borderlands." Many Ukrainian linguists argue that the etymology of Ukraine comes from words meaning "In My Land," not "borderlands." Thirdly, I misspelled Kyiv as Kiev. If I made further mistakes, let me know and I'll amend here.

Now, SOURCES:

Putin's claims that Ukraine never had "real statehood" have been stated in both essays and speeches. Here's some coverage of one such speech: https://time.com/6150046/ukraine-stat...

And a fact-check of the same speech: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...

If you want to read Vladimir Putin's essay where he expounds his theory that Ukraine "was created entirely by Russia," you can read Putin's meandering, surreal, ahistorical essay about it here: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president... (This is an insecure site owned by the Kremlin so bear that in mind)

This article goes into far more detail about Putin's theory of Ukraine's illegitimacy than I could cover in the video: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/wo...

You can learn about the Holodomor here: https://www.britannica.com/event/Holo... or at this thoroughly researched wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

And about Stalin's forced deportation policies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populat...

Putin's reference to assault in the context of invading Ukraine: https://www.businessinsider.com/putin...

The 1991 Independence referendum results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Uk...

Huge thanks to Rosianna Halse Rojas for editing the script and help sourcing images.