To justify his designs on Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly referred to what Russians call the Kievan Rus. He sees this Orthodox medieval state which centred around the contemporary Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, as the common point of origin for both Ukrainians and Russians. To his mind, this means the Ukrainian people are Russian. And he believes his mission is to restore the unity of the Russian lands, as a precondition for Russia being a great power.
Ukrainians, meanwhile, refer to the same place as the Kyivan Rus and the cradle of their own nation. These are not Russian lands but the “lands of the Rus”. The word “Rus” derives from the old east Slavic word Роусь (which reads as “Rous’” when you convert from Cyrillic into Roman letters). The word refers to the land of a people called Rus: the common ancestors of today’s Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Throughout history, there have been Russian rulers who have believed in their mission to “gather the Russian lands”, the land of the Rus. Others have simply used the idea to justify Russia’s hegemonic ambitions.
