In eastern Ukraine's Donbas, Putin draws on an old playbook

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/21/europe/russia-donbas-putin-playbook-hodge-hnk-intl/index.html

Professional historians will have their hands full for a long time deconstructing and debunking some of Putin's historical generalizations. But if you'll pardon the distillation, it runs like this: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks created the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; Joseph Stalin expanded it after World War II by annexing territory that previously belonged to Poland, Romania and Hungary; and then Nikita Khrushchev (who led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War), for some unknown reason, took away the Crimean Peninsula from Russia and gifted it to Ukraine. Et voila! Modern Ukraine is merely a fiction.

It's easy enough to disagree, and thousands of Ukrainians have fought and died for a country that Putin dismisses as some kind of administrative and territorial concoction of Soviet administrators. So what does that have to do with Donbas? Putin's tendentious historical lecture on Monday seemed to barely touch on the current crisis. But the ghosts of history, it seems, still haunt the Russian president.