The Ukrainian world will force russia to break its predatory teeth

09 June 2022
 The Ukrainian world will force russia to break its predatory teeth

When there is some time between things, I always try to continue studying historical events in order to better understand today's events, including the war with the Russian invasion

Now the occupiers have focused on capturing the Ukrainian South and East, "selling", mainly to their internal consumers, an ephemeral ideology about the artificiality of Ukraine's modern borders, as one of the main arguments in the propaganda war of imperialists and Ukrainophobes against the modern Ukrainian state.

History shows that the Novorossia project has its roots in the first half of the 19th century. The concept was thrown into the political space in order to deny the role of the Zaporozhye Cossacks and other Ukrainian population in populating and economic development of the South and East of modern Ukraine. It was then that in St. Petersburg they worked on the creation of a "great Russian nation", for which it was necessary to Russianize Ukrainians, and not only them. The concept was a complete fake, born in a Russian test tube: they say, before the arrival of Russia, the territory of the modern Ukrainian South and East was a wasteland without settlements, cities, roads or economic activity.

Since those times, the politics of Moscow has been imbued with the spirit of the "Novorossiya" concept. This also applied to the USSR, an empire disguised as a communist system. In order to irrevocably destroy everything Ukrainian from the East and South, the communists spared no means. It is enough just to raise the terrible pages of the holodomor-genocide of 1932-33.

All the old-new concepts, both born in the 19th century and the more modern "Novorossiya-2014", and today's propagandistic tantrums of the Kremlin, do not withstand elementary verification of historical facts

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Many of them from time to time had an encroachment on settled and agricultural Ukraine. From time immemorial, Ukrainian elites saw it as their historical mission to displace all kinds of nomads from the Steppe, the territory between the Danube and the Don, conquered by the hordes.

Even with the arrival of the Tatars in the Steppe lands in the 13th century, Ukrainian influence on the Steppe lands did not weaken. At the end of the 15th century the southern borders of the Ukrainian lands were perceived as "to the shores of the Black Sea, where the mouth of the Dnieper is, to the borders of the Taurika and Tavani, the crossing of the Dnieper." The Ukrainian elite of that time steadfastly held to this position.

At the beginning of the 16th century, Ukrainian Cossacks joined the trials for influence on the Steppe. Their mastery of the steppe space became the most effective and adequate response of the Ukrainian world to the spontaneous attempts of the Asian invaders. First, the Cossacks achieved a balance regarding the influence of their Muslim neighbors, and later gained an advantage that opened the way for the Ukrainian population to adapt to the steppe lands.

The general map of Ukraine from the middle of the 17th century, created by the Frenchman Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan, outlined the lands between the line Brest - Kursk in the north, the southeastern foothills of the Carpathians, the mouth of the Danube and the Sea of ​​Azov. A special map of 1650, with a military purpose, added Lublin, Kyiv, Belz, Rus, Podil, Bratslav Voivodeships and Pokutty with Kholm region to Ukraine. The historical fact says that the Hetman of the Zaporizhzhya Army, Ivan Vyhovskyi, told the Swedish ambassador: the Cossacks are seeking "ancient Ukraine, or Russia, where there was a Greek faith and where there is still a language all the way to the Vistula." Such an understanding of Ukraine existed in the 18th century, and from it comes the understanding of Ukraine in the 19th century.

The second half of the 18th century. was the time of the expansion of Ukrainian territories and the formation of Slobid Ukraine. Ukrainians, led by the Cossacks, began to develop uninhabited lands to the east of modern Chernihiv Oblast and Poltava Oblast. Almost all the cities of Slobozhanshchyna were founded by Ukrainians: Sumy (1652), Kharkiv (1654), Zolochiv (1675), Vovchansk (1674), Lebedyn (1657), Okhtyrka (1654) and others.

Against the background of the Ukrainian space of Slobozhanshchyna, the settlements of Muscovites were isolated. Ukrainians made up almost 99% of the population of the Slobid region. But already then, civilizational differences between different communities were acutely felt in everything: customs, psychology, everyday life, language. The conflicts of the situation with the Russians were a typical picture of everyday life at that time.

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The beginning of the 19th century. was of fundamental importance for the settlement of the modern East and South of Ukraine. Peasants from different parts of Ukraine, under the banner of the Cossacks, established their final dominance in the developed southern and eastern lands and made them part of the Ukrainian ethnic territory. In addition, the Zaporozhians began to establish their own settlements in the Crimea. At the end of the 18th century they settled on the outskirts of Bakhchisaray, Hezlov (Evpatoria), Kafa (Feodosia). The Cossacks opposed the Russian expansion by the quick and effective development of the eastern and southern regions, and demonstrated their organized strength to uninvited colonists inspired by the Russian government.

Thanks to the efforts of the Cossacks, the Northern Black Sea region finally acquired a Ukrainian content. Even the liquidation of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks by Catherine II did not radically change anything in these lands, because everything that Russia did there was based on the Zaporizhzhya foundation and on Ukrainian human and material resources. The economy of the region, settlements, and communication routes developed on the infrastructure created by the Zaporozhians and on farms