In late August 2014, Putin stated: "People who have their own views on history and the history of our country may argue with me, but it seems to me that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples are practically one people".[412] After making a similar statement, in late December 2015 he stated: "the Ukrainian culture, as well as Ukrainian literature, surely has a source of its own".[413] In July 2021, he published a lengthy article "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" revisiting these themes, and saying the formation of a Ukrainian state hostile to Moscow was "comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us",[414][415]—it was made mandatory reading for military-political training in the Russian Armed Forces.[416]