“No. 1, the Soviet Union is not the same thing as Russia. It was established deliberately as non-Russian, as an internationalist project.
No. 2, he’s got it completely backward because the Soviet Union was created as a federation of national units. That was precisely because everybody, including internationalists like Lenin, understood in 1917, ’18, ’19, ’20, ’21, ’22, that the Ukrainian question was real. A century ago, this was not actually a big debate, even on the far left. Several years of watching people being willing to fight and die for Ukraine convinced the Communists who founded the Soviet Union that there was a real question here, and they had to have a real answer for it. So in that sense, it would be truer to say, “Ukraine created the Soviet Union,” because without the general acknowledgment of a Ukrainian question, the Soviet Union wouldn’t have been set up the way that it was.
But then the third point, I mean, the third way this is just absurd is that, of course, Ukrainian history goes way back before 1918. I mean, there are medieval events which flow into it, early modern events that flow into it. There was a national movement in the 19th century. All of that is, going back to your earlier question, all that falls into completely normal European parameters.
So Ukraine didn’t get created in any sense when the Soviet Union was created. It was already there, and it already had an extremely interesting history.”
https://www.vox.com/22950915/ukraine-history-timothy-snyder-today-explained