They say Russia and Ukraine are one people. No. They are like two siblings who share the same ancestry but grew up in different homes. The older one-Ukraine-had one set of teachers and friends. The younger-Russia-had another.
For centuries they lived side-by-side, borrowing and resenting, until history shoved them under one roof. One became the dependable worker who kept the household running. The other, the favored child, insisted on being the "big sister," sure she knew best.
Whenever the family business collapsed-1917, then 1991-Ukraine reached for the door to write her own story. Moscow read that not as independence, but as betrayal. And a family quarrel curdled into the most dangerous kind of war: intimate, bitter, personal.
Tonight we're going past headlines to the roots: how invasions, famine, energy pipelines, and propaganda turned sisters into enemies-and why this war is less about territory than about who gets to define reality.
What we'll uncover:
- The Great Split — Mongol rule vs. Western pull: two political cultures from one origin.
- The Cossack Frontier — a free border world that taught Ukraine to resist masters.
- Empire & Crown Jewel — erasure, Holodomor, and the Soviet version of history.
- The New State Hooked on Energy — how energy dependence warped the 1990s-2010s.
- The War of Mistakes — illusions on both sides and the decision that ignited full-scale invasion.
When people say Russia and Ukraine share the same roots, they point to Kyivan Rus-the medieval realm that grew around Kyiv a thousand years ago. But Rus wasn't an empire with one ruler. It was a constellation of cities, each with its own prince, taxes, and ambitions.
And here lies the key to the Russian political problem-its inheritance tradition. Every prince divided his lands among his sons. Each generation became poorer and weaker, until one of the siblings conquered the others, united their lands-and then divided them again. It was a cycle of endless fragmentation, fatal when the Mongols arrived in the 13th century.
All the Rus princes were relatives, but none rushed to help each other. Each hoped the Mongols would destroy his rivals, retreat, and leave him to inherit the ashes. But the Mongols didn't retreat. They destroyed them one by one-and forced the survivors to pay tribute. For centuries.
The only relief the Rus lands ever felt came during civil wars within the Mongol ruling dynasty itself. When the khans fought each other, they didn't have time to ruin the lives of their vassals.
Over time, the Mongols weakened, and the great plains of Eastern Europe invited new predators. Western crusaders, Lithuanian dukes, Polish nobles-each bit off a piece. The lands farthest from the Mongols-today's western Ukraine-drifted toward Lithuania and Poland. The heartlands of what would become Russia stayed dependent on the Mongol khans.
And here's a universal truth: elites copy their conquerors. They adopt the manners, the language, the hierarchy of whoever seems the toughest. The nobles of what is now Ukraine borrowed customs and laws from Poland. The princes of Muscovy borrowed theirs from the Mongols-who, in turn, had borrowed many administrative systems from China, which they had conquered earlier.
Even language began to show this split. Everyday peasant words stayed the same in both tongues: bull — бык, water — вода, tree — дерево, goat — коза, spade — лопата. But words of power began to differ. In Ukrainian, money is гроші, from the Polish grosz. In Russian, it's деньги, from the Turkic word tanga. The Russian word for treasury is казна-from Mongol. The Ukrainian kept the old Slavic root: скарбниця. Even vocabulary remembered who ruled whom.
When the Mongols finally faded, Muscovy inherited not only their tribute-collecting system but also their political instincts: centralized control, suspicion, and absolute obedience. Meanwhile, the western and southern lands of Rus absorbed Western laws and a taste for local assemblies.
But there was a catch. Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania-who divided Ukrainian lands between them-faced the usual medieval diseases: endless wars, epidemics, weak kings, and nobility who prized personal glory over state strength. Muscovy, by contrast, built quietly, gathered land, wealth, and people.
Far from royal courts, fugitives, mercenaries, and adventurers built something entirely new on the Dnipro steppes. It was called the Zaporozhian Sich-a semi-autonomous fortress of free men.
They called each other "brothers." They elected their leader, the hetman. They followed only the code of the host. No kings. No lords. It was messy, loud, and deeply democratic-and dangerously attractive to peasants who wanted to escape their masters.
These men lived right where the frontlines run today. Back then, the region was called the Wild Field-an open frontier between empires. The land was rich, the climate kind, but raids from the Crimean Tatars made peaceful farming impossible. That's why the Cossacks existed in the first place: to guard the border, to shield settled lands from the nomads who swept in from the south.
For the rulers of Poland and Muscovy alike, this wild borderland was a headache. You couldn't send a regular army there-who would feed it? Who would supply it? So kings and tsars relied on the people already living there: runaway serfs, ex-soldiers, debtors, and dreamers-men who had nothing left to lose and everything to fight for.
In the Ukrainian and Russian imagination, the Cossack became a legend. A man with a shaved head and a proud mustache, a master horseman and swordsman, a drinker, a singer, a poet of the steppes-brave, unpredictable, sometimes brutal, always loyal to his code.
Romantic? Yes. But for every ruler, they were also a problem. Because you can't truly control free men who live by their own law.
Cossacks existed as a permanent military camp. They didn't farm, they didn't keep families; their whole life was war. They fought whoever paid-or whoever threatened their freedom. One decade they served the Polish crown, another the Russian tsar, then they'd ally with the Turks or even the Swedes. They were not mercenaries so much as they were a nation in motion-a people defined by the act of defending themselves.
But one loyalty remained constant: their faith. They were Orthodox Christians, and that sealed their fate. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth treated the Orthodox as second-class citizens, pressuring them to convert to Catholicism. Only the tsar of Moscow called himself the protector of the Orthodox world. That promise, "We'll defend your faith and your rights", was what finally drew the Cossacks toward Moscow's orbit. It was a fatal choice.
At first, the tsars honored their word. The Cossacks could elect their hetman, govern their own ranks, and keep their lands. But as Muscovy turned into an empire, autonomy became a threat. Free warriors on your frontier are useful-until they start to believe they're equals.
Eventually, in the 18th century, the empire destroyed the Sich. Its leaders were executed or exiled; the survivors scattered across the empire. Yet the idea of the Cossack did not die. It became a national myth-the very DNA of Ukrainian identity. The songs, the poems, the paintings-all glorified that image: the free rider of the steppe, the man who bows to no master.
Russia also adopted the myth-but twisted it. The empire turned Cossack freedom into imperial service. From the eighteenth century onward, Cossack regiments patrolled the southern borders and crushed rebellions across the empire. In exchange for land and privileges, they became the tsar's loyal cavalry- an echo of the Wild Field now harnessed to imperial order. It was a perfect inversion. What began as a rebellion against control was transformed into its instrument.
So when modern Ukrainians call themselves the heirs of the Cossacks, they don't mean the polished parade riders of the Russian army. They mean the restless men of the frontier who refused to kneel.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian Empire had one consistent goal toward Ukraine: to erase the differences that had grown during centuries of separate lives. The state wanted to prove there was only one people, one faith, one language-and one truth: that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the true heir of Kyivan Rus.
This was not an innocent historical debate; it was a branding campaign. The Moscow tsars didn't want to be seen as provincial princes in the far corner of Eastern Europe. They wanted to be Rome. So they rebranded.
Since the time of Peter the Great, the Muscovite Kingdom became Rossiya-"Russia"-a name borrowed from the old word Rus, the Viking nickname for the warriors who once ruled the Dnipro lands. It was a clever trick: rename yourself after the ancient center, and suddenly, you look like its heir. Meanwhile, Ukraine was labeled Malorossiya-"Little Russia." A poetic way of saying: you are part of us, but smaller.
By the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic to the Caucasus, and Ukraine became its crown jewel-the fertile breadbasket that fed the empire's armies and markets. The once-wild steppe now yielded so much grain that it filled the tsar's coffers and financed his wars. But all that prosperity rested on the backs of peasants bound to the land. Serfdom was the skeleton of the empire.
The imperial policy toward Ukraine looked strikingly like Britain's toward Ireland: land ownership in the hands of outsiders, resources flowing toward the capital, and local culture treated as a curiosity. The Russian aristocracy received vast Ukrainian estates as royal gifts. Ambitious young Ukrainians, if they wanted a future, moved north to St. Petersburg or Moscow-to paint, to write, to serve, to be noticed.
The imperial narrative said the Ukrainian language was just a "funny dialect" of Russian. Officials banned Ukrainian books, songs, and even theater performances. To speak Ukrainian in public became provincial at best, rebellious at worst. It was a colonial policy-but toward fellow Orthodox believers.
Then came the Soviet Union, determined to paint over the old imperial past with a new ideology. At first, Moscow introduced a friendly-sounding policy called korenizatsiya-"indigenization." Ukrainian schools reopened, local officials spoke Ukrainian, and writers were encouraged to publish-in Ukrainian, as long as their work served the Bolshevik cause. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the dream of a national culture had survived. But Stalin closed that door as fast as his predecessors had opened it.
His goal was to create a new kind of human-the Soviet man-a person with no nationality, no private loyalties, only devotion to the Party and the Plan.
When Stalin launched his industrial revolution, he needed foreign currency to buy machines and build factories. The easiest way to get it was by selling grain abroad-and he took it where it was easiest to seize: from Ukraine.
At the same time, America was struggling through the Dust Bowl, and global grain prices soared. So Stalin stripped the Ukrainian countryside bare, trying to use the opportunity. He requisitioned food, sealed village borders, and punished anyone caught hiding even a handful of wheat.
The result was the Holodomor-literally, "death by hunger." Between 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians starved to death.
Then came World War II. Ukraine once again became the battlefield between two empires-Hitler's and Stalin's. Cities were razed, villages erased from the map, millions of people killed. In Western Ukraine, nationalist partisans fought first against the Nazis, and then-after the Red Army returned-against the Soviets. To Moscow, they were bandits. To themselves, they were patriots of a stateless land.
When the war ended, the Soviet Union emerged victorious-and victory meant ownership of the story. The winners wrote the textbooks; the losers became villains. In that version of history, there was no independent Ukraine-only a loyal province in the "brotherhood of nations," grateful to its wiser sibling for guidance and protection.
The 1950s and ླྀs brought mass migration. Industrialization pulled workers across the Soviet map. Russians moved to Ukraine to build factories and ports; Ukrainians moved east for work and education. Moscow encouraged this mixture-it made everyone look the same. The dream was a single Soviet identity, a melting pot of Slavic faces and interchangeable names.
Once again, Russian became the language of science, culture, and success. For millions of Ukrainians, it was easier to switch tongues than to fight bureaucracy. By the time the USSR began to crack in the late 1980s, many genuinely believed in the myth of "reunification." They had been told for generations that they were one people-and they had lived long enough to believe it.
Look back at the empire and the Soviet Union, and you'll see the same unspoken hierarchy: Ukraine cast as the older but poorer sister-burdened with history but lacking power. Moscow as the younger, glamorous one-rich, self-assured, and always right. In that family myth, Ukraine couldn't be trusted to live on her own, to choose her friends, or to build her own future. She was the "unreliable relative"-the sentimental one who needed supervision.
But no one asked why she was weaker. Few remembered that wave after wave of war had rolled across her plains, destroying her cities, her fields, and her people. The contrast is stark: Kyiv has been in the center of major wars more than ten times in its history. Moscow-about four. My own native city, Nizhny Novgorod, almost as old as Moscow, was burned only once-by the Mongols in the 13th century-and never again. Many Russian cities never saw a single foreign army at all.
That difference is not luck-it's geography. Ukraine sits at the crossroads of empires. When you live on a crossroads, you learn to bow and to bargain. It's what made Ukraine cautious, flexible, always clinging to powerful neighbors-not out of weakness, but because there was no other choice. She never had the natural barriers or resources to protect herself-until, at last, she learned how to build them on her own.
By 1991, the Soviet Union was collapsing under its own contradictions. In Kyiv, the parliament declared independence. Then came the referendum-December 1. Over ninety percent said "yes." Even in Crimea. Even in Donbas. Even fifty-five percent of ethnic Russians living there.
Within days, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, dissolving the USSR. Ukraine gave up the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees-the Budapest Memorandum, signed by Washington, London, and Moscow.
In 1997, Russia and Ukraine signed a Friendship Treaty, pledging mutual respect and a promise never to use force.
That same year, they settled the Black Sea Fleet question. Ukraine kept sovereignty over Sevastopol but leased bases there to Russia for twenty years-until 2017. The ships were divided, the flags raised, and on paper, everyone was happy. But behind the smile was resentment.
The main source of Russian wealth-oil and gas exports to Europe-still flowed through Ukrainian pipelines built in Soviet times. For Moscow, it was intolerable: to depend on someone else for the arteries of its own power. It could control the oil, it could control the gas-but not the ground those pipelines ran through.
And Ukraine still held countless industrial treasures: aircraft plants, shipyards, rocket engines-remnants of the old Soviet might. To Russian oligarchs, Putin included, they looked irresistible-a glittering collection of assets that simply, in their minds, belonged back home.
So, both elites-Russian and Ukrainian-started playing an endless tug-of-war over gas. Was it a fairy tale with good and evil? Not really. Each side tried to install loyal politicians in Kyiv to secure a better deal for themselves. The ultimate goal of each side was to get rich quickly through corruption.
Ukraine needed cheap gas to keep its factories alive and its cities heated. But the population was poor, and the oligarchs pocketed much of the profit. The country's messy democracy produced noise and freedom-but not efficiency. Moscow's centralized system produced discipline-but also corruption on an imperial scale.
For ordinary Ukrainians, there seemed to be only one way out: to go west, to follow the example of Poland and the Baltic states. Join Europe, build a real economy, escape the gas trap. But for the elites, that path was dangerous. European rules would kill the very corruption schemes that made them rich. So politicians learned to talk out of both sides of their mouths. Before elections, they spoke of "the European choice." After elections, they quietly flew to Moscow to negotiate cheaper gas.
While Kyiv hesitated, relations between Moscow and the West worsened. The West didn't like what President Putin was doing-crushing the press, rewriting laws, and annexing media. Sanctions followed.
In the Kremlin's eyes, the world had split again into friends and enemies. And Russia wanted Ukraine to make a "clear choice" of who its master was. For a while, that seemed possible. Ukraine's oligarchs could be bribed or threatened; many spoke Russian, had business in Russia, and felt safer staying in the old orbit.
But the Ukrainian public was changing. A new generation had no nostalgia for Soviet times. They didn't want to "return under Moscow's heel." Still, a significant part of the population-especially in the east and south-felt differently. They compared their wages to Russia's and thought: "Maybe Russia is just better managed," not realizing it had simply inherited the larger share of the Soviet treasure.
Then came the Arab Spring. In Africa and the Middle East, dictators Moscow had relied on were falling one by one. Putin saw it as proof of a Western conspiracy. He didn't believe in spontaneous protest. In his worldview, people don't rise up on their own-they are herded by some foreign shepherd.
So when demonstrations erupted in Ukraine against Moscow's protégé, President Yanukovych, the Kremlin saw not citizens demanding dignity but a CIA plot. Paranoia spread through Moscow's corridors of power: If Ukrainians could topple their government, maybe Russians could too-and surely, America would help them.
At the same time, Russia itself was ripening for change. By the early 2010s, people in big cities had traveled, studied abroad, and seen how things worked elsewhere. They were no longer the demoralized post-Soviet masses of 1991. They wanted a voice. New opposition figures emerged-among them Alexei Navalny-and the president's approval ratings began to slide.
Then Putin did the unthinkable. In the middle of Ukraine's chaos, he sent troops into Crimea-and later, into Donbas. It was a bloodless blitz, executed under the banner of "protecting Russian speakers." And it worked-politically.
For one segment of Russian society, it felt like redemption. It was exciting, even cool. The TV said it was a victory, a restoration of greatness, the return of "what was ours." No one cared about international law; they cared about pride. They believed Ukraine would soon follow Crimea back into the fold, and Russia would once again stand tall, respected and feared-just like in the mythic Soviet past.
Because by then, "like in the USSR" had become a legend: a time of free housing, free medicine, and global respect- a selective memory polished by propaganda and longing. And for many Russians, that illusion was easier to live in than the messy, uncomfortable truth of modern reality.
In the future, historians may call today's war in Ukraine the War of Mistakes. Because everything about it-every decision, every assumption, every speech-was a mistake. A chain of errors by people who believed they were geniuses of strategy, yet never understood the world they were trying to control.
For Ukraine, it began as a moment of disbelief-a violation of every treaty, every rule, every promise. Suddenly, the country that called itself a "sister" sent soldiers. The shock turned to fury. Nationalism, long a quiet current, surged to the surface.
After 2014, the idea of maximum distance from Russia became synonymous with survival. And in that rush for safety, came new frictions. Language, once just a household choice, became a political battlefield. The state pushed for rapid Ukrainization-in a country where at least half the people still spoke Russian at home, and almost everyone understood it. What was meant as protection of identity sometimes felt like rejection.
Meanwhile, Moscow doubled down on propaganda. Ukrainians were recast as "Nazis," their state called a "fiction," a "puppet," an "anti-Russia." Russian TV ran endless horror stories about the persecution of Russian speakers-and millions believed them. This was not foreign policy anymore. It was religion, fueled by fear.
Then came the competition of illusions. Russia poured billions into Crimea to prove that "life is better with us." New roads, bridges, and salaries-an attempt to turn annexation into a fairytale of success. At the same time, fighting simmered in Donbas. Some locals fled, others stayed, and in that vacuum a new "majority" was manufactured-a crowd that existed mostly on paper and television, cheering for Putin and thanking him for "protection."
For a few years, the tension burned quietly, but as Putin's domestic approval ratings began to fall again, the temptation returned: Do another Crimea. One more short, victorious war. Crush Kyiv in three days, boost the polls, control the pipelines, show the world that Russia is still a superpower. It was a script written for 2014-played again in 2022. But this time, it failed.
What followed was everything Putin never expected. Instead of collapsing, Ukraine united. The nation he called "artificial" became more real than ever-a country reborn under fire. Instead of panic, the world responded with sanctions that froze hundreds of billions, isolated Russian banks, and stripped away decades of economic growth. Instead of awe, Russia inspired fear and disgust-its image abroad reduced to a paper tiger.
Inside Russia, victory parades gave way to funerals. Factories stalled for lack of parts. Hundreds of thousands fled the draft and the dictatorship. The "special operation" meant to restore greatness became the very thing that exposed its decay.
In the end, the war of mistakes achieved only one thing: it proved Ukraine's existence beyond any doubt. The more Moscow tried to erase it, the clearer it became. Every missile, every ruined building, every refugee-a living testimony that this nation cannot be absorbed, only recognized.
Putin wanted to make history. He did-but not the way he imagined.
In the end, what began as a political crisis revealed something far older-an argument that's been running for centuries. A clash not between governments, but between two different ways of being.
Russia and Ukraine were never "one people." They're relatives shaped by different conquerors, laws, and beliefs.
Ukraine's open frontier and Cossack past taught independence, self-rule, and resilience. Russia's imperial inheritance taught hierarchy, obedience, and control.
For centuries, one learned to endure invasion; the other learned to rule through fear. The Soviet Union tried to fuse them into one-but only buried the resentment deeper.
That's why today's war isn't just about territory. It's about memory, identity, and the eternal struggle over who gets to define reality.
Originally published at https://elvirabary.com on October 26, 2025.