After Catherine II “the great” of Muscovy, died in 1796, among her papers, the ‘Reflections on the Project of History of Russia‘ written in French was discovered. As of now, a copy of that book is available on Archive.org. A better scan with the quote below can be found at the bottom of this article. The quote:
“”However, the continual wars of the appanages did not divide them to prevent them from making common cause, in certain cases, or all or part of it, against the enemies from outside; this was even manifested with very marked vigor upon the arrival of the Tartars.
The Grand Duke of Kyiv, along with fourteen princes of his relatives, went to meet the Tartars with an army of over 92,000 men, an enormous force for that time, but as they had to deal not with an army, but with an entire people, who came from China to settle there and who historians put at over two million, they were defeated in the first battle, where the Grand Duke himself and all the princes who were with him perished after having fought for a long time and valiantly.”
Catherine II had access to many sources, including foreign ones, so her information deserves credibility. She would surely not have wanted to look uninformed in the eyes of the people she was composing her letter to.
Per Wikipedia, Battle of the Kalka River was fought on May 31, 1223, on the banks of the Kalka River in present-day Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, and ended in a decisive Mongol victory… This battle was a significant defeat, given that many of the Rus principalities lost much of their armies, with the notable exception of Vladimir-Suzdal.
What happened with Vladimir-Suzdal? In the Wikipedia page about Yuri II of Vladimir, we read that “when the Mongols first approached Rus in 1223, he sent a small unit against them, but it arrived too late to take part in the disastrous Battle of the Kalka River in May 1223.
The Vladimir-Suzdal principality is the heartland of Muscovy, future Russia. They did not fight Mongols in the ranks of Kyiv Rus, but they fought in Europe in the ranks of the Horde >
The previous significant battle that had happened in the same area of the present-day Donetsk region between Kyiv Rus and Asiatic forces was in 1185. And just like 38 years later, the future ‘Russians’ were not able to arrive at the battle in time. The famous Rus-Ukrainian documentary epic ‘The Song of Igor’s Campaign‘ tells us that they actually supported the Asiatic side >
The current Russian authoritarian regime has claimed that the Donetsk region was ‘Russia’s historic land’. As the two examples above show, Muscovite-Russians did not protect them from invasions; they did not consider them as theirs at all. The land was protected by Kyiv at enormous cost!
There is something supernatural that 800 years later, the central battles of the current war between Muscovy and Ukraine take place in the same very area and basically include the same forces: European Rus-Ukraine and semi-Asiatic Muscovy-Russia as Replica of the Golden Horde. The outcome should be different this time.
‘Gardariki, Ukraine‘ ebook has more facts about the ways Muscovy has been trying to falsify Kyiv Rus’ history.
