Historians come together to wrest Ukraine’s past out of Russia’s shadow

The St Sophia cathedral in Kyiv. Climate, geography and environmental questions will form a part of the project’s focus. Photograph: eFesenko/Alamy

The opening salvo in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year was not a rocket or a missile. Rather, it was an essay.

Vladimir Putin’s On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in summer 2021, ranged over 1,000 years of history in its 7,500 words to assert that the two countries are “one people”.