Both incarnations of Rusi: Kiev and Moscow, co-exist as perfect types, due to the fact that chronologically they miss each other. Rus Moskiewska was in the beginning erstwhile in the 13th century the Kiev Rus, already existing only as a network of affluent principalities in the power of the developed Rurykowicz clan, died under the hooves of Mongols and Tatars.
"Moscow grew up and grew up in a terrible and hideous school of Mongolian captivity," Karl Marx wrote. “She only got stronger by becoming a virtuoso in the art of slavery. Even freed herself, Moscow played its conventional slave role, which became master." Thus the Moscow principality was placed on the least civilized outskirts of the Russian-Kijov ecumen. In the war launched in February 2022 by the Russian Federation in Ukraine, did they clash in the fight to the death and life of “Rusini” (Rutheni), cultural and spiritual relatives (as Orthodox)? Is this a civilian war? The answer is yes and no.
To solve this problem, we request to make an in-depth diagnosis of what a nation is. The nation category came along with the bourgeois revolutions in the United States and France in the late 18th century. The multiethnic nature of the modern nation has been highlighted in America – it was besides debated at the beginning of the United States whether, for example, to make German second, alongside English, an authoritative language. The French revolution yet confirmed the northern dialect utilized in Paris and the royal court as an authoritative language. This, on the another hand, brought together millions of human masses, regular utilizing another languages or brawls, into a national community. But possibly a more crucial national bond has become a social agreement, which has bound a political and civic nation (i.e. not tribal) in the form of democratic statehood. This agreement took the form of a constitution: an American from 1789 and a French from 1791.
According to the above criteria, the current war in Ukraine may resemble, in a way, the American Revolutionary War against Britain. It is actual that the political process in Ukraine reveals more democratic features than the same process in Russia. Today, Russia is clearly drawing from the stigma of imperial aggression, which is becoming a part of the next phase of the "gathering of Russian lands". In turn, the cultural cohesion of Ukraine, which favours modern nationalization, is positively different from the national mishmas in the Russian Federation, although the Russians represent a majority in it.
The population of the FR present resembles the imperial population of the subjects, as in the russian Empire or earlier Czarski. But is the population of Ukraine a modern nation that has blended smoothly into the modern Ukrainian state? The country is not identified with the eastern, Russian-speaking part of Ukraine in its predominance and the deeply-soldient part of Ukraine. Outstanding Russian author (and polonafil), Viktor Jerofeyev, qualified armed separatists from Donetsk and Lugansk as heirs implementing ongiś communism of the city of Chewengur from the dystopia of Andrei Płatonov (1928). In turn the west of Ukraine plagues flagism. Both parts of Ukraine contrast through polarally different identity marks, although in practice they are very akin to primitiveism and brutality. At 1 time Samuel Huntington recognized Ukraine as a “culturally divided country” who wandered on a “civilizational crossroads”.
In Ukraine there is so a peculiar civilian war between its east and west. Conflicts of this kind have long been culturally devouring the russian ecumen, which is guarded by Russia Vladimir Putin, mourning the russian Union. And this ecumen activates the networking of the oligarchic clans with their trans-Soviet political and economical ties, seriously projecting on the politics of independent de nomine of the russian states. This ecumen besides holds the russian coverage of Russian tv in check. Countries that emerged from the USSR are peculiarly hard to form their own national identity, due to the fact that the mound of the russian empire was put to sleep for decades from their cultural self-expression. Ukraine is armedly trying to extricate itself from formal dependence on post-Sovietism, while belonging to it under the above-mentioned links. Hence archetypes of alleged self-stiness (independence) of Ukraine, which even if nominally not Soviet, in practice take the form of Soviet, specified as forged with the Komsomol momentum of the bander nationalism. It should be remembered that 2 russian leaders: Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, although crushed, came from Ukraine and made efforts to research it secularly. And present from the Ukrainian oligarchate for a mile goes post-Sovietism. Yes, Ukrainian-speaking people are fighting Russian-speaking people, although both groups have been immersing for decades in the same russian reagent and it has eaten in them.
The Russian-Ukrainian War is becoming more and more like the position-foiling First planet War in the West (im Westen nichts Neues). But there are immense risks in this “nothing fresh on the front” of Ukrainian-Russian. The most apocalyptic of them is Russia's usage of atomic weapons. At the same time, it is worth recording the political overactivity of Kiev in relation to the Western planet in the name of obtaining subsequent tranches of material and political support. And the fact that the Kiev factors duphically announce that Ukraine has the strongest army in Europe. In turn, Poland appears to Kiev, in his actions towards the West, as a transfer point, as a base for a million Ukrainian refugees, among whom there are no Ukrainians fulfilling a patriotic order against Ukraine in the form of criminal acts in Poland. It besides serves as an inn for Kurenians made up of Ukrainian historians who effort to elect UPA and justify Volyn massacre in 1943.
And at this point it is worth to make an equation of historical historical interdependence between Poland and Ukraine. The Polish Crown under the Jagiellonian government was obliged to redirect a crucial pool of its own material, demographic and cultural resources to the east, to the Kresy, to rehabilitate them civilizationally after demolition due to Mongol-Tatar invasions. However, the Russian population there, robbed by Byzantineism, which was then brutalized by the Ordinian spirit, devolved into Polishness and garcholi. Moreover, the Polish element, as it was melting in the elements of the end, became increasingly eurasian, alienated from Europe. The Latin spirit of the Crown, embracing Ukraine's regulation after the Lublin Union, became in a way acquainted with Ukrainian Eurasianism. Michał Tyszkiewicz wrote about the Polish-Ukrainian frictions of his day: “Both sides were subject to common and mutually neutralizing racial and cultural influences. The landowner or the Russian lord was ethnographically the same Cossack; and the colonist of the noble, not only the peasant, was a teaser with time. (...) This kind of Sarmatian, neither Polish nor Russian, alternatively Turkish, developed on the rich dirt of Ukraine, due to the fact that no uncertainty east and wild."
As with the above, the historical interdependence of Poland and Russia stands out. Both countries from the 15th century struggled for primacy in east Europe (Eurasia the Front, in cultural terms), with changing happiness, but clearly since the 18th century favoring Russia. Polish troops occupied Moscow for little than 2 years, in turn as a consequence of the partitions Russia included large rags of Polish lands, including Warsaw. At a organization released in December 1941 in the Kremlin in honor of the Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski, Josif Stalin emphasized the fact that Poland and Russia both invaded and occupied their capital cities (for what did Ambassador Stanisław Kot respond sarcastically: “But why did the Russians play in Warsaw so long?). Stalin made it clear that Poland and Russia could combine partnerships. Without a tiny 70 years later, in 2009, Vladimir Putin in “Gazeta Wyborcza” published a text on relations between Russia and Poland as “two large European nations”. Russia has for over 5 centuries considered Poland to be a hard opponent, who can bring another European nations against Russia. However, having reconciled with Russia on the basis of the agreed squad of past of common relations and having the possible of ambitious economical cooperation with it, Poland will feel a strong ground. And then her geostrategic imagination – provided that she will not usage the advice of charlatans from geopolitics, who have late multiplied in Poland – will lead her (with the support of Germany and another close neighbours) to the past straight. The finalization will be given to the Republic of Poland by the power.
Prof. Jarosław Bratkiewicz
Think Poland, No. 23-24 (7-14.06.2026)
