Aggressors may initiate the creation and mass dissemination of artificial historical concepts designed to substantiate their claim to foreign territories. Constructing a new historical canon, in which facts are distorted and the chronology of events is tailored to the interests of the metropole, allows the aggressor to retroactively legalize the occupation, convincing both its own population and the local one of the historical inevitability and legality of the absorption.
The government of the Tsardom of Muscovy fabricated historical narratives to provide legal justification for the invasion of new territories: historian Michael Khodarkovsky points out that in diplomatic correspondence officials deliberately constructed fictitious claims that the Indigenous peoples of the Caucasus had allegedly, since ancient times, been Muscovite "subjects in the Riazan region, who then fled from Riazan and settled in the mountains"[1].
For the ideological justification of the seizure, the Muscovite authorities received a ready-made historical canon: "the 'SYNOPSIS,' 'Synopsis, or a Brief Collection from Various Chroniclers on the Origin of the Slaveno-Rossian People' – a historical work first published by the printing house of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra (1674)"[2] – the book constructed a shared "Slaveno-Rossian" past, legitimizing Moscow's rule over Kyiv retroactively.
The government of the Russian Empire fabricated historical accounts to provide legal justification for invasion: historian Michael Khodarkovsky points out that in 1748 and in the 1770s officials deliberately constructed fictitious claims that the Indigenous peoples of the Caucasus had allegedly been Christians in the past, in order to contest the claims of other empires and "legitimize their efforts at their 're-Christianization'"[3].
On the pedestal of the Khmelnytsky monument (1888) the empire cast a programmatic statement about the past: on the front side stood the phrase "We will to be under the tsar of the east, the Orthodox one," attributed to the Pereiaslav Rada, and on the right - the imperial formula "To Bohdan Khmelnytsky – one and indivisible Russia"[4]. Brought together, they presented the events of 1654 as a voluntary and final choice in favor of a single Russian state, and the entire history of the Hetmanate as the road to that choice.
The construction of a new Soviet-imperial historical canon to supplant the Ukrainian past: "from the late 1930s a thesis took hold in the historical scholarship of the USSR," proclaimed in the works of B. Grekov, K. Huslystyi, and F. Yastrebov, "of Kyivan Rus as the 'common cradle' of the history of the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian peoples," and "in 1939 B. Grekov advanced the proposition of the ethnic unity of the 'Rus people' in the era of Kyivan Rus"[5]. This scheme displaced M. Hrushevsky's conception and denied the independence of Ukraine's history.
A state campaign to construct a historical myth: the "Theses on the 300th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia," approved by the CPSU Central Committee, declared that "by this historic act was completed the long struggle of the freedom-loving Ukrainian people against foreign enslavers for reunification with the Russian people in a single Russian state"[6] – the annexation of 1654 was retroactively rewritten as the goal and outcome of a national struggle.
The publication of the manifesto "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" (July 2021), constructing a pseudo-historical myth: "Russians and Ukrainians are one people, a single whole," while modern borders are declared the result of the fact that "the Bolsheviks' actions in severing from Russia its historical territories are not considered a criminal act"[7]. The same article describes how Lenin personally "persuaded" the leaders of the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih republic "to act within Soviet Ukraine," and how the Central Committee resolved "to create at the congress 'one government for all of Ukraine'"[7]. On the eve of the invasion the thesis was taken to its limit: in his address of February 21, 2022 Putin declared that "modern Ukraine was entirely and wholly created by Russia, or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, communist Russia," and called the country "Ukraine named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" - "He is its author and architect"[8].