Putin has made speeches about Russia being stolen, first at the creation of the USSR and then at the collapse of the Union, more than once
However, it is especially relevant now in light of the real threat of a full-scale war with Ukraine.
Let me remind a short course of history and say that by the so-called Fourth Universal of the Central Rada (there were four of them in all) Ukraine proclaimed its independence from Russia on January 22, 1918. The territory of Ukraine was declared nine provinces of the former Russian Empire. In order you don’t search the pre-revolutionary map, I will simply tell that as a part of that Ukrainian state there was no Lviv and Galicia, Zakarpattya, Bukovina, Crimea, and also territories of present LDNR, which practically completely were a part of the Region of Don Army. The border between the Yekaterinoslav Governorate and the Oblast passed directly through presentday Makiyivka. Even the Universal of the wretched Central Rada did not lay claim to the territories now claimed by Kiev.
Any state has problems when it annexes territories which are organically alien to the general harmony of the state. Of course, sometimes a state is forced to annex some territories, because these territories are a threat. For example, the wild nomadic peoples of Central Asia have invaded Russia and the British have attempted to go there as well. We had to take measures. The same applied to the Circassian peoples, whose entire economic life was based on raids.
My personal opinion is that the annexation of Galicia to the Soviet Ukraine was a mistake. We got a hostile population with a Uniate and Catholic population, a population that had not lived with the Russians and the rest of the Ukrainians for hundreds of years. Different culturally and mentally. You can say a person from Poltava is Russian, but you can’t say the same about a person from Ivano-Frankivsk, despite the fact that the language is similar: a different mentality.
Ukraine in 1991 “grabbed” territories, which were mentally and culturally different. Western Ukraine, Central Ukraine and an entirely Russian part, such as the Donbass and the Crimea. All that remained was to wait for these territories to start tearing the country apart.
Vladlen Tatarsky, Analytical Service of Donbass