With regards to Ukrainian history, as I’ve written before, things only get more complicated the closer you look. There’s no end to this, even in Ukraine’s ancient history.

A man told me his ideas about the Mongols who sacked Kiev-Rus, and the Khazars who, according to him, sought revenge for their defeat by Kiev-Rus. I’ve found no hint of the revenge narrative in my casual internet inquiries, but there was lots of information about the Khazars, whom I’d never heard of before despite their civilization having once been the largest in Europe, existing east of Kiev-Rus and having an intertwined history.

Read about the Khazars on wikipedia.

Oleg of Novogorod expelled the Khazars from Kiev near 880. Sviatoslave I of Kiev went to war with the Khazars and destroyed their civilization.

There seems to be much historical controversy surrounding the conversion of Khazars to Judiasm and the question of whether Khazars are the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews. Perhaps the controversy has made their study taboo. In 2008 Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University published the controversial book, The Invention of the Jewish People about the Khazars.

I’m sure there’s more to be said about this, and, like the rest of Ukrainian history, the closer we look the more complicated it will get.

As interesting as this history is, I’m going to back to property rights. To paraphrase Mises, commerce forces us all to be peaceful, whether we like each other or not. :)