Kyiv, Kyiv, Kyiv

This is a quick one. Wage slavery and all that.

Check out this Gone Medieval podcast episode on the history of Kyiv with Slavic history professor Dr. Olenka Pevney from the University of Cambridge.

To put the Russian invasion of Ukraine in perspective, imagine the United States of America decided to invade England on the pretext that we were once an English colony and some of us speak English or a language based on English. Now we should take Britain back. And the first places we pulverize are Oxford and Manchester.

You’re probably scratching your heads right now. The history of Eastern Europe is long and somewhat complex but basically it boils down to Russia invading Ukraine because Ukraine is the motherland.

In other words, that is probably NOT the reason Russia is invading Ukraine. It’s not a Tsarist wet dream to get the band back together because Ukraine was only loosely affiliated with Russia for centuries. It was actually once part of the Lithuanian-Polish federation while Muscovites were the tax collectors for the eastern Mongol Empire.

Taking over Ukraine is a Soviet wet dream. And mostly only Putin’s.