Artificial state: What Putin told George Bush about Ukraine long before the war

New Delhi,UPDATED: Dec 26, 2025 02:15 IST

Russian President Vladimir Putin privately described Ukraine as an artificial state in conversations with US President George W. Bush years before Russia’s invasion, according to newly declassified US transcripts cited.

The documents, released by the Security Archive, cover meetings and phone calls between Putin and Bush from 2001 to 2008. They show that Putin was articulating a consistent view of Ukraine not as a naturally formed nation, but as a product of Soviet-era territorial engineering.

“This is not a nation built naturally. It is an artificial state created in Soviet times,” Putin told Bush, according to the transcripts.

Putin argued that Ukraine’s borders were assembled through a series of political decisions rather than organic historical development. “After World War II, Ukraine received territories from Poland, Romania, and Hungary — this is almost all of western Ukraine,” he said. “In the 1920s–1930s, Ukraine received territories from Russia — this is the eastern part of the country. In 1956, the Crimean Peninsula was transferred to Ukraine.”

In an earlier meeting on June 16, 2001, Putin framed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a voluntary act by Russia rather than decolonisation. He told Bush that Moscow had “voluntarily gave up thousands of square kilometers of territory,” including Ukraine, which he said “had been part of Russia for centuries.”

By April 6, 2008, Putin’s tone had hardened further. In talks that year, he warned Bush that any move to bring Ukraine into NATO would trigger a lasting confrontation between Russia and the West. Ukraine, he insisted, was inherently unstable because it was “an artificial state.”

Putin also advanced demographic arguments that would later feature prominently in Russian public rhetoric. He claimed that roughly one-third of Ukraine’s population was Russian and portrayed sharp cultural divisions between western and eastern regions as proof of incompatibility rather than diversity.

He told Bush that most Ukrainians viewed NATO as a hostile force, suggesting that Western integration was being imposed from outside rather than chosen domestically.

What stands out in the transcripts is not a sudden shift in thinking but continuity. Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion in 2022, Putin was already casting Ukraine’s sovereignty as provisional and historically reversible.

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