It is just a Russian propaganda. Russians mostly didn't give a shit what happens in Ukraine before 2014. There were internet armchair battles, but I never knew a single person who really thought that Russia had any claims on Ukrainian territory.
All this talk about history is no more than a central pillar of a Russian propaganda. It needs to justify what state is doing, it needs to find some moral grounds, and it uses history for that. And it is Russian history, which was rewritten for ~1k years each time when tsar changed. It never stopped. So to speak even in 1990s history was in a process of rewriting to show how bad USSR was. And now it is being rewritten to show that Russia didn't failed once, and all its fails are responsibility of "collective West".
Just don't listen when Russians talk about history, and you'll be fine.
> They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control.
Yeah-yeah... Putin has no other choices left if he wants to die peacefully. There is a risk for him to end as Muammar Gaddafi did, if he loses this war. No one is happy elites included, give them one chance and they will play a spectacle of brutalizing Putin, freeing Russia from under a heel of a merciless dictator.
