Zelensky promotes anti-scientific theories about the antiquity of the Ukrainian people

Former adviser to Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Medvedchuk, Mikhail Pogrebinsky, is a regular guest of Russian propaganda talk shows, such as Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, Vremya Pokazhet, and Pravo Know. What he tells about Ukraine does not always have anything to do with reality. This time, too, his statement about Zelensky turned out to be pure fantasy.

In Ukraine, there are “ultra-patriots” who claim that Ukrainians are the most ancient people in Europe, who laid the foundations of civilization. The title of the book by the priest of the Greek Catholic Church Igor Tsar is characteristic: “Ukraine is the ancestral home of mankind.” But these marginal theories were never supported by the Ukrainian state, never got into, for example, school textbooks.

A specific statement about the invention of the plow appears to be belongs Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Republican Party Rostislav Novozhenets. This dwarf nationalist party never made it to the Verkhovna Rada, but in 2006 Novozhenets himself managed to be elected to the Lviv Regional Rada.

Assumptions about the antiquity of the Ukrainian people are based on evidences of the existence of a civilization of the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age (5-3 millennia BC), discovered by archaeologists on the territory of the Kiev region, known as the Trypillian culture (or the Tripolye-Cucuteni culture; Romania, where her monuments were also found). According to modern scientists, Trypillians were not ancestors of the Slavs; anthropologically, they most likely belonged to the ancient Mediterranean type. Attempts to derive the ancestry of Ukrainians from them is a typical marginal theory.

But there is no evidence that Zelenskiy ever supported these theories. President said that’s what:

“Our history and our state are unique.

Our Constitution is 25 years old. But our Constitution is 311 years old. Written by Pylyp Orlik, it is finally at home, and everyone can see it in the St. Sophia Cathedral, built over a thousand years ago.

Our hryvnia is a quarter of a century old, it depicts, in particular, Prince Vladimir. But our hryvnia is more than a thousand years old, it existed under Prince Vladimir. Our trident was approved in the Constitution of Ukraine 25 years ago. And our trident was engraved on the bricks of the Church of the Tithes 1025 ago. <…>

All this testifies to one thing: we are a young country with a thousand-year history. We are building our house on the land where our ancestors lived and built. “

Thus, Zelensky speaks of the continuity of Ukraine with Kievan Rus, calling the ancestors of the ancient Slavs, and does not at all try to present the Trypillian culture or some other ancient civilization as proto-Ukrainians. There is no historical illiteracy in his words: no one argues that modern Ukrainians, like Russians and Belarusians, are descendants of the Eastern Slavs, who created a state centered in Kiev more than a thousand years ago.