In “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published on the Kremlin’s website on July 12, 2021, Vladimir Putin wrote that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people, a single whole.” That essay supplied a ready-made script for dismissing a cross-border assault as an internal family affair.
The Essay That Laid the Groundwork
Putin insisted that Ukraine’s borders were artificial. Its independence, he claimed, rested on a “historical mistake.” Ukrainian statehood, he added, was a project manipulated by outside powers. The 5,000-word essay named no Ukrainian leader as legitimate unless subordinated to Moscow.
It appeared five months after Russia’s military began massing near Ukraine’s eastern border. That was seven months before the February 24, 2022, invasion. By framing sovereignty as a family quarrel, Putin supplied a ready-made script. It let him dismiss a cross-border assault as an internal affair.
“Civil War” as a Rhetorical Weapon
On February 24, 2022, missiles struck Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. Putin told Russian television the goal was to end a “civil war” among “one people.” That phrase erased the 1991 border and the 2014 annexation of Crimea in a single rhetorical stroke.
A cross-border assault involving over 150,000 troops became, in his framing, a domestic police action inside a single historical community. He used “civil war” not to describe actual fighting between Ukrainians. Instead, he redefined Ukraine’s armed resistance as an internal Russian dispute.
By casting the invasion as intervention in a family quarrel, Putin denied Ukraine the status of a sovereign state defending its territory.
The label also implied that Kyiv’s government, not Moscow’s army, had broken the peace.
Denying Civilian Deaths
In April 2022 Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russian forces could not have struck civilian targets in Ukraine. Ukrainians and Russians are “the same people,” he said. That phrasing converted documented deaths in Bucha and Mariupol into internal losses.
It was as if a family dispute had turned violent, and no outside observer should count the casualties as war crimes. Peskov used the same line to deflect satellite imagery of mass graves. He also used it for the flattened Drama Theatre in Mariupol, where hundreds of civilians had sheltered.
Calling the invasion a local conflict let the Kremlin deny artillery strikes on apartment blocks, maternity wards, and evacuation corridors. It did so without addressing each documented case. Under that logic, a full-scale assault with tanks, cruise missiles, and 190,000 troops became a domestic police action. Every Ukrainian death was reclassified as the cost of restoring unity among one people.
Annexation as “Homecoming”
On 30 September 2022, Putin read the annexation text in the Kremlin’s St George Hall. Before him stood the Moscow-installed heads of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. He told the assembled officials that residents of the four regions were “returning to their historical homeland.”
That phrase rewrote military occupation as a homecoming. Weeks earlier, Russian state media had aired referendum footage from Melitopol and Lysychansk. The clips showed door-to-door voting accompanied by armed personnel.
The script mattered less than the framing. By calling annexation a reunion, Putin treated the 2014 and 2022 invasions not as cross-border wars but as an internal family dispute. That wording dodged the language of conquest. Instead, it cast occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as prodigal territories rejoining Russia after a separation. The same speech invoked shared baptism, common language, and Soviet borders. The lines between “one people” dissolved.
Mobilization as “Brotherly Help”
On September 21, 2022, Putin announced a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists. He called it “brotherly help.” The draft, he told Russians, was needed to protect “our people” in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson from “neo-Nazis.”
That word, “brotherly,” did the work of erasing the border. Mobilization was an internal consolidation of state power, a rescue mission inside a family quarrel. Conscripts from Buryatia, Dagestan, and Krasnodar were sent to “defend” villages they had never seen. The enemy, as Putin described it, was internal traitors and external puppets. In the end, the framing turned a war of artillery, trenches, and occupied cities into a domestic emergency.