Vladimir Putin's essay - "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians"

This essay, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians (Russian: Об историческом единстве русских и украинцев; Ukrainian: Про історичну єдність росіян та українців), was published by Vladimir Putin on 12 July 2021 on the Kremlin website (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181) from where it is sometimes inaccessible because of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. In line with our mission to tame wild content and make it safe, the text in this copy was retrieved from the Internet Archive on 1st March 2022. Some further reading to provide background and context has been appended at the end.