Comment Many considered Russian celebrities are really Ukrainians: Nikolai Gogol, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Prokofiev, Leon Trotsky, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev …

Vladimir Putin think Ukrainians are nothing.

He has forgotten that many masters of Russian culture were Ukrainians. Author Mikhail Bulgakov was born and raised in Kiev. There were Ukrainians, too Nikolai Gogol and Isaac Babel. Poet Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa and studied in Kiev.

Composer size Sergei Prokofiev was from Ukraine, as well as a visual artist Ilja Repin.

In the Soviet Union that Putin missed, many of the heroes were Ukrainians.

Ukrainian-oriented Leon Trotsky led to the victory of the Red Army when the Soviet Union was founded. General defending Staliningrad Andrei Jeromenko was Ukrainian. Ukrainian commander Semyon Tymoshenko even managed against the Finnish army, although otherwise it was difficult for the Red Army.

The political leadership of the Soviet Union also needed Ukrainians for decades. Nikita Khrushchev grew in eastern Ukraine and, while in power, transferred the Crimean peninsula to the Soviet republic of Ukraine. Also a successor Leonid Brezhnev was born in eastern Ukraine and began his career in steelworks in the region. The Ukrainian was also the Soviet president Nikolai Podgornyi.

In sports, the Ukrainians brought glory to the Soviet Union. A superior pole vaulter Serhi Bubka is from Luhansk. The best footballers in the Soviet Union were Ukrainians: Oleg Blohin, Igor Belanov and coach Valeri Lobanovski.

But who now misses the past, especially the Soviet Union, other than Putin.

41 million people live in independent Ukraine. There’s a pretty big bunch of heroes out there.