Hello and welcome to this special episode of epox where I should be talking all about the history of Russia and Ukraine and I am joined by the brilliant apostolic majesty.

How are you sir?

I'm good. I mean we had a bit of an incident in terms of being able to arrange this, but no, I'm glad we're finally here and always glad to be on the show and to talk about this topic so thank you once again for having me on.

No no it's absolutely our pleasure. So a few weeks ago

Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin.

And Vladimir Putin used that example.

They're talking all about Ukraine, of course.

And Putin used that example, that opportunity to sort of go back to the ninth

century to talk about relations between Ukraine and Russia or even using those words are problematic.

Now there was some backlash on in the mainstream media on the BBC and Twitter and people like Tom Holland and whatever

claiming Putin was just factually wrong about all sorts of things and you

did what I thought was a superb stream and you did say a few times it was off the

cuff it didn't seem like it was off the cuff it was off the cuff it was a great

example of somebody that's got a

fantastic amount of knowledge. You've got far more than I have, so I'm hoping to

pick your brain in this. But Putin decided to go back to the ninth century and

to go back to the 9th century and go back to Rurik in the 860s and sort of start his

story start his narrative there I think one of the things overall you were saying

is that Putin might have been wrong here or there especially in the more modern era in sort of the 20th century era, but what he wasn't necessarily all that factually inaccurate but what he was

do was conflating things and there was some sort of few lies by a mission here and

there so I thought we could just dig into it if that's all right with you. So one of the first things I wanted to say or ask and it's a giant question which probably hasn't really got a straightforward answer but sort of where does Russia as a state begin? I'm sure there's all sorts of arguments,

different people would argue different things. Where does Ukraine begin? I mean, so for example, let's just start here. Would you start the story of Russia,

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