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DUBAI: As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth week, any lingering fondness the latter could have had for shared bonds of kinship and tradition is now historical past, changed by resentments and bitterness more likely to final generations.

Underlying the present try to carry Ukraine again into the fold of Russia seems to be the conviction that the 2 peoples are one and the identical — the product of a shared historical past spanning centuries.

The Kremlin has mentioned its “particular army operation” is aimed toward defending Russia’s safety and that of Russian-speaking folks in Ukraine’s jap Donbas area.

Nonetheless, for a lot of Ukrainians, significantly those that got here of age after 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence, the invasion has solely served to intensify the ethnic, political, and cultural variations between Russia and Ukraine on the expense of their commonalities.

“My paternal grandparents are from Ukraine,” Eugene B. Kogan, a researcher at Harvard Enterprise Faculty who emigrated to the US from Russia within the Nineteen Nineties, informed Arab Information. “The surprising impact of this warfare is that I’ve a renewed curiosity in understanding the place my ancestors got here from and in my household historical past.”

Removed from drawing Russians and Ukrainians nearer, the invasion, which began on Feb. 24, seems to have pushed a deeper wedge between the 2 peoples, whereas fanning the flames of Ukrainian nationalism and cementing additional the political and protection ties that bind Ukraine to Western Europe.

Whatever the seething bitterness, certainly hate, that consumes many Ukrainians as their cities are pulverized by the Russian army, the 2 peoples share plain bonds, linked by a typical thread of historical past in every part from faith and written script to politics, geography, social customs, and delicacies.

In a latest opinion piece in The Guardian, Alex Halberstadt, writer of “Younger Heroes of the Soviet Union,” mentioned: “Ukrainians and Russians share a lot of their tradition and historical past, and an estimated 11 million Russians have Ukrainian kinfolk. Hundreds of thousands extra have Ukrainian spouses and buddies.”

Each nations, alongside Belarus, can hint their cultural ancestry again to the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus, whose ninth century Prince Vladimir I, the Grand Duke of Kyiv, was baptized in Crimea after rejecting paganism, turning into the primary Christian ruler of all Russia. Actually, in 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, he cited this second in historical past to assist justify his actions.

Non secular identification has performed an element within the justification of the warfare on the grounds of defending the Moscow-oriented Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Ukraine, who’re divided between an independent-minded group primarily based in Kyiv and one other loyal to its patriarch in Moscow.

Leaders of each Ukrainian Orthodox communities, nonetheless, have fiercely denounced the invasion, as have Ukraine’s important Catholic minority.

One other issue is demographics. When Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, a coverage of Ukrainian out-bound and Russian in-bound migration noticed the ethnic Ukrainian share of the inhabitants decline from 77 p.c in 1959 to 73 p.c in 1991.

Upon Ukraine’s independence, nonetheless, this pattern was thrown into reverse. By the flip of the twenty first century, Ukrainians made up greater than three-quarters of the inhabitants, whereas Russians made up the most important minority.

Trendy Ukraine exhibits influences of many different cultures within the post-Soviet neighborhood — not simply Russia. Previous to its incorporation into the Soviet Union, the nation was topic to lengthy durations of domination by Poland and Lithuania. It loved a quick bout of independence between 1918 and 1920, throughout which a number of of its border areas had been managed by Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, all of which left their mark.

We at all times considered ourselves as brothers and sisters. We now have a lot shared historical past and to see what is occurring is much more heartbreaking due to that.

The Russian and Ukrainian languages, whereas each stemming from the identical department of the Slavic language household, have their very own distinct options. The Ukrainian language shares many similarities with Polish.

Though Russian is essentially the most extensively spoken minority language in Ukraine, a major variety of folks within the nation additionally communicate Yiddish, Polish, Belarusian, Romanian, Moldovan, Bulgarian, Crimean Turkish, and Hungarian.

Russia has left an indelible mark, nonetheless. Throughout each the tsarist and the Soviet durations, Russian was the frequent language of presidency administration and public life in Ukraine, with the native tongue of the native inhabitants lowered to a secondary standing.

Within the decade after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Ukrainian language was initially afforded equal standing with Russian. However, through the Thirties, a coverage of Russification was applied, and it was solely in 1989 that Ukrainian grew to become the nation’s official language as soon as once more, its standing confirmed within the 1996 structure.

Lots of the present-day commonalities between the 2 cultures are literally the results of lengthy spells of Russification, first underneath the Romanovs and later underneath Joseph Stalin when the Soviet dictator unleashed his disastrous collectivization coverage on the Ukrainian inhabitants.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, a Ukrainian-Arab artist primarily based in Berlin, was because of open a solo exhibition on the Nationwide Artwork Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv on March 4 however is now again in Berlin serving to Ukrainian refugees.

She informed Arab Information: “I might not put the connection between Ukraine and Russia by way of similarities proper now as a result of, after the invasion, many issues have modified in my thoughts and within the core of my very own being.

“I’ve began to query my mom tongue — my Ukrainian mom spoke to me in Russian — and I by no means did earlier than. I even communicate Russian to my two youngsters.

“I can’t focus on variations and similarities, however I’ll put it in a manner that I won’t have ever carried out earlier than the invasion. Now I really feel it’s becoming to say that is colonization,” she mentioned.

Unsurprisingly, it isn’t simply folks with Ukrainian heritage who really feel that the rhetoric of nationalism has poisoned a as soon as shut relationship, pulling the 2 peoples aside.

Russian-born Tanya Kronfli, who has lived within the Gulf for practically 10 years, informed Arab Information: “I really feel heartbroken, unhappy, indignant, and helpless. We at all times considered one another as brothers and sisters. We now have a lot shared historical past and to see what is occurring is much more heartbreaking due to that.”

Kronfli identified that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians had been “from totally different international locations however are the identical folks. Our languages are practically the identical and plenty of households have intermarried. It’s such a combination with many similarities.”

The Kremlin has repeatedly mentioned that NATO’s enlargement into Japanese Europe and Ukraine’s ambition to affix the alliance created a safety dilemma for Russia. It has continued to demand Ukraine’s disarmament and ensures that it will by no means be a part of NATO — situations that Kyiv and NATO have dominated out.

Kogan mentioned: “One other safety evaluation is that the Kremlin felt uneasy with Ukrainians’ Westward leanings and democratic aspirations, thanks these days to the efforts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Previous colour revolutions (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine 2004, Kyrgyzstan 2005) and Zelensky’s West-leaning ambitions are of deep concern to the Kremlin’s sense of management over Russia’s close to overseas.”

Intent on halting Ukraine’s drift to the West, Moscow has rejected the concept of Ukrainian nationwide identification, saying that Russia’s Ukrainian brothers and sisters have been taken hostage by a Western-backed Nazi cabal, and that Russian troops can be welcomed as liberators.

“One often-heard argument is that the post-Soviet Russian management by no means accepted Ukraine as a nation and Ukrainians as a separate folks requiring a geopolitically viable nation state within the worldwide system,” Kogan added.

In a speech simply days earlier than the invasion started, Putin defended his formal recognition of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk Folks’s Republics by declaring that Ukraine was an invention of Bolshevik chief Vladimir Lenin, who he mentioned had wrongly endowed Ukraine with a way of statehood by permitting it to get pleasure from autonomy inside the Soviet Union.

“Trendy Ukraine was totally and totally created by Russia, extra particularly the Bolshevik, communist Russia,” Putin mentioned in a televised handle.

“This course of started virtually instantly after the 1917 revolution, and furthermore Lenin and his associates did it within the sloppiest manner in relation to Russia — by dividing, tearing from her items of her personal historic territory.”

It stays unclear whether or not all Russians imagine this interpretation of historical past or contemplate it a believable ethical justification for the invasion.

It’s true that by means of wars, disasters, and Soviet tyranny, Russians and Ukrainians, dwelling facet by facet as neighbors or compatriots, managed to protect their kinship.

Nonetheless, for a lot of Ukrainians, their distinctive historical past, identification, and sovereign proper to decide on their very own future are evidently not issues open to debate.