DISINFO: Ukraine is an artificial state created by Soviet leaders
SUMMARY
Modern Ukraine is a country that was artificially created by the actions of the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin after World War II.
After the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia and another war with Poland, Warsaw regained control over large swaths of western Ukraine. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government established a Soviet Ukraine that had never existed before.
After the Second World War, Ukraine, in addition to the territories that had belonged to Poland, received part of the territories that had previously belonged to Hungary and Romania. So, there is every reason to affirm that Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin’s will.
RESPONSE
This statement was made by Putin during his interview with Carlson Tucker on February 2024. Putin’s is using a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative denigrating the history of Ukraine and its statehood, in order to question its sovereignty and justify Russia's attempts to illegally annex the temporarily occupied territories in Ukraine.
The history of Ukraine dates back to the era of the Kyivan Rus’ in the 9th-13th centuries. A fully independent Ukraine only emerged in the 20th century, after long periods of successive domination by Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In the aftermath of World War I and the disintegration of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires two states were created: the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) and the West Ukrainian People's Republic. They merged into a unified state - the Ukrainian People's Republic - on 22 January 1919.
Under Lenin's leadership at the beginning of the 20th century, Ukraine was occupied by the Bolsheviks and for decades was under communist control. When the Soviet Union began to unravel in 1990–91, the legislature of the Ukrainian SSR declared sovereignty (July 16, 1990) and then outright independence (August 24, 1991). With the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, Ukraine gained full independence.
The EUvsDisinfo database contains other examples of this disinformation narrative, for instance, that Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin, that Ukraine was artificially created by the Bolsheviks, that Ukrainian statehood is an inheritance from Soviet Ukraine, or that Ukraine never had independence before joining the Soviet Union.