User blog comment:The Spie/Head-Canon Volume II: Short Subjects/@comment-1616397-20091013180947

Well, Anon, let's deal with your two concerns:

1. Kievan Rus, at its founding, was Kiev and the surrounding territory. Its governmental influence never extended into the territories that we now identify as belonging to the Great Russians or White Russians. Therefore, Kievan Rus is a separate identity, and given the aspects of continuity that I was talking about in the main post, Kievan Rus is now Ukraine (territory, culture, and religion are the key aspects here).

Katya is the oldest because Kievan Rus was a well-defined nation-state before any governmental structures were established in Great Russian or White Russian territory. Vanya, originally Novgorod, would be the next oldest.

As for being small and poor, they were still young when the Mongols invaded, and the destruction involved would certainly have made them poor. Kiev essentially became a ghost town during this period.

If you want a good summary on the origins of the Russian peoples, and the origins of the words "Rus" and "Russian", I recommend Richard Pipes' "Russia Under The Old Regime". Pipes is a Harvard professor of Russian history and is considered one of the greatest experts in the field.

2) Having land is important to what's considered a nation, but it's not the only factor. If we go by the Montevideo Convention of 1933, a nation has to have the following characteristics:  permanent population, defined territory, a government, and capacity to enter into diplomatic relations with other nations (you can easily imagine that France insisted on throwing that one in, and we all know what his definition of "diplomatic relations" is).  What I look at when establishing my head-canon is continuity in these areas, especially the first two, along with an equally-important factor when it comes to continuity:  culture, including language.

(The fact that English isn't a Celtic or Romance language is a big justification for my contention that Arthur was originally Wessex and not of pre-Roman origin, so it's not something to be ignored when thinking about things like this.)

Antonio as Hispania fails this test continuity-wise in the "permanent population" and "government" categories, as well as the "culture" category. The Visigothic invasion displaced the population of Roman Hispania to a significant extent. Then, the Visigoths moved on to North Africa, where they were eventually crushed by the first expansionist wave of Islam; as a consequence, the quasi-Roman continuation of government by the Visigoths disintegrated. The Islamics eventually reached the Iberian peninsula and established Al-Andalus. During the period of Islamic domination of the peninsula, modern Spanish identity and culture began to coalesce in Aragon, Castile-Leon, and Catalonia. The best candidate among these for Antonio is Castile, given the state of modern Spain and the appearance of Juana the Mad as his boss.

It doesn't require much to research this stuff. History happens to be a favorite reading subject of mine (my degree is in Physics, believe it or not), with British and Russian history being particular favorites. It helps that, being significantly older and male, I can completely ignore the BL/yaoi/slash aspects and concentrate on the history.