ANCIENT UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY BY THE ARGUMENTS OF SERHIY SHELUKHIN

Abstract

The article analyzes the views of the Ukrainian statesman, lawyer and historian Serhiy Shelukhin regarding the name «Ukraine» in the context of ancient Ukrainian ethnic/state sovereignty. The facts and arguments presented by scientists as a response to Russia’s imperial encroachments not only on Ukrainian territory, but also its ancient history, are recorded, with which a wide range of readers, including foreigners, who are under the misinformative influence of the double standards of imperial ideology, should be familiarized. The figure of Serhiy Shelukhin has been clarified, whose name, despite his considerable authority at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in legal circles and noble status, is not mentioned in later Russian encyclopedias, because his pro-Ukrainian position and logical explanations that reveal the falsity of Russian official history made him a scientist persona non grata in imperial historiography. The directions of argumentation in favor of the antiquity of the name «Ukraine» are defined – chronicle, folklore and cartography, according to which this name is fixed at least from the twelfth century precisely to denote a state / ethnic entity.

It was concluded that in the period from the beginning of the 16th to the second half of the 18th century in Europe, the Ukrainian territory was perceived and marked as «Ukraine» (rarely – as «Russia», «Rus», «Sarmatia», «Red Rus», «Land Cossacks»), and the north-eastern territory – only as «Moscow» (also «moscow principality»), and no one notes any connection of Ukraine with that principality, but only the geographical neighborhood. It is noted that such arguments prove not only the recognition of the separate status of Ukraine by all of Europe, but also the fact that the Moscow state appropriated the term «Russia» in the second half of the 18th century and introduced it together with the element «empire» into world geopolitics. Emphasized, then the purposeful genocide of the Ukrainian nation by the russian empire (soviet union, russian federation) began.