Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

The story of the Vikings who travelled to Eastern Europe is just as thrilling as a story of those who headed west.

It's also just as important,

still being relevant today because of its deep-rooted connections to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

But what exactly are those long-lasting links? Historian and author of Vikings in the East,

Martin Wittuck, examines this complicated history in a conversation with James Osborne.

Martin, your book is a deep exploration of how the story of the Vikings is interconnected with the earliest origins of the states of Russia and Ukraine and the very live

ramifications of those connections today. In 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President

Putin published an essay on those historical connections between Russia and Ukraine, and this purported history would then go

on to serve as one of his justifications for the invasion of Ukraine. Before we get to the Vikings,

could you provide an overview of that historical claim made by President Putin in 2021?

Putin's claim, as shown in his essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,

which is its title, basically claims that because of a shared origin, that the Ukrainians

and the Russians are one people and that any division of them into two sovereign states

is an artificial modern construct.

And in so doing, he referenced the ancient Rus,

the Norse founders of the state of Kiven Rus,

as his basic foundation story. Now, this wasn't new.

In 2015, when seeking to justify his annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, he said,

Crimea has sacred meaning for Russia, like the temple, mount for Jews and Muslims. And Crimea is the spiritual source of the formation of the multifaceted,

but monolithic, that's his word, Russian state.

It was on this spiritual soil that our ancestors first and forever recognized their nationhood.

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