Discussions, post-mortems, analysis, inflated egos, and all that jazz.

In simple terms, Peter the Great rewrote history, carrying out a substitution of original concepts, defining who is who.

These "proto-Ukrainians" are getting tiresome with their nationalism, as if there isn't anywhere else to do it. I'm going to finish your "kisel" now.
The Muscovite Tsardom is a direct successor to the ancient Slavic statehood. Let me remind you that the Mongols destroyed Kyiv, and the Russian state remained only in the "forest lands," where even the Metropolitan of All Rus' moved – to Vladimir and then to Moscow.
Kyiv went under the Lithuanians, then under the Polish-Catholics; the left bank of the Dnieper generally became the Wild Field, where the Crimean people came for slaves (and when Moscow defeated the Khanate, gangs of Cossacks appeared here). Hence, there are no signs of an independent statehood for these territories.
All the cities of Ukraine were built either by the Russian Empire or during the Soviet era.