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He continues in the same vein: “If we have an order to move forward, we can get to Moscow - and we'll show what Ukraine means and what are our guys are like - real Cossacks.”

Mr Suny points out that the inhabitants of these lands when they were conquered by Russia were neither Russian nor Ukrainian, but Ottoman, Tatar or Cossacks - Slavic peasants who had fled to the frontiers.

More recently, say, 500 years ago, it became a fortress for the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a military community from the eastern European steppes that played a prominent role in building a Ukrainian state.

Ukrainians learned that the hard way in the mid-1600s when Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled against their Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rulers and established an independent state, seeking protection from their Orthodox co-religionists in Muscovy.

Not to mention the genocidal killing or deportation of up to half a million Cossacks and execution of millions of prosperous peasants and their families.