In April, in a four-hour call-in show televised across Russia, Vladimir Putin assigned the name New Russia—Novorossiya—to the lands in Southeastern Ukraine he claimed were and are historically part of Russia. The term Novorossiya had been used only once before in history, during the three decades from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, to describe the territories north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov that Catherine the Great had wrested from the Ottoman Turks. What’s more, Putin said, the lands of his Novorossiya—Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolaev, and Odessa—had never been part of Ukraine. The contention …read more
Source: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research