Former Mongolia leader Tsakhia Elbegdorj wrote "After Putin's talk. I found Mongolian historic map. Don't worry. We are a peaceful and free nation."
  • Putin has relied on historical borders to argue that Ukraine is part of Russia, justifying the war.
  • Mongolia’s former president shared a map of the Mongol Empire, which included parts of Russia.
  • “After Putin’s talk. I found Mongolian historic map. Don’t worry. We are a peaceful and free nation,” he wrote.

The former president of Mongolia mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend and his focus on history to try to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Putin has frequently used historical borders to justify his brutal invasion, arguing that Russia has a claim over Ukraine even though Ukraine is an independent country.

In his interview with Tucker Carlson last week, Putin outlined centuries of Russian and European history to justify his invasion. Historians say much of the history he gave doesn’t stand up.

Tsakhia Elbegdorj, who was Mongolia’s president between 2009 and 2017, and was also its prime minister, poked fun at Putin’s argument on X.

  • tal@lemmy.today
    12·
    9 months ago

    The map they used in the linked article as the largest empire to ever exist was actually of the later British Empire, which doesn’t include what is the present-day US (though it was larger than the British Empire at the time that it included some of the present-day US).

    It’d be interesting to create composite maps of empires that included all the territory that they ever controlled, rather than the peak that they controlled at any one time. I think you’d need to do some work in R, and that the Brits would probably still come out on top.

    As I have pointed out before, Russia also historically controlled part of what is now the US:

    https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-vyacheslav-volodin-warns-us-russia-reclaim-alaska-1722342

    Oleg Matveychev, a member of the Duma, told Russian state television earlier this year that Russia should seek the “return of all Russian properties, those of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and current Russia, which has been seized in the United States, and so on.”

    When asked if that included Alaska, Matveychev responded that it did.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_North_America

    From 1732 to 1867, the Russian Empire laid claim to northern Pacific Coast territories in the Americas. Russian colonial possessions in the Americas are collectively known as Russian America ((Russian: Русская Америка, romanized: Russkaya Amerika); 1799 to 1867). It consisted mostly of present-day Alaska in the United States, but also included the outpost of Fort Ross in California, and three forts in Hawaii, including Russian Fort Elizabeth. Russian Creole settlements were concentrated in Alaska, including the capital, New Archangel (Novo-Arkhangelsk), which is now Sitka.

    Fort Ross in California has been preserved as both an American and Californian historic landmark, and you can go visit it; Russian Orthodox services are held there a couple times a year:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross,_California

      • tal@lemmy.today
        3·
        9 months ago

        My understanding from past reading is that there’s some sort of conspiracy theory in Russia that the Alaska Purchase wasn’t properly formalized in some way, ergo it doesn’t count.

        googles

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_payment_conspiracy

        The Alaska payment conspiracy (Russian: Аляскинский платежный заговор, romanized: Ali͡askinskiĭ platezhnyĭ zagovor), also known as the Orkney conspiracy (Russian: Оркни заговор), is a conspiracy theory that the Russian Empire never received payment for the Alaska purchase from the United States, and that instead the ship, the Orkney, that carried the payment in gold was detonated for insurance money by Alexander ‘Sandy’ Keith, a con artist and explosives expert.[1][2][3] This conspiracy theory has been debunked in several ways.[4]

        Russian politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has brought up these claims, as well as the bribery related to the deal.[8]

        The Fort Ross article has a similar-sounding conspiracy theory:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross%2C_California

        Although the settlement was sold for $30,000 to Sutter, some Russian historians assert the sum was never paid; therefore legal title of the settlement was never transferred to Sutter and the area still belongs to the Russian people. A recent Sutter biography however, asserts that Sutter’s agent, Peter Burnett, paid the Russian-American Company agent William M. Steuart $19,788 in “notes and gold” on April 13, 1849, thereby settling the outstanding debt for Fort Ross and Bodega.

        Would be an interesting Cold War scenario to have a little exclave of Russia just north of San Francisco, kinda a Pacific Kaliningrad.

    • Skua@kbin.social
      3·
      9 months ago

      Edit: not sure what’s going on with these markdown links. I’ll try to work it out

      Wikimedia Commons users to the rescue! For the top five largest empires in history:

      • British empire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British\_empire.png which benefits substantially due to some very short-lived occupations like Ethiopia and the southern two thirds of Somalia after pushing Italy out during WW2

      • Mongol empire never held anything that it didn’t have at its territorial peak, so that one is easy

      • Russian empire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The\_Russian\_Empire-en.svg I honestly had no idea about Djibouti, and by the sounds of it it was more one mad Russia guy and his mates who were soon kicked out by the French navy

      • Qing dynasty. I’m pretty sure this one is also the same as its territorial peak, but it’s much harder to check due to the far longer history than the Mongol empire. Light green on this map is claims which were never actually controlled.

      • Spanish empire. This one is horrendously complicated since it includes the Iberian Union with Portugal and Portugal’s colonies at the time, and also the Holy Roman Empire, southern Italy, and the Netherlands due to Charles V and the other Habsburgs. It also includes Louisiana (as in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, not the modern US state), as well as large claimed areas that were not meaningfully controlled like the interior of Brazil or the Pacific Northwest of North America. This is certainly the biggest proportional increase, with Louisiana alone putting it above the Qing dynasty, but I don’t think it catches up to Russia.

    • merc
      2·
      9 months ago

      Fort Ross

      “Ross” sounds like a really English name, but “According to William Bright, “Ross” is a poetic name for a Russian in the Russian language”.

      • Skua@kbin.social
        1·
        9 months ago

        In the context it’s usually seen as a male given name for English-speakers, it does descend from Scottish Gaelic that later spread across the UK, so your instincts weren’t wrong, just misplaced for this specific context

        • merc
          1·
          9 months ago

          Yeah, “Ross” is an English name, but this particular “Ross” comes from a different root.