FACTORS OF RUSSIAN IRREDENTISM IN UKRAINE: HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

This article examines the Russian policy of irredentism, namely its manifestations in relation to Ukrainian territories. Threats from the Russian Federation to Ukraine's national and territorial security prompt the study of the genesis of Russian expansionist policies. The notion of irredentism is extremely complex and multifaceted, and has different interpretations. In particular, it is seen as the desire of an ethnic minority to secede from a multi-ethnic state in order to unite with a neighboring kin state. In the modern concept, irredentism is seen as a state policy aimed at annexing territories inhabited by ethnically related populations. Russian irredentism, defined as Russia's aggressive policy towards the territories of former post-Soviet countries, has much deeper roots, as the idea of the hegemony of the Moscow tsars over the entire Slavic Orthodox world dates back to the sixteenth century. and was actively pursued by the Russian imperial authorities, which from the mid-seventeenth century seized a significant part of Left-Bank Ukraine, and by the end of the seventeenth century, as a result of three divisions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian-Turkish wars, almost all Ukrainian lands. An in-depth historical analysis of the origins and manifestations of Russian aggressive policy has shown that irredentism plays a key role in Russian aggression and has a number of factors: historical, geopolitical, economic, and ideological. Keywords: irredentism, irredentist policy, "Novorossiya", "fifth column", ethnopolitics, kin-state.