Comment by tokai

Here[0] you have it directly from Putin; Ukraine is not a real country and Ukrainian is a fake ethnicity and they are actually Russian.

You have to remember how political communication works in Russia. They rarely state goals outright, and always juggle several narratives at the same time. To make it hard to pin them down to any position and achieve exactly what is happening here.

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...