The early medieval history of Ukraine: mythology and historical logics

This lecture explores concerns which affect not only the international image of Ukraine, making her culture impoverished, but Ukraine’s very security, since those myths are used to inspire the Russians to attack Ukraine, to justify the imperialistic claims of Vladimir Putin in gathering so-called Russian lands. Ideologically the war is deeply rooted in the myths which have been developed since the days of the Russian empire, such as that Ukrainian culture began to evolve from the Russian stock in the fourteenth century, the Ukrainian nation deviated from the so-called triune Russian people one hundred years ago, the medieval Slavic state Kyivan Rus was Russian, or the medieval language of Eastern Slavs was Old Russian, etc. – the concepts of Russian ideological manipulations.

Dr Andrii Pastushenko is a researcher-at-risk Fellow of the British Academy and an academic visitor at All Souls College, Oxford; Reference Professor of the Master degree programme in Global Economy and Business at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy; and Associate Professor of the international economic relations department at the Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics, Ukraine. During his nearly 10 year teaching career in higher education, he has taught the history of Ukraine, world history, the history of international relations, courses on diplomacy, international organisations and international business ethics. In 2013, he became one of the laureates distinguished by the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in gender historical studies on the Second World War in Ukraine. From 2019 to 2021, as a leading facilitator, he organised several educational events in Ukraine with international organisations such as the UN, OSCE and EUAM. Dr Pastushenko’s own research interests focus on the naval history of Elizabethan England.