Before Vladimir Putin launched the insane depravity that is his invasion of Ukraine, he gave

a long national address that purported to tell the history of Ukraine and Russia, which

to his mind justified the coming reconquest.

Ukraine is not just a neighbor Putin said it is an integral part of our history, culture

and spiritual space.

Putin watchers say that in his isolation he has become something of an amateur historian,

diving deep into the legends of the pre-Russian empire and emerging with a warped national

mythology he is now infusing with his own, embittered contempt for Ukraine and the European

continent to its west.

It's a fraught and contested history and one that isn't yet over.

To help sort through a less mutated strain of the region's history, I spoke with Vladimir

Ischenko, a Ukrainian sociologist and a research fellow at the Institute of Slavic studies.

He was heavily active in a number of Ukrainian new left initiatives and was a founding editor

of the left wing intellectual publication Comments, Journal of Social Criticism.

His academic work focuses on the Maidan uprising of 2014, but he spoke to us too about the

development of the state and Ukrainian culture over the last thousand years.

I began by asking him a question that's about as trivial as anything imaginable given

the unfolding invasion, but I've wondered why we in the west have been told to move

from the Ukraine to just Ukraine and from Kiev to Kiev.

And I've suspected it had something to do with Ukrainian nationalism and state formation.

And Vladimir said that that was roughly right and that there's a tiny faction of Kiev

Kiev partisans who carry an extraordinary amount about the pronunciation, but nobody

...