"There is no Ukraine": Fact-Checking the Kremlin's Version of Ukrainian History (July 2020)
blogs.lse.ac.uk

... True to form, within days of his dismissal he stirred up fresh controversy by publicly questioning the existence of Ukrainian statehood. In an interview published on 26 February, Surkov stated that "there is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainian-ness. That is, a specific disorder of the mind.

An astonishing enthusiasm for ethnography, driven to the extreme." Surkov went on to claim that Ukraine is "a muddle instead of a state. [ ... ] But there is no nation. There is only a brochure, The Self-Styled Ukraine', but there is no Ukraine."

"Ukraine is not even a state"

Surkov is not the first Russian official to make such a claim. The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership.

Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that "Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!"

In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians "are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus' is our common source and we cannot live without each other."

Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions.

As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians "are one and the same people", and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference.

Similarly, Russia's then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been "no state" in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis. ...