Russia Against Ukraine: Russian Political Mythology and the War on Ukrainian Identity

When Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas in early 2014, Ukraine was a neutral state. Despite this neutrality, Russia violated numerous international agree­ments, including the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the Budapest Memoran­dum, and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship with Ukraine, which explicitly recognized Ukraine's territorial integrity. Exploiting Ukraine's non-membership in NATO, Mos­cow launched a war unseen in Europe since the Second World War. Russia's focus on NATO is not just misleading-it serves as a strategic distrac­tion from its revisionist aims: challenging the post-Cold War order and dismantling Ukraine as a sovereign nation. Central to the latter is Ukrainophobia, a deeply rooted ideological hostility towards Ukraine, embedded in Russian geopolitical chauvinism. This collected volume explores the socio-cultural foundations and political mani­festations of contemporary anti-Ukrainian sentiment within the Russian state and society. The volume's contributors are Boris Bondarev, Dmitry Dubrovskiy, Yuri Dzhibladze, Alexander Etkind, Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, Andrey Kalikh, Martin Kragh, Sergei Lebedev, Alexey Levinson, Anton Shekhovtsov, Andreas Umland, and Andrew Wilson.