Culture War: An Essay on the Origins of Russo-Ukrainian Conflict

The Pereyaslav Agreement, Holodomor, and WWII are analyzed, highlighting their ideological significance in Ukraine’s national identity and its conflict with Russia. This essay is an attempt to assess the old conflict between the Ukrainian and Russian nations in the light of both the full-scale invasion since 2022 and the larger historical context. The analysis centers on salient cultural issues behind the tense bilateral politics. The narrative focuses on certain historical events that bear an ideological significance for Ukrainian national identity and Ukraine’s attitude to the aggressor state. They include the Pereyaslav Agreement, Holodomor, Great Terror of 1937-38, World War II, collaboration with Nazi Germany, and others. Each of these events is differently interpretated by the two sides of the conflict. Thereby purely historical debates exert a heavy political influence on the two states’ nation-building and conflictual relations including the present large war. In a previous book, Iaroslav Petik compared the Ukrainian Revolution and the People’s Republic of 1917–1921 to the Revolution of Dignity and contemporary Ukraine of 2013–2022. This essay is, in a sense, a continuation of the earlier book, and an attempt to interpret recent events within a larger cultural-historical context.