Russia's War Against Ukraine OP-ED

Peter Dickinson: Gulf between Putin’s Russia and democratic Ukraine

By Peter Dickinson.

Published Sept. 21, 2021. Updated Sept. 24 at 1:36 pm

A woman casts her ballot at a polling station set up at Moscow's Kazansky railway station during the last day of the three-day parliamentary election on Sept. 19, 2021.

Photo by AFP

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears genuinely convinced that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” As he made perfectly clear in his lengthy July 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin believes the two countries remain inextricably bound together by a common past and regards their current state of separation as a temporary and artificial aberration.