Alternatively, this is (arguably) the most paradigmatic example of genocide on European soil since the post-Yugoslav wars: the official line of the Russian government is that there is no such thing as a "Ukrainian people," only a "little Russia" (Malorossiya) that has no distinct identity, and the war is intended to destroy the Ukrainian nation itself and absorb it through violence into Russia, through some combination of direct absorption and tightly-controlled puppet states.
This is hardly unprecedented in Russian-Ukrainian relations, even in the last century; in a 1953 speech, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and foundationally established international law against it, called the Holodomor and post-Holodomor Soviet control of Ukraine "the classic example of Soviet genocide ... the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. [I]f the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it ... which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people."
No, that's far from anything related to genocide and Putin is actually right: Russians and Ukrainians(and Belarussians) have the same common root in the Kievan Rus. The idea of Ukraine didn't even exit until about 1700s and the country itself was founded in 1917.
This is hardly unprecedented in Russian-Ukrainian relations, even in the last century; in a 1953 speech, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and foundationally established international law against it, called the Holodomor and post-Holodomor Soviet control of Ukraine "the classic example of Soviet genocide ... the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. [I]f the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it ... which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people."