President Vladimir Putin made extensive reference to tsarist Russian, Soviet and postcommunist history on Monday in a speech that sought to justify the Kremlin’s second territorial dismemberment of Ukraine since 2014. The speech was notable for its distortions of that history and for a number of glaring omissions of the facts surrounding the emergence of Ukrainian national consciousness and independence.

Putin kicked things off by asserting that “since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians”. His purpose was to deny the very notion of a Ukrainian nationhood separate from that of Russia.

Yet the ancestors of modern Ukrainians were known by various names up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The tsarist empire labelled them “Little Russians”, but those in the Austro-Hungarian empire — now an area of western Ukraine, where many were and remain Catholics — were called Ruthenians. In the 19th century, with the rise under tsarism of patriotic intellectuals and writers such as Taras Shevchenko, the national poet, the idea of a modern Ukrainian identity began to spread.