The Russian propaganda media outlet "Украина.ру" (Ukraine.ru) spread a manipulation on its Telegram channel that Kyivan Rus is a legacy of exclusively Russian history, defending the statement by saying that the very term "Kyivan Rus" was coined by Russian scholars.

The authors of the article argue that due to the inauthenticity of the well-known name, this period should be considered exclusively as a stage of Russia's development, which delegitimizes Ukraine's use of medieval symbols of Rus. Such statements form a multi-level manipulation.

In its post, Ukraine.ru quotes the Russian-language propaganda Telegram channel "Історія України" (History of Ukraine) and adds a link to it.

Yevhen Synytsia, PhD in History, Associate Professor of the Department of Archaeology and Museum Studies at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Chairman of the Board of the Union of Archaeologists of Ukraine, researcher of the Early Middle Ages and the Slavic history, commented on the above:

"The above post is an example of a multi-story manipulation based on the principle of "changing the argument": the trident is a foreign symbol because there can be no symbols of Kyivan Rus, as it was invented by Russian scholars.

"Kyivan Rus" is indeed a purely artificial term that was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. The history of the emergence and spread of this term is quite confusing, and it is problematic to precisely identify its author. It is also difficult to define the exact meaning that different scholars have put into this term. In particular, Mykhailo Maksymovych (the first rector of the Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr, an encyclopedist, well-known philologist, folklorist, and historian) was probably among the first ones who used the term "Kyivan Rus" (also often referred to as "Kyivan Pereyaslav Rus"). Maksymovych turned to the term to emphasize the special status of Kyiv and in the history of Rus (the latter being the historical name of the early medieval state formed by the dynasty of Kyivan princes in the tenth and eleventh centuries).

However, almost simultaneously (if not earlier), Russian historians, such as Sergei Solovyov, began to use the term "Kyivan Rus" in their works, putting rather a chronological meaning than a territorial one into it. When using the terms "Kyivan Rus," "Vladimir's Rus," and "Moscow Rus," these scholars saw primarily successive chronological stages in the movement of the princely power's center. The consonance of these terms (always containing "Rus"), created the illusion of the validity of the linear concept. For Russian scholars such a vision served as the historical justification for the "gathering of lands" by the Moscow principality and the Moscow kingdom at the turn of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.

Without any major conceptual changes, this understanding of the term "Kyivan Rus" prevails in contemporary Russian historiography. However, now there is also a tendency to avoid using this term (and even references to Kyiv as the center of Rus) in scientific, and especially in educational literature. Russians now prefer to replace the term "Kyivan Rus" with the equally artificial construct "Old Russian State." In other words, the historical name of the medieval state of Rus, centered in Kyiv, is being removed from the information field altogether.

Therefore, the complete denial of the term "Kyivan Rus," as exemplified by the opus quoted above, fits in with the current Russian terminological games. The supporters of this denial resort to a deceptive substitution of concepts. The "non-historicity" of the term "Kyivan Rus" does not undermine the historicity of early medieval Rus with its center in Kyiv in any way. Just as the "expulsion" of Kyiv and Kyivan Rus from the pages of Russian school textbooks does not "erase" them from history.

The second part of the analyzed manipulation is no less deceitful than the first one. Rus, like virtually any early medieval state in Europe, simply did not have state symbols in modern understanding. The tridents of Rus' times are interpreted as the ancestral sign of the princes of the Kyivan house. Most often they are called "signs of the Ruriks", but the mention of Rurik is nothing more than a tribute to the genealogical legend of those princes, which is recorded in the chronicle. In fact, the emergence of the first tridents is associated with the name of Volodymyr Sviatoslavovych (Volodymyr the Great), and later these signs were used by his descendants.

Regarding the origins of the use of such signs by Rus princes, one of the common hypotheses is the borrowing of this element of culture from the nomads of the Black Sea Steppe. The so-called tamgas, ancestral signs of ownership, were traditional for the Iranian- and Turkic-speaking peoples of the Eurasian steppe corridor at least from the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. So, given the active contacts between Russia and the Steppe, this tradition could well have been borrowed from the nomads. Moreover, princely tridents are personalized, they mark a specific representative of the family by adding some secondary elements to the family sign. This principle is also used in tamgas.

The prince, in fact, was the embodiment of power in the state. Therefore, his personal sign, by and large, symbolized the state as it was understood by people of the Early Middle Ages. Therefore, it is not surprising that the creators of Ukrainian statehood in the early twentieth century turned to Volodymyr's trident as a symbol of the origins of the state tradition on the banks of the Dnipro River."

In new editions of educational books, Russians try to avoid mentioning Kyiv: they replace it with the word "capital", shift attention to Novgorod, etc. Moreover, methodical materials are being prepared for publication, in which "the role of Kyiv in the history of Russia is clarified", "Mediazona" informs. All this is part of Russian aspirations to "appropriate" the heritage of medieval Rus by dismantling associations with Ukraine.