The treaty of Pereyaslav

[Cypress]

Putin's attempted conquest of Ukraine was never directly about NATO.

NATO was founded in 1952. This Russo-Ukranian war has roots which go back to 1654.

The cossacks and Orthodox Christians of Eastern Ukraine rebelled against their Polish overlords, and secured Russian support for their cause by swearing an oath of allegiance to the tsar.

350 years later, Russian nationalist still consider Eastern Ukraine, and importantly Kiev, to be part and parcel of an Orthodox Russian motherland. While they wouldn't mind making all of Ukraine a vassal state, they probably could stomach the Catholic west of Ukraine, with it's Polish background, to retain some of it's autonomy.

What Was the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav?

And why does Vladimir Putin keep talking about it?

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/03/explainer-what-was-the-1654-treaty-of-pereyaslav-a78491

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[Cypress]

If we really want to understand the Russo-Ukranian war, we have to ignore the barely educated morons who blame it on NATO, and we have to understand history.

Master Sun Tzu said that you have to understand the true motivations of your opponent.

In the 1990s, it wasn’t just the Russian military and politicians who found it difficult to accept Ukraine as a sovereign nation. The dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the “talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since the ninth century’’ a “recently invented falsehood.” He condemned the “cruel” partition of Ukraine and Russia and proposed a “Russian Union” be created comprising Russia (minus the Caucasus), Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan.

This failure to accept Ukrainian independence hails, in part, from a 368-year-old treaty that few historians had paid much attention to over the years: the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav.