A few days later, the Kremlin website published an interview with Putin about the article. Several months later,
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the
Security Council of Russia, also published an article on Ukraine in the Russian daily
Kommersant. In it, he agrees with Putin's essay, and declares that there will be no negotiations with Ukraine until the Ukrainian government is replaced. The article, endorsed by the Kremlin, was criticized for its denigrating and
antisemitic tone.
Vladislav Surkov, the personal adviser (2013–2020) of Putin, also published an article concerning Ukraine and other ex-USSR territories on the website
Aktualnye Kommentarii. In the article, he questions the legitimacy of the western border of Russia (including the borders with Ukraine and the
Baltic states), claiming that it was born out of the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, arguing that Russia should abolish the "wicked peace" that keeps it confined by the borders. In
a speech on 21 February 2022, following the deployment of Russian troops in the
Donetsk and
Luhansk People's Republics, Putin said that "modern Ukraine was wholly and fully created by Bolshevik, communist Russia".
Sarah Rainsford wrote in
BBC News that Putin's speech was "rewriting Ukraine's history", and that his focus on the country was "obsessive".
Vitaly Chervonenko from the
BBC noted how carefully Putin kept silent about the
independent Ukrainian state formations of 1917–1920 and
Kyiv's war with Lenin's Bolshevik government, whose purpose was to include Ukraine in
Bolshevik Russia. {{Blockquote Plokhiy recalled that Lenin
invaded Ukraine and then took away even formal independence from Ukraine by
integrating it into the Soviet Union in 1922. The article "The Advance of Russia and of a New World" by
Petr Akopov was briefly published in several Russian state news sites on 26 February 2022, two days after Russian forces openly invaded Ukrainian-controlled territory, but was soon deleted. Its original publication on
RIA Novosti at precisely 8:00 a.m. suggests it may have been automatically published by mistake. The same state-owned RIA Novosti published another article in April 2022, this time without any backtracking. Titled "
What Russia Should Do with Ukraine", the article openly accused the entire Ukrainian nation of being Nazis who must be wiped out and in some cases re-educated. On 29 March 2022,
Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official
government gazette of the Russian government, published an article that claims that European elites support the
Ukrainian Nazis because of their bitterness over the loss in the
Second World War. The article quotes Ukrainian priest Vasiliy Zenkovskiy, "Ukraine must become a part of Russia, even if Ukrainians are against it". The article was also almost simultaneously published in German in journal
Osteuropa under the title
Über die historische Einheit der Russen und der Ukrainer. (Vladimir Putin is fully fluent in written and spoken German). == Reactions ==