The 1686 Treaty of Perpetual Peace and the Russia Ukraine War

By Robert Korczynski

Poland and Russia have been fighting over Kiev and the Ukraine for well over 500 years, and it is impossible to address the current Russian Ukraine War without acknowledging that Russia literally bought Kiev and all of the lands to the east, and that they still have the bill of sale and the deed to the land.

882–1240: Kievan Rus' Prince Oleg establishes Kiev as the capital of the unified East Slavic state, Kievan Rus'. This is the foundation of the Russian historical claim.
1240: Mongol Invasion The Mongol Empire sacks Kiev, effectively ending the central authority of Kievan Rus' and fracturing the region into separate principalities.
Early 1300s–1569: Grand Duchy of Lithuania Lithuania gradually incorporates Kiev and surrounding Ukrainian lands into its territory following the decline of Mongol influence.
1480s–1500s: Muscovite Claims Begin Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow claims the title "Grand Prince of All Rus'," asserting a dynastic right to Kiev, though Moscow does not physically control it.
1569–1654: Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth The Union of Lublin transfers the administration of Kiev and Ukrainian territories from Lithuania directly to the Polish Crown.
1654: Treaty of Pereyaslav The Cossacks swear allegiance to the Russian Tsar, leading to the gradual integration of Kiev and eastern Ukraine into the Tsardom of Russia over the following decades.

In 1686 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire signed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, and Poland permanently ceded all territory east of the Dnieper River, including the city of Kiev on the west bank and a five-mile buffer zone around it. Russia paid 146,000 silver rubles in hammered wire silver pieces, totaling 225,312 Troy ounces of fine silver, roughly 7.01 metric tons. It took seven horse-drawn wagons to move the bullion across the border into Poland. Today seven metric tons of silver is worth nearly 14 million dollars. Poland took the silver, signed the treaty, and Russia kept the permanent deed to the land.

Exactly like modern entertainment and intellectual property contracts assert rights "in perpetuity throughout the universe and throughout all time," the 1686 diplomats used the term "perpetual" (Вечный мир / Pokój wieczysty) to ensure the purchase could never be undone by future generations or shifts in leadership.

In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire, and just like the Treaty of Perpetual Peace was paid for in silver, the Alaska purchase was paid for with 348,331 Troy ounces of pure gold, weighing roughly 10.83 metric tons. In today's precious metals market, that gold is worth over 1.4 billion dollars. Because that treaty contained no expiration date or reversionary clauses, the transaction was permanent. No international court would entertain modern Russia demanding take-backs on Alaska based on a change in political eras.

Because the global monetary system was tied to gold and silver between 1686 and 1867, only fluctuating between 14 to 1 and 16 to 1 ounces of silver per ounce of gold, wholesale price inflation was essentially non-existent. Inflation is a direct result of nations breaking away from the gold and silver standard entirely. Using an average ratio of 15 to 1, Russia's 1686 silver payment for everything east of the Dnieper was equal to 15,020 Troy ounces of gold for 90,000 square miles, or 0.16 ounces of gold per square mile, while the United States paid 0.59 ounces of gold per square mile for Alaska, nearly four times as much per square mile.

This premium was entirely justified by the immense scale, long-term strategic value, and renewable natural resources like whale oil, timber, and fur that made Alaska worth far more than the land and a few cities east of the Dnieper River. Russia only bought the land to end a 13-year war over a group that wanted to join Russia, and because they consider Kiev the homeland of Russia and the Kievan Rus'.

Following the signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between Poland and Russia, the European continent underwent massive territorial and political upheavals. Through the partitions of Poland, occurring in three stages between 1772 and 1795, the Polish state was completely stripped of its lands and vanished from the official world maps. During these partitions, international law turned a blind eye while Russia swallowed the massive geographic footprint of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which encompassed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all of Belarus, and most of what we now call the Ukraine. Catherine the Great explicitly legitimized this massive territorial sweep under the historical mantle of the old Russian empire, stamping commemorative medals with the declaration, "I have restored what had been torn away," to signal that Russia was merely reclaiming the original ancestral lands of the Kievan Rus'. This massive overreach on the west side of the river was what allowed the later Soviet state of the Ukraine to stretch all the way up to the border of Poland, which itself was a direct violation of the original 1686 treaty boundaries that stopped at the Dnieper channel.

Despite being wiped off the international map, Poland never acknowledged its disappearance. The Polish people maintained their own internal administration, identity, and regional institutions throughout the entire era of non-statehood, especially in the Austrian partition, known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, where the Polish nobility retained local autonomy, conducted internal administration in the Polish language, and even held high-ranking ministerial positions within the Imperial Austrian state.

While the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in name was equal to Poland, the entire Commonwealth was "Polonized," meaning everyone adopted the Polish language, Polish culture, and Polish law, with all nobility adopting the unique style of dress of the Polish nobility. When Poland was partitioned, the separate Baltic territories of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were entirely absorbed into the Russian Empire along with Belarus and the Ukraine.

Later, the 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew the Russian government and established the Soviet Union, effectively making the traditional state of Russia disappear for over 70 years under a communist regime. Yet, under the absolute rules of contract law, none of these internal upheavals or temporary occupations matter. Perpetual means perpetual, and an international property deed is not erased or invalidated by domestic regime changes or periods of instability when a nation ceases to exist on a map or changes names.

Following the conclusion of World War I and the subsequent collapse of the Russian, German, and Austrian empires, Poland immediately reasserted its sovereignty, reclaimed its original territories, and established the Second Polish Republic. Following World War II, the regional map changed again under Soviet dominance as Poland kept its name, its borders, and its formal status as an independent nation but now behind the Iron Curtain and under the influence of Moscow.

Crimea was not part of the original 1686 Treaty of Perpetual Peace; it was an independent Khanate under the Ottoman Empire at the time, which Russia annexed later in 1783 under Catherine the Great after a series of military victories against the Ottomans. The modern boundaries of the Ukraine were established by internal Communist Party decrees including Nikita Khrushchev’s 1954 administrative transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, so in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, the internal Soviet administrative lines became the international boundaries for the Ukraine.

From a strict international contract-law perspective, treating these Soviet lines as legitimate international borders was illegal. An internal administrative shuffle or the collapse of a domestic government cannot legally erase an international treaty backed by 225,312 Troy ounces of silver, when Russia still holds the original property deed and the cash receipt for the east side of the Dnieper River. As Vladimir Putin pointed out in his "historical narratives," the territorial claims to the east side of the Dnieper go all the way back to 1654 when a Cossack revolution requested joining the Tsardom of Russia, followed by a 13-year war and the 1667 Truce of Andrusovo, which was drawn right down the Dnieper River channel. This is exactly what was formalized by the Treaty of Perpetual Peace which also included the city of Kiev.

When the Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 it claimed control over all territories ceded to both Poland and Russia in the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, as well as Crimea, claiming territories that legally belonged to both Poland and Russia simply because the Soviets had previously lumped them together.

In February of 2014 just 23 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a pro-Western coup called the Maidan Revolution triggered the neverending Russian Ukraine War. Following the uprising, Russia refused to cede the Donbas, and an 8-year bloody border war was fought along its border, bought and paid for by billions of dollars worth of US military equipment. After eight years Putin finally had enough, and in 2022 the Russian forces pushed across the Donbas and rapidly seized all territories granted them by the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, including surrounding the city of Kiev. In only 18 days Russia bombed and destroyed all US weapons systems stockpiled over that eight-year period on all Ukrainian military bases.

Despite Vladimir Putin saying that the entire purpose of the invasion was to demilitarize the Ukraine, and despite his declaration of a successful demilitarization campaign after only 18 days, and the war being effectively over, the United States voted yet again to fund the Ukrainian pro-Western rebels to keep fighting Russia, not just over the Donbas this time, but now over the entirety of the Ukraine, Crimea, and the southern land bridge that connects Crimea to the Donbas that includes the states of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, which only represent the southern section of the east side of the river. The historical boundary line runs all the way up the physical channel of the Dnieper River, including northern and central territories like Poltava, Chernihiv, and Sumy, and including Kiev with its five-mile western buffer zone.

The Three Seas Initiative and the New Balance of Power

Now that the Soviet Union is gone, Poland is back on the map and actively constructing a massive regional infrastructure and geopolitical bloc called the Three Seas Initiative (3SI), a multi-trillion-dollar platform spanning 13 European states from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black Seas. By leading this alliance, Poland has de facto recreated the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Strategic partners like Italy have also stepped in to build roads and rail lines directly to the borders so their domestic ports can capture international trade traffic.

While this initiative clearly echoes the territorial sphere of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it is even larger this time, because both Austria and Hungary are full members, which means the 3SI is a combination of the original Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The collapse of the Soviet Union 35 years ago unleashed the exact same two regional powers fighting over the exact same piece of land that we call the Ukraine today, just like they have been doing for over 500 years, bringing the region right back to the original dynamic: a direct standoff between Poland and Russia, where the 3SI has already recognized the Ukraine as a partner participant state in the reformed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with only Belarus remaining in Russian hands.

Poland was the only major European power to step up to Donald Trump's demands that NATO allies fund their own defense, rapidly scaling its military budget to meet and then exceed 4% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that Trump asked for. While Western Europe continues to lag behind, and to resist investing in their own defense, the countries that spent time behind the Iron Curtain don't have to be told twice. Having watched Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia get entirely erased from the map by the Soviet Union, these border states have all aggressively scaled up their defense expenditures along with Poland, who now leads NATO in defense spending by committing 4.8% of their GDP to national defense. By binding themselves together under the 3SI alongside Hungary and Austria, they are reconstituting the core defense sphere of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The 3SI has been building high-capacity transit networks like the Via Carpatia highway corridor, train rail lines, and even pipelines right up to the border of the Ukraine to ship grain, corn, sunflower seeds, and both seed oils and LPG from the Ukraine, which not only has always been the agricultural breadbasket of the world, but also sits on the largest natural gas supplies in Europe. Because Russia can't object to the Ukraine trading with its neighbors, or to the neighbors laying roads and tracks to their own borders, Russia can do nothing about the 3SI, even though all roads and rails are always designed to move military equipment in times of war, which means that the 3SI will ultimately defend the Ukraine from additional Russian advances when peace is ever established.

The Ukraine has already been formally integrated into the 3SI as an "Associated Participating State," and facing a Western Europe unwilling to invest in its own defense, the Eastern European nations of the 3SI have taken it upon themselves to defend themselves from Russia all on their own, without any help from Western Europe, NATO, or the European Union. Without the Ukrainian military added to the combined armies of the 3SI, they do not possess a larger standing army than Russia, but have modern equipment, and a mutual defense clause in their membership, and if the Ukrainian forces are added they have a combined standing army almost equal to the Russian army.

Conclusion

Regardless of the territorial reshuffles, both Poland and Russia have returned to the global stage after the Soviet Union dissolved 35 years ago to assert their authority over what we call the Ukraine. Russia treats the original territorial boundaries of the 1686 Treaty of Perpetual Peace as an active, legally binding framework, which is why the Russian forces initially occupied the entire eastern side of the Dnieper River and surrounded Kiev in 2022, yielding ground only when faced with massive, Western-backed counter-offensives, only to fall back to the Donbas and annex the land bridge to Crimea.

Just like it has been for well over 500 years, the Russians and Poles are fighting over the Ukraine again. If Russia does not own the east side of the Dnieper River and the city of Kiev, then the United States does not own Alaska. Since the United States claims complete sovereign ownership of Alaska after buying it from the Russian Empire, then Russia has every right to claim complete sovereign ownership of Eastern Ukraine because the same Russian Empire that sold Alaska to America bought Eastern Ukraine from Poland; ultimately, it is completely hypocritical of the United States to claim that they own Alaska but that Russia doesn't own everything east of the Dnieper including the city of Kiev, because Russia still has the receipt.

Citations and Sources

The Pereyaslav Agreement (1654) & Truce of Andrusovo (1667): Historical Council Records of the Zaporizhzhia Host and the Russian Tsardom. Documentation covering Bohdan Khmelnytsky's oath of allegiance and the subsequent 13-year armistice partitioning the territory along the Dnieper River channel.
Historical Deed and Terms of the 1686 Treaty: The Treaty of Perpetual Peace (1686) between the Russian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Legal transfer of everything east of the Dnieper, the city of Kiev, and the five-mile western buffer zone, secured by a cash payment of 146,000 silver rubles (approx. 7.01 metric tons / 225,312 Troy ounces of fine silver).
Alaska Purchase Records: United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Treasury Warrant No. 9277, issued August 1, 1868, cashed explicitly for 348,331 Troy ounces of pure gold coin (approx. 10.83 metric tons) under the U.S. gold standard.
Historical Gold-to-Silver Bimetallic Ratio Records: The London Mint and Global Exchange Registries (1687–1867). Historical price indices tracking the stability of the global bimetallic ratio between 14:1 and 16:1 prior to the breakdown of the classical metallic standards.
1991 Soviet Dissolution Boundaries: Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine and the Belavezha Accords (December 1991). Conversion of internal Soviet administrative borders (including Khrushchev's 1954 Crimea decree) into international borders upon the collapse of the USSR.
February 2022 Russian Military Timelines: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation / Regional Conflict Logs. Operational documentation covering the 18-day northern push to the outskirts of Kiev, the destruction of forward stockpiles, and the subsequent consolidation of the southern and eastern annexed oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson).
The 2014 Maidan Revolution: The February 2014 Maidan Revolution and subsequent Donbas Border War. Historical timeline of the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, Russia's refusal to cede the Donbas, and the ensuing eight-year localized conflict prior to the 2022 intervention.
Three Seas Initiative Framework: Three Seas Initiative Official Summit Protocols (Dubrovnik 2016 through Warsaw/Dubrovnik 2025/2026). Infrastructure logs outlining the 13 EU member states, the €3.5+ trillion economic bloc, and the Ukraine's status as an Associated Participating State.
Infrastructure Expansion Data: The Atlantic Council & Hudson Institute Geopolitical Reports (2025–2026). Logistical schematics for the Via Carpatia highway corridor, Italian port integration, and standard-gauge rail modernization up to the Ukrainian border for agricultural transport.
Eastern European Military Capabilities: The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) & Baltic-Black Sea Security Reviews (2025–2026). Strategic analysis of the military readiness of 3SI members (Poland, Hungary) on the eastern flank acting as a defense counterweight relative to Western Europe.
Standing Army Assessments: The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Military Balance Reports. Collective military personnel counts, armor configurations, and border deployment data comparing Eastern European coalitions to active Russian forces.
Yavoriv Base Strike Documentation: International Centre for Peacekeeping and Security Operational Logs (March 13, 2022). Tactical reports detailing the cruise missile strike on the strategic facility located 25km from the Polish border, resulting in the elimination of foreign logistics hubs and incoming Western defense weapon handouts.

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