Yves here. This article provides a useful complement to Putin’s many remarks about the history of Ukraine from a Russia perspective. It examines the forces that led to the formation of Ukraine as a “self-constructed identity” yet why it was left out until very late in the process of national formation along perceived or actual ethnic lines.

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, Ex-University Professor, Research Fellow at the www.geostrategy.rs” rel=”nofollow”>Center for Geostrategic Studies, Belgrade, Serbia

An imagined community

Ukraine is an Eastern European territory that was originally part of the western part of the Russian Empire and the eastern portion of the Polish Kingdom in the mid-17th century (the division according to the 1667 Peace Treaty of Andrusovo). That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and