This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week we mark a grim milestone,

the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Days before the war began,

Russian President Vladimir Putin recited an old essay on the quote, historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,

wherein he rewrote the past.

And this week started with President Putin quoting Lenin in saying that Ukraine was a fake country created by Lenin.

President Putin laying out his case that Ukraine is always part of Russia historically,

cultural, ethnic, religious ties that go way back in history,

that it's not a real country that is naturally part of a bigger Russia.

A notion featured heavily on Russian news to justify the war, because Kiev is the mother of all

Russian cities. But this is not new fiction. In fact, Mikhail Ziegar has traced it back at least as far as

the Middle Ages. He's a Russian investigative journalist and founding editor-in-chief of the independent

Russian TV channel, Raine, suspended for its war coverage and now based in the Netherlands.

He's also the author of the book, War and Punishment.

Actually, when I spoke to him back in 2023, he told me that the history starts in a Europe that would be familiar to fans of Game of Thrones,

with empires and religions vying for power and for land.

My mission was to start writing completely different version of Russian history,

because unfortunately we have never had any kind of history of Russian people or

peoples of Russia. It has always been written by official historians who were serving the state

and they were much more propagandists than historians.

Your book explores seven myths about the relationship between Ukraine and Russia.

We won't get to them all, but we'll start with the most crucial one probably, unity,

which was penned in a paper called Synopsis by a German monk 300 years ago.

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