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...So on Thursday, after visiting an exhibition dedicated to Peter the Great's 350-year anniversary, Putin remarked on how little had changed over the intervening centuries.

"Peter I fought the Northern War for 21 years," Putin remarked. "It seemed then, fighting with Sweden, that he took something away ... but he wasn't taking anything away, he was returning!"

Putin added that Peter I founded Russia's imperial capital -- St. Petersburg -- on territory taken from Sweden during that war.

"When he laid the new capital, not one country of Europe recognized this territory as Russia, they all recognized it as Sweden's," Putin said. "And there, since time immemorial, the slavs had lived alongside the Finno-Urgic peoples, and this territory was located under the control of the Russian state."

It's another dubious history lesson from a leader who launched his war against Ukraine with two lengthy lectures and an essay expounding on his view of the circumstances that led to the creation of modern Ukraine, from Kyivan Rus to 1991.

But Putin inserted another reference in his Wednesday remarks: Peter the Great's campaign to take Narva, a city that's currently part of Estonia. ...