Putin keeps claiming that Ukraine doesn’t exist – that Ukraine’s sovereignty is somehow a Western slight-of-hand, and that Ukrainians are really Russians in pseudo-democratic disguise, ready to be rescued by Mother Russia. But all of those posturings are false, as any examination of Ukraine’s deep history shows. Only in Soviet times, especially after the 1932-1933 massacres of 4 million, were the Ukrainian spirit and identity fully denied. Now Putin wants – as a deathly vanity project --to obliterate a genuine people who survived one after another rendezvous with destiny.