In his annual press conference, summing up the year just past (Kremlin.ru, December 19, 2019), Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned Ukraine’s title to the territory that Russian nationalists reference as “Novorossiya”; and he cast an irredentist glance at central Ukraine as well. Mr. Putin himself had launched a short-lived Novorossiya project in 2014, aiming at that time to create a Russian protectorate out of eight Ukrainian oblasts, six of them along the Black Sea coast.
Mr. Putin refloated that theme under a different name, “Prichernomorie” (Black Sea coastal lands) in his 2019 end-of-year press conference: “When the Soviet Union was created, ancestral Russian territories [such as] all of the Prichernomorie and Russia’s western lands, that never had anything to do with Ukraine, were turned over to Ukraine.” In Mr. Putin’s telling, this territorial arrangement was Vladimir Lenin’s idea, which Joseph Stalin initially resisted but then accepted and enforced it. “And now we have to grapple with this.”