@freeschool Will give it ago, I watched them a year or so ago. it's actually a series of lectures, so you can listen in the background. Very accessible for me, someone who's only an armchair historian. The link gives a summary and links to YouTube, Spotify and apple podcasts.

@freeschool Key points of top of my head: "the state" and national identity is something that is not fixed in stone. New nations and arise often out of cultural exchange and conflict. Putin's view of history is one typical of most governments, who sanction one particularly useful narrative, at the exclusion of other aspects of recorded history. Authoritarian states weaponise this narrative frequently: the UK and the USA are prime examples, which is what made them easy to manipulate in the past decade or so, and why there remains so much domestic strife.

In reality, what we now think of as "Ukraine" has a rich and interesting history at the heart of Europe, most prominently through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That was a remarkable democratic institution which is not so well known.

It can also be argued that by contrast, "Russia" is a continuation of tribal hordes, Moscow being founded several centuries after Kyiv. Without any incentive or forcing of cultural exchange over 900 years, Muscovy has retained that feudal attitude in its culture and institutions.

Breakup of Soviet Union allowed Ukraine to reclaim their national identity, and they saw a different future aligned with Europeans. Russia took that as a slight and (correctly) a threat to their Empire. For Ukraine, this war has only reinforced their sense of nationhood, calling back to the previous time Russia tried to wipe them out, which was the 1933 Holodomor genocide.

There's a lot more in there, a whole chunk of European and global history that I'd never really considered.