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What's "ancient" for you? Ukraine was incorporated in Russian Empire in late 18 century. That's not something people really call "ancient" usually - that's like saying "Texas is one of the ancient states of the US" or "Lincoln's Gettysburg address is one of the great ancient speeches". Surely there's no strict definition of "ancient" but that's not the usage most of people would be comfortable with.
I was referring to Kiev, the first capital of the original Rus state from which modern Russia claims cultural, linguistic, and religious continuity. To the extent that one can claim that Russia itself is ancient (which is debatable), Kiev was a part of it. It is true that the territories that comprise "Novorussia" in the southeast of Ukraine were seized from the Crimean Khanate over a thousand years later, but they are peripheral to the importance of Ukraine in the Russian mind, despite having been easier for them to conquer in the current war on account of their terrain and their population not having gone through the cultural separation from Moscow and St. Petersburg that the rest of Ukraine has.
That is an extremely tortured argument. Like claiming US must invade and annex Italy because our culture has so much connections to Romans. Kiev, as you know, is the capital of Ukraine, and not Russia, and while it is true that Kiev, at certain times, was the center of the civilizational entity which gave birth to many other that eventually become modern entities including Russia, treating this as a claim that "Ukraine was an ancient part of Russia" makes as much sense as claiming "Rome is an ancient part of the US". It's just ahistorical nonsense based on shallow TV-news-level knowledge - which is exactly why Putin is using it btw, his target audience knows "there was something with the name vaguely resembling "Russia" in Kiev at one time, so that means Kiev always belonged to Russia".
This has nothing to do with the population or what they would want or not want. Pre-2022, the territories were mostly conquered by using Ukrainian internal turmoil and weakness to capture control. The population wishes had precisely little to do with it - it's not like Russia is a democracy or cares what the population thinks - people that think wrong just get jailed (or die of mysterious illnesses, or fall out of windows, you get the idea). Once they expanded their interest to the territories which couldn't be easily grabbed, the default mode became just bomb the shit out of it until nothing but barren scorched earth is left. Again, nothing to do with "cultural separation". It's not like Civilization games when there's a "cultural vote" among the population and if the culture of other country wins, this city joins it. What actually happens Russian just bomb this city into dust, and it matters preciously little what the former occupants of the former city thought about St. Peterburg's culture.
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This may be referring to the Kievan Rus' - perhaps "ancient" is used more poetically in Russian and the translator chose to keep it. However, I couldn't tell if the Kievan Rus' had ever included Crimea, so...
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