• Putin has relied on historical borders to argue that Ukraine is part of Russia, justifying the war.
  • Mongolia’s former president shared a map of the Mongol Empire, which included parts of Russia.
  • “After Putin’s talk. I found Mongolian historic map. Don’t worry. We are a peaceful and free nation,” he wrote.

The former president of Mongolia mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend and his focus on history to try to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Putin has frequently used historical borders to justify his brutal invasion, arguing that Russia has a claim over Ukraine even though Ukraine is an independent country.

In his interview with Tucker Carlson last week, Putin outlined centuries of Russian and European history to justify his invasion. Historians say much of the history he gave doesn’t stand up.

Tsakhia Elbegdorj, who was Mongolia’s president between 2009 and 2017, and was also its prime minister, poked fun at Putin’s argument on X.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Did Mongolia also not burn/sack Moscow several times for failure to pay taxes. Aka like Trump said he would be fine with Russia doing to NATO countries?

        • Wogi@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Moscow was a backwater town, not worth marking on a map.

          Kiev however absolutely had it’s shit packed in by the Mongols.

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Just go take it back, Russia is so wrapped up in the western front they wouldn’t be able to mount any kind of defense until it was far too late to hold Siberia.

  • rebul@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    The UK has decided that they have historical claims to the US, so they will begin their invasion soon.

    • ALQ@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You bringing socialized health care?

      I’ve left the back door unlocked.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      9 months ago

      The map they used in the linked article as the largest empire to ever exist was actually of the later British Empire, which doesn’t include what is the present-day US (though it was larger than the British Empire at the time that it included some of the present-day US).

      It’d be interesting to create composite maps of empires that included all the territory that they ever controlled, rather than the peak that they controlled at any one time. I think you’d need to do some work in R, and that the Brits would probably still come out on top.

      As I have pointed out before, Russia also historically controlled part of what is now the US:

      https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-vyacheslav-volodin-warns-us-russia-reclaim-alaska-1722342

      Oleg Matveychev, a member of the Duma, told Russian state television earlier this year that Russia should seek the “return of all Russian properties, those of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and current Russia, which has been seized in the United States, and so on.”

      When asked if that included Alaska, Matveychev responded that it did.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_North_America

      From 1732 to 1867, the Russian Empire laid claim to northern Pacific Coast territories in the Americas. Russian colonial possessions in the Americas are collectively known as Russian America ((Russian: Русская Америка, romanized: Russkaya Amerika); 1799 to 1867). It consisted mostly of present-day Alaska in the United States, but also included the outpost of Fort Ross in California, and three forts in Hawaii, including Russian Fort Elizabeth. Russian Creole settlements were concentrated in Alaska, including the capital, New Archangel (Novo-Arkhangelsk), which is now Sitka.

      Fort Ross in California has been preserved as both an American and Californian historic landmark, and you can go visit it; Russian Orthodox services are held there a couple times a year:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross,_California

      • Skua@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        Edit: not sure what’s going on with these markdown links. I’ll try to work it out

        Wikimedia Commons users to the rescue! For the top five largest empires in history:

        • British empire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British\_empire.png which benefits substantially due to some very short-lived occupations like Ethiopia and the southern two thirds of Somalia after pushing Italy out during WW2

        • Mongol empire never held anything that it didn’t have at its territorial peak, so that one is easy

        • Russian empire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The\_Russian\_Empire-en.svg I honestly had no idea about Djibouti, and by the sounds of it it was more one mad Russia guy and his mates who were soon kicked out by the French navy

        • Qing dynasty. I’m pretty sure this one is also the same as its territorial peak, but it’s much harder to check due to the far longer history than the Mongol empire. Light green on this map is claims which were never actually controlled.

        • Spanish empire. This one is horrendously complicated since it includes the Iberian Union with Portugal and Portugal’s colonies at the time, and also the Holy Roman Empire, southern Italy, and the Netherlands due to Charles V and the other Habsburgs. It also includes Louisiana (as in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, not the modern US state), as well as large claimed areas that were not meaningfully controlled like the interior of Brazil or the Pacific Northwest of North America. This is certainly the biggest proportional increase, with Louisiana alone putting it above the Qing dynasty, but I don’t think it catches up to Russia.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Fort Ross

        “Ross” sounds like a really English name, but “According to William Bright, “Ross” is a poetic name for a Russian in the Russian language”.

        • Skua@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          In the context it’s usually seen as a male given name for English-speakers, it does descend from Scottish Gaelic that later spread across the UK, so your instincts weren’t wrong, just misplaced for this specific context

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            Yeah, “Ross” is an English name, but this particular “Ross” comes from a different root.

      • Skua@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        pfft we won the Falklands War while shipping jets over there on the top of requisitioned civilian cargo ships, we’ll be fiiiine

        • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Our military industrial complex would love to see you try, it would be great for stock prices. If you managed to make it ashore, you still have millions of rednecks that would love to see you down yonder and kick you out of the colonies again. We could drop one JDAM on every square mile of Great Britain(~80,823sqmi) and still have enough munitions to do it again 5 more times.

          The terrifying truth is that the entire planet VS America is the only way to beat America in non-nuclear warfare.

          • Skua@kbin.social
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            9 months ago

            My dude you can lay off the bald eagle juice, nobody actually thinks the UK will or wants to try to invade America

            • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              I can’t lay off the freedom sauce, they put it in all the food. You know who does think the UK might invade? The Pentagon, they have the threat assessment and battle plans laid out in case 1812 wasn’t just a one time indecression.

              But seriously we love y’all like a distant parent and adore your cute accents, but we will make you speak American and gain 3 stone if you decide anything is a war crime retroactively and hold us accountable for our rampant freedom distribution campaigns.

  • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Greece is getting ready to expand too, and solving the Israel / Palestine issues at the same time

  • x0chi@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Hey Portugal and Spain, according to the treaty of Tordesilhas together, Portugal and Spain had conquering rights for half the world. And the pope signed it…

    And Romans… You had a great empire. So did the Mouros (Arabs) Etc…

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      Hey Portugal and Spain, according to the treaty of Tordesilhas together, Portugal and Spain had conquering rights for half the world.

      They got most of the other half a bit later:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas

      The lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Castile, modifying an earlier bull by Pope Alexander VI. The treaty was signed by Spain on 2 July 1494, and by Portugal on 5 September 1494. The other side of the world was divided a few decades later by the Treaty of Zaragoza, signed on 22 April 1529, which specified the antimeridian to the line of demarcation specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas. Portugal and Spain largely respected the treaties, while the indigenous peoples of the Americas did not acknowledge them.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Zaragoza

      Under the treaty, Portugal gained control of all lands and seas west of the line, including all of Asia and its neighbouring islands so far “discovered”, leaving Spain with most of the Pacific Ocean.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Portugal and Spain largely respected the treaties, while the indigenous peoples of the Americas did not acknowledge them.

        You think!?

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Don’t worry. We are a peaceful and free nation

    …until someone messes with a Mongolian trade delegation.

  • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Good joke, but it’s bold on him to poke fun at one of the only two neighbors Mongolia has, while the other dreams of invading it.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Yeah. First of all, there wasn’t really a “Russia” at the time. Vikings invaded the European mainland and controlled some settlements like Novogrod. They eventually made it down to Kiev, and for a while there was the “Kievan Rus” state with its capital in Kiev. That was destroyed when the Mongols sacked and completely obliterated Kiev.

          In December 1237, Moscow was sacked by the Mongols, and many / most (?) of the civilians were either enslaved or killed. The Ukraine area was important because the Ukrainian lands were so fertile, but Moscow wasn’t, so it retained some independence. Moscow was under the thumb of the Mongols to such an extent that they acted as tax collectors for the Horde, and when town officials resisted the tax collection on behalf of the mongols, Alexander Nevsky (Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev, etc.) had their noses cut off. The Russians only stopped paying off the Mongols in 1476.

          Eventually the Mongol force faded due to infighting, and one of the forces pushing them out was based out of Moscow. But, again, this isn’t because Moscow was important and powerful. It’s because Moscow was at the very edge of their territory, and wasn’t a strategically important place the plains of Ukraine.

          Putin’s whole “Ukraine has always been part of Russia” is backwards. “Russia” was originally part of the Kievan Rus, based out of Kiev. Eventually, after the chaos following the Mongols, Ukraine was fought over by various empires, but it wasn’t until the 1800s that most of the territory now considered to be Ukraine was in Russian hands.

      • zik@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Depending on the time you choose, Russia was much smaller than that too.