Crimea and the Crimeans

It all began in the early 2000s, when in Ukraine there appeared publications by respectable male scholars that were more like the ramblings of a paranoid patient. For example, the great leader of the Huns, Attila, was declared to be a Ukrainian ataman named Hatylo, and the Ukrainians themselves were said to be descendants of the Atlantean giants who survived the Great Flood. The Ukrainians supposedly settled not anywhere, but in Egypt—and it was they, for reasons unknown, who supposedly built the pyramids there. Then they supposedly created Ancient Rus, with which no москали and no Russians ever had anything to do. They spoke Ukrainian there, wrote in Ukrainian, and all the princes were solid Ukrainians. But when the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War turned into “a page of combat glory of Ukrainian troops” led by Admiral Nakhimov, an urgent need arose to put an end to all this fantastic nonsense.