Artificial State: Years Before the War, Putin Questioned Ukraine’s Sovereignty in Talks With George W. Bush

Years before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin had already articulated deep skepticism about Ukraine’s sovereignty in conversations with US leaders. Recently released and cited US transcripts reveal that Putin repeatedly portrayed Ukraine as a state formed through Soviet-era political decisions rather than as a naturally evolved nation.

The documents were published by the national security Archive and include records of phone calls and face-to-face meetings between Putin and George W. Bush between 2001 and 2008. These materials indicate that Putin consistently framed Ukraine as a product of historical engineering by Soviet authorities, rather than as an independent country with organic national roots.

According to the transcripts, Putin bluntly told Bush that Ukraine was “not created organically” and instead was “an artificial state created in Soviet times.” This characterization, made informally but repeatedly, underscores how early Putin’s views on Ukraine’s legitimacy were formed.

Putin further argued that Ukraine’s present-day borders were the outcome of political bargains and territorial transfers rather than historical continuity. He pointed out that much of western Ukraine had been incorporated after World War II from neighboring countries such as Poland, Romania, and Hungary. He also emphasized that eastern Ukrainian territories were transferred from Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, while Crimea was handed over to Ukraine in 1956.

In an earlier meeting on June 16, 2001, Putin framed the collapse of the Soviet Union not as a process of decolonization, but as a voluntary sacrifice by Russia. He told Bush that Ukraine—along with other territories—had been “part of Russia for centuries” and was land that Moscow had willingly relinquished.

By April 6, 2008, Putin’s rhetoric had hardened further. During talks that year, he warned that any effort to bring Ukraine into NATO would inevitably trigger a prolonged confrontation between Russia and the West. He reiterated his belief that Ukraine’s supposed artificial nature made it inherently unstable and vulnerable to internal fracture.

Putin also advanced demographic and cultural arguments that later became central to Russian state narratives. He highlighted what he described as deep cultural and historical divisions between western and eastern Ukraine, presenting them not as diversity within a nation but as proof of incompatibility. He claimed that nearly one-third of Ukraine’s population was ethnically Russian.

In addition, Putin asserted that most Ukrainians viewed NATO as a hostile force, suggesting that the country’s push toward Western institutions was driven by external pressure rather than domestic consensus. This argument implied that Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation was being imposed from outside rather than chosen by its own population.

Taken together, the transcripts reveal a striking continuity in Putin’s thinking rather than a sudden shift in response to later events. Long before the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the launch of a full-scale invasion in 2022, Putin was already depicting Ukraine’s sovereignty as temporary, conditional, and historically reversible.

These early conversations with George W. Bush provide critical insight into how the Kremlin’s long-standing views on Ukraine laid the ideological groundwork for policies and actions that would later reshape European security and ignite one of the most serious geopolitical conflicts of the 21st century.