According to the Institute of History of Ukraine, the essay represents the historical views of the Russian Empire.[19] The Ukrainian World Congress compares Putin's view of Ukraine "as a non-nation" to that of Joseph Stalin under whose watch at least five million Ukrainians perished during the Holodomor.[2] The analytics platform VoxUkraine [uk] described the essay as a "mixture of historical myths, lies about Crimea and Donbas and manipulation of Ukrainian economic data".[20]