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Artificial State

Tagshistorical distortionimperial narrativeterritorial claimdelegitimization

Also writtenartificial countryfake statenot a real countryLenin created Ukraine

EquivalentsRUискусственное государство

Definition

Section titled “Definition”

“Artificial state” (Russian: iskusstvennoye gosudarstvo) is the claim that a neighbouring country is not the product of a nation’s self-determination but an accident of history — a construct assembled by other people’s decisions, padded out with “gifts” of allegedly Russian land, and therefore possessed of only conditional sovereignty and negotiable borders. Where One People denies that a separate nation exists, “artificial state” denies that a real state exists: the country on the map is recast as an administrative error awaiting correction.

The frame’s power lies in its implication. No one owes anything to an error. If Ukraine is “Lenin’s invention,” if Kazakhstan’s territory is “a great gift from Russia,” if Georgia “did not exist” before the empire absorbed it, then invasion is not aggression but repossession — the rightful owner reclaiming property from an accidental tenant. The label travels with a family of delegitimising companions — “failed state,” “anti-Russia project,” “puppet of the West” (see Kyiv Junta) — but “artificial” is the foundational one, because it attacks not the government of the moment but the state’s right to exist at all.

Origin and history

Section titled “Origin and history”

The aggressor’s grammar. Great powers have called their targets artificial for as long as they have partitioned them. Nazi propaganda cast Czechoslovakia as an artificial contrivance of the Versailles order before dismembering it in 1938–39; and after the Soviet Union and Germany had divided Poland between them, Vyacheslav Molotov told the Supreme Soviet on 31 October 1939 that one blow from the German army and one from the Red Army had left nothing of “this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty.”1 The word performs the same operation in every century: a state that is “artificial” has no right to exist that anyone is bound to honour.

The Russian revival. The modern Kremlin lineage runs through two decades of escalating statements. At the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Kommersant reported — citing an unnamed participant — that Putin had told George W. Bush: “You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe, and part, a considerable part, was gifted by us.” The Kremlin never confirmed the remark, but it became canonical because everything Putin later published said the same thing openly.2 At the Seliger youth forum in August 2014 — months after annexing Crimea — he extended the frame to Central Asia, praising Nursultan Nazarbayev for having “created a state on a territory where there had never been a state,” since “the Kazakhs never had any statehood.”3 In January 2016 he supplied the doctrine’s villain, accusing Lenin of planting “an atomic bomb under the building called Russia” by giving Soviet republics borders and the right to secede.4

From aside to doctrine. In 2020 Putin complained on state television that republics leaving the USSR had carried off “gifts from the Russian people”; his July 2021 essay (see One People) made the historical case at length; and in his address of 21 February 2022, three days before the full-scale invasion, he declared that modern Ukraine had been “entirely created” by Bolshevik, communist Russia — its statehood a clerical product that the author state could revoke.5 By the time of his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, the claim had become the official opening move of Russia’s case to the world: a half-hour historical lecture presenting Ukraine as an “artificial state” pieced together by others.6

Function in propaganda

Section titled “Function in propaganda”

The frame is used to:

  • convert sovereignty into a revocable licence — statehood is reframed as something granted by Moscow, and what was granted can be reclaimed;
  • pre-justify territorial revision — if borders are clerical accidents, redrawing them by force is presented as correction, not conquest (see Novorossiya);
  • reverse the burden of proof — the targeted nation must forever demonstrate its right to exist, while the aggressor’s own imperially assembled borders are treated as natural and beyond question;
  • erase the neighbour’s agency — history becomes something empires do to territory; the neighbour’s independence movements, declarations, and referendums simply vanish from the story (the same erasure that powers NATO Expansion);
  • keep every former colony on notice — applied serially to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Moldova, the trope signals that any post-Soviet state’s turn may come;
  • nurse domestic grievance — the “gifts” narrative tells Russians they were robbed at the empire’s collapse, converting neighbours’ independence into a standing injustice awaiting redress.

The claim collapses on inspection. Every state on earth is “constructed” — built from treaties, wars, migrations, and administrative acts; nations themselves, as Benedict Anderson observed, are imagined communities, and no country passes a naturalness test that Russia’s own imperially accumulated territory would fail first. In scholarship, “artificial states” is a neutral term for borders drawn by outsiders with no regard for the people living there7 — which describes precisely what the Russian Empire and the USSR did to their subject peoples, not what those peoples did to Russia. The Bolsheviks did not conjure Ukraine and Georgia out of nothing; they destroyed, by conquest, the independent republics both nations had proclaimed in 1918 — in Georgia’s case after Soviet Russia had recognised its independence de jure in the Treaty of Moscow of 7 May 1920, nine months before the Red Army invaded.8 And where the people were actually asked, they answered: in the referendum of 1 December 1991, 92 percent of Ukrainian voters chose independence, with majorities in every region.9

Key examples

Section titled “Key examples”

Ukraine — from aside to casus belli. The trajectory runs from the reported Bucharest remark of 2008, through the 2016 “atomic bomb” speech and the 2021 essay, to the declaration of 21 February 2022 that Ukraine was “entirely created” by Bolshevik Russia — delivered three days before the invasion. On state television the claim is routine: EUvsDisinfo’s database records a Rossiya 24 broadcast asking, “From how many pieces is Ukraine shaped? It is completely artificial… Where is Ukraine?”10 Dmitry Medvedev has made the endpoint explicit, calling Ukraine “this artificial country,” predicting it “will cease to exist,” and declaring “any, absolutely any Ukraine” mortally dangerous to Ukrainians.11

Kazakhstan — the trope as standing threat. Putin’s 2014 Seliger remark that Kazakhs “never had any statehood” landed in a country with a large ethnic-Russian north and produced immediate alarm; Kazakhstan answered in 2015 by celebrating the 550th anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate, founded in 1465 — a pointed reminder that statehood on that territory predates the Russian Empire.12 In December 2020, Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov called Kazakhstan’s territory “a great gift from Russia,” drawing a formal protest from the Kazakh Foreign Ministry, while his colleague Yevgeny Fedorov asserted Russia’s “right” to reclaim ceded lands.13 In August 2022 a post on Medvedev’s verified VKontakte page called Kazakhstan an “artificial state” — it was deleted within minutes, with aides claiming a hack, a defence made plausible only by how closely the post matched what Russian officials say in the open.14

Georgia — history rewritten backwards. In July 2019 Putin offered his own “historical facts”: Georgia, he said, had “occupied” Abkhazia in 1918 and inflicted near-”genocide” on Ossetians in 1919–20 — an inversion that recasts Georgia as the artificial intruder in its own internationally recognised territory and Russia’s 2008 war as rescue (see Peace Enforcement Operation, Liberation of Sokhumi).15 The deleted 2022 Medvedev post applied the template directly, claiming Georgia “did not exist” before the Russian Empire.14 The record says otherwise: Georgian statehood spans more than two millennia, and Soviet Russia itself recognised the Democratic Republic of Georgia by treaty in 1920 — before invading and annexing it in 1921.8

The serial pattern. The same logic is aimed at Moldova (recurringly portrayed as a non-state torn between Romania and Russia) and, in the “gifts” register, at the Baltic states. The point of the repetition is the repetition itself: no former colony’s statehood is ever settled, because the argument that dissolves one dissolves them all.

Why it matters

Section titled “Why it matters”

“Artificial state” matters because it is the legal-sounding half of statehood denial. One People tells Russians why the neighbour should not exist; “artificial state” tells the world why it never really did. Together they convert a war of conquest into an act of administration — the tidying-up of history’s clerical errors.

It is also a predictor. The powers that called Czechoslovakia and Poland artificial partitioned them; the power that called Ukraine artificial invaded it. When a state with revisionist capability declares a neighbour’s existence to be a mistake, it is not doing historiography — it is announcing intent. That is why the trope’s serial application to Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Moldova is read in those capitals as a threat rather than a theory.

Finally, the frame inverts the actual history of the region. The borders of the post-Soviet space were drawn and redrawn by the empire itself, over the heads of the peoples concerned — the one genuinely “artificial” element in the story. The trope takes the empire’s own cartography, blames the colony for it, and offers the empire’s return as the cure. Accepting “artificiality” talk as legitimate analysis, rather than naming it as the predicate of aggression, is how that inversion passes into respectable debate.

Naming it accurately

Section titled “Naming it accurately”

A quick reference for reporting — what to write instead of the Kremlin’s framing.

See also

Section titled “See also”

Sources

Section titled “Sources”

Mentioned in

Section titled “Mentioned in”

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. Molotov, V., report to the Extraordinary Fifth Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 31 October 1939: “One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing remained of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty.” On Nazi propaganda’s framing of Czechoslovakia as an artificial creation of the post-Versailles settlement, see “German Prewar Expansion,” USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia. ↩

  2. Kommersant, 7 April 2008, citing an unnamed summit participant. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had not heard the remark, and it remains unconfirmed; it is cited here as a reported statement whose substance Putin later published under his own name (see the 2021 essay and the address of 21 February 2022). ↩

  3. Seliger 2014 National Youth Forum, 29 August 2014 (kremlin.ru transcript): Nazarbayev “created a state on a territory where there had never been a state… the Kazakhs never had any statehood.” Coverage of the reaction: “Putin Downplays Kazakh Independence, Sparks Angry Reaction,” RFE/RL, September 2014. ↩

  4. Meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education, 21 January 2016: Lenin’s nationality policy “planted an atomic bomb under the building called Russia.” See “Putin Slams Lenin for Laying ‘Atomic Bomb’ Under Russia,” The Moscow Times, 21 January 2016; and “Defusing Lenin’s Time Bomb,” CSIS. ↩

  5. On the “gifts from the Russian people” remark, made in a June 2020 interview on Rossiya-1; Address by the President of the Russian Federation, 21 February 2022 (kremlin.ru): modern Ukraine was “entirely created” by Bolshevik, communist Russia, and departing republics took “vast territories that had nothing to do with them.” ↩

  6. Interview to Tucker Carlson, 8 February 2024. For analysis of its historical claims, see “Decoding Putin’s ‘obsessive ideas’ in the Tucker Carlson interview,” Al Jazeera, 9 February 2024. ↩

  7. Alesina, A., Easterly, W., Matuszeski, J. (2011). “Artificial States.” Journal of the European Economic Association 9(2), 246–277 — defining artificial states as those whose borders were drawn without regard to the peoples on the ground. ↩

  8. Treaty of Moscow, 7 May 1920: the RSFSR recognised the Democratic Republic of Georgia de jure; the Red Army invaded in February 1921 and the Georgian SSR was proclaimed on 25 February 1921. ↩ ↩2

  9. 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum: 92.3% for independence on an 84% turnout, with majorities in every region (CSCE report, 1991). ↩

  10. “Disinfo: Ukraine is a completely artificial country,” EUvsDisinfo (Rossiya 24 broadcast of 11 November 2019); see also the related case “Ukraine was created by Joseph Stalin.” ↩

  11. Medvedev’s statements: “Ukraine to cease to exist because it is not needed to anyone,” TASS, April 2023; “the existence of Ukraine is mortally dangerous for Ukrainians,” January 2024; and the speech analysed in “‘Ukraine is Russia’: Medvedev reveals imperial ambitions fueling invasion,” Atlantic Council, 2024. ↩

  12. “Take Note, Putin: Kazakhstan Celebrates 550 Years of Statehood,” The Diplomat, September 2015 — on the 550th anniversary of the Kazakh Khanate (founded 1465), staged in answer to the Seliger remark. ↩

  13. “An Old Refrain: Russian Lawmakers Question Kazakhstan’s Territorial Integrity, Statehood,” RFE/RL, December 2020 — Nikonov’s “great gift from Russia” remark on Channel One, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry’s protest, and Fedorov’s follow-up claims. ↩

  14. “Russia’s Medvedev Deletes Posts Targeting ‘Artificial’ Kazakhstan, Georgia,” Newsweek, August 2022; “Former Russian President Questions Kazakhstan’s Sovereignty,” The Diplomat, August 2022 — the post on Medvedev’s verified VKontakte page called Kazakhstan an “artificial state,” claimed Georgia had not existed before the Russian Empire, and was deleted with aides alleging a hack. ↩ ↩2

  15. “Putin: Throwing Sand of Historic Deceit,” Civil Georgia, July 2019 — Putin’s remarks that independent Georgia “occupied” Abkhazia in 1918 and that events in Ossetia in 1919–20 were “essentially what we would call genocide today,” and the Georgian government’s rebuttal. ↩