Konwersatorium im. J.Pniewskiego i L.Infelda
sala 0.06, ul. Pasteura 5
2026-06-08 (11:00) 
dr Oleksandr Avramchuk (Faculty of History, University of Warsaw)
From “the Gathering of the Rus’ Lands” to the “Russkiy Mir'': The Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine
In the summer of 2021, a long article by Vladimir Putin on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” appeared on the Kremlin website. It was not a text written only for historians or only for Russian readers. A few months later, Russian troops were already massed along Ukraine’s borders. To understand the origins of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, we must also ask about history – or, more precisely, about what Russian elites call history. This lecture will examine why Ukraine occupies such a special place in the Russian political imagination. Why does Ukraine appear in Putin’s speeches not as an ordinary neighbouring state, but as part of an allegedly “lost” Russian whole? Where did the belief come from that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” that Ukrainian statehood is artificial, and that Ukrainian distinctiveness was invented or sustained by external enemies – Poland, Austria-Hungary, Germany, the United States, or NATO? To answer these questions, we will go back to the Muscovite idea of the “gathering of the Rus’ lands,” the nineteenth-century concept of the “triune Russian nation,” the Soviet view of Ukraine, and the contemporary ideology of the Russkiy Mir. Poland will receive particular attention as well: in the Russian imagination, it has often been portrayed as a force supposedly seeking to “tear” Ukraine away from its natural bond with Russia.
