The question of who owns the legacy of Kievan Rus is one of the most contentious in the historiography of Eastern Europe. In the 19th century, the imperial scheme prevailed: Rus was the cradle of a single "common Russian" people from three branches (Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians), and the history of the state sequentially transitioned from Kyiv to Vladimir and Moscow.

In 1904, Mykhailo Hrushevsky challenged this scheme with his article "The Usual Scheme of 'Russian' History." He argued that the direct heir of Kyiv is not Moscow, but the Ukrainian people through the Galician-Volhynian principality, Lithuanian Rus, and Cossack heritage. His multi-volume "History of Ukraine-Rus" became the foundation of the Ukrainian national narrative.

After 1917, the dispute moved into emigration. Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy, in his work "On the Ukrainian Problem" (1927), acknowledged the uniqueness of Ukrainian culture but viewed it as an individuation of a unified common Russian culture rather than a separate civilization. He was opposed by historian Dmytro Doroshenko, who defended the independence of the Ukrainian historical path. The polemic in the pages of Eurasian publications became one of the most substantive émigré debates about the fate of the former empire.

The Soviet power proposed a compromise: Kievan Rus is the "common cradle of three fraternal peoples." Today, researchers like Serhiy Plokhy and Andreas Kappeler consider Rus as a pre-modern state, the legacy of which was appropriated differently by later national projects.

The dispute is not over, and each side relies on real sources: on a common dynasty, church, and literature on one side, and on regional continuity and a unique historical experience on the other.