Putin planned to divide Ukraine into three parts had his invasion succeeded – Ukrainian professor

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin planned to divide Ukraine into three parts, historian and Ukrainian Catholic University professor, Yaroslav Hrytsak, told NV Radio.

"The first part was that the entire so-called Novorossiya, the Russian-speaking part of [Ukraine], would be annexed to Russia. Relatively speaking, Kharkiv-Uman, the southeast, will be annexed by Russia as Novorossiya," he said, adding that Putin was not and is not interested in western Ukraine.

"He considers it a toxic territory, so 'let it go wherever it wants, even to hell.'

"The remaining territories were supposed to create "a kind of Ukrainian version of Belarus – Malorossia (“Little Russia” – ed.), where Kyiv will have its own president" with "a more human face than Yanukovych (Ukraine’s fugitive ex-president – ed.)," but much more loyal and manageable.

"Agrarian, without big industry, without western territories. And completely under control. A kind of puppet state. A puppet state under the Kremlin leadership," Hrytsak said, describing Putin's planfor this part of the country.

Malorussia would act as a buffer state between the newly-annexed Novorossia and the “trouble-making” Western Ukraine, according to Putin’s pre-war plans.

One of the options was to give western Ukraine to Poland.

"Peter the Great fought the Great Northern War for 21 years. It seems that he fought with Sweden,reclaimed something... He did not reclaim anything: he returned (the territory) back (to Russia)". It is Russia’s “destiny to return and strengthen,” Putin said on Jun. 9, comparing himself to the Russian tsar.

Read also: Putin’s speech at virtual G20 full of false narratives, event ignored by Biden and Xi

"Ukraine, in fact, never had a stable tradition of its true statehood;" it emerged "as a result of Bolshevik policy," and therefore "today it can be fully called Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine,"Putin said, in his own interpretation of history, as he spouted his false narratives two days after the full-scale invasion.

The Russian dictator blamed Gorbachev (the Soviet Union’s final leader – ed.) for "the collapse of historical Russia, called the USSR."

"Modern Ukraine," Putin wrote in an article published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, "is entirely the brainchild of the Soviet era ... created at the expense of historical Russia.”

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