Every war needs a founding lie, and this one has a particularly seductive one: that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” torn apart by malice and propaganda, who would fall back into a single embrace if only the troublemakers were removed. It is an attractive story because it dresses an invasion as a family reunion. It is also false, and not in a vague or sentimental way. History refutes it precisely. Ukraine and Russia did not drift apart in the twentieth century over politics; they forked in the Middle Ages, from two different roots, into two different civilizations. The man pulling the trigger believes he is correcting an accident. He is, in fact, fighting the conclusion of a process that was settled long before he was born — and, as I will argue at the end, he is now completing it against his own will.
I want to make the historical case plainly, in my own voice, because once you see where the two countries actually come from, the slogan of “one people” stops sounding like a fact and starts sounding like what it is — a weapon.
The fork in the road
There was a moment, centuries deep, when the lands that had once been Kievan Rus split and went two ways. One branch became Muscovy — the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The other became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This is the fork. Everything downstream — the temperament of the two states, their idea of power, their relationship to Europe — flows from which side of it a people stood on. Today’s Ukraine descends from the Lithuanian branch. Today’s Russia descends from the Muscovite one. They are not estranged siblings. They are the products of two incompatible educations.
In drawing this contrast I am leaning on the account of the historian Pivovarov, who set the two trajectories side by side better than most. The point of his comparison is not nostalgia for one side or contempt for the other. It is structural. The two branches built two different machines for organizing human life, and people who live for generations inside different machines become different peoples — in their habits, their expectations, their political instincts, their very sense of what a ruler is for.
What Lithuanian Rus actually was
Strip away the romance and look at the institutions, because institutions are where a civilization keeps its real values.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Commonwealth it joined, was a complex, European, non-autocratic order. Its rulers were not handed power by God or by inheritance alone; they were elected — kings chosen, in a feudal manner, by an assembly of those who held power. That single fact reorganizes everything around it. A ruler who can be chosen can, in principle, be refused; power that is granted is power that is conditional; and a people that watches its sovereign selected rather than anointed grows up with a different idea of authority than a people that has only ever knelt before it.
The cities had their own life. Many governed themselves under Magdeburg law — the European charter of municipal self-rule that made a town not the private estate of a prince but a community with its own courts, its own councils, its own rights. There was learning of the secular, European kind: a university in Lviv in the 1570s, science, scholars who wrote the textbooks that other Europeans learned from. And there was something close to religious tolerance, codified: the Warsaw Confederation established a measure of religious equality at a time when much of Europe was butchering itself over confession. Elected power, self-governing cities, early universities, room for more than one faith — this is not the periphery of European civilization. It is its body. For over two hundred years, the ancestors of today’s Ukrainians lived inside it.
That is the decisive thing. A civilizational choice is not a decree signed yesterday; it is what centuries of daily life pour into a people. The June anniversary that Ukrainians could mark — the Union of Lublin of 1569, which bound the Grand Duchy and the Polish crown into one Commonwealth — is not a quaint date. It is the marker of when the European trajectory became, for these lands, simply the water they swam in. Ukraine’s “European choice” was not made in 2014 on a square in Kyiv. It was made, and lived, long before.
And notice the cumulative effect of these institutions, because each one teaches a lesson that the next reinforces. An elected ruler teaches that authority is answerable. A self-governing city teaches that ordinary people can hold rights against a prince. A university teaches that truth is something pursued and argued, not handed down. A codified tolerance teaches that a neighbor of another faith is still a neighbor, not an enemy to be converted or killed. None of these is a slogan; each is a habit, drilled into a society generation after generation until it becomes second nature — the unspoken assumption a child absorbs before he can name it. That is how a civilization actually reproduces itself: not through manifestos but through the texture of ordinary life. The Lithuanian branch spent centuries building that texture into the people who would become Ukrainians.
What Muscovy actually was
Now the other branch, and here the comparison turns harsh, because the two machines were built on opposite principles.
Muscovy grew up under the Golden Horde, and it absorbed the Horde’s matrix of power: total, unelected, unaccountable. Where the Lithuanian branch chose its rulers, Muscovy never did. Its sovereign was not selected by anyone; he was an autocrat whose authority answered to no assembly and no charter, and who in time was held to be the “anointed of God” — power not granted by men but conferred from above, and therefore beyond their reach to question or recall. This is the Horde’s model wearing an Orthodox crown.
And the Orthodoxy mattered, in a specific and damaging way. Moscow’s church did not stand apart from power as a conscience or a counterweight; it served whatever ruler held the throne. A faith that blesses every sovereign, that has no independent footing from which to say no, is not a brake on autocracy — it is its lubricant. While the Lithuanian branch had its secular universities and its Warsaw Confederation, Muscovy had neither secular learning nor science of its own; it would not acquire them until Peter imported scholars from abroad, two full centuries after Lviv. An autocracy modeled on the Horde, sanctified by a servile church, sealed off from the European cures of self-rule and tolerance — that is the soil today’s Russia grew in.
Set the two side by side and the phrase “one people” simply collapses. One people does not, over centuries, build elected kingship and Magdeburg self-rule on one side and Horde autocracy and a court-church on the other. These are two social psychologies, two historical memories, two answers to the oldest political question — who may rule, and on what terms. The war between them is not a family quarrel. It is, in the exact sense of the word, a clash of civilizations.
Why this is not a story about blood
I want to be careful here, because a thesis about deep roots can curdle into something ugly if it is misread. None of this is genetic. There is no Ukrainian gene for freedom and no Russian gene for submission; that way of thinking is racial theory, and it is both false and obscene. What divides the two peoples is not biology but inheritance of a different kind — the inheritance of codes, of institutions, of accumulated social habit. A people raised for centuries inside elected power and self-governing cities carries those expectations the way one carries a mother tongue. A people raised inside Horde autocracy and a servile church carries the opposite. Change the institutions and, over time, you change the people; that is precisely why this is history and not destiny. Belarus is the proof that the line is institutional and not racial: it shares the Lithuanian root, it could have walked the same European road as Ukraine — and in 2020 it tried — but it was denied that road by force. The root does not guarantee the destination. It only sets the direction the soil is built to grow.
So when I say Ukraine is “not Russia,” I am not making a boast about superior blood. I am making a claim about two different civilizations that happened to share an origin point a thousand years ago and have been diverging ever since. That divergence is the real, unglamorous, unanswerable reason the slogan fails.
Two corollaries the lie can’t survive
From this, two things follow that the “one people” story is specifically constructed to hide.
The first is that Ukrainian nationalism and Russian chauvinism are not two versions of the same disease. It is fashionable, in certain circles, to wave them away as symmetrical — to say that Ukraine is breeding its own fascism that simply mirrors Russia’s. This is false, and the falseness is structural, not a matter of degree. Ukrainian nationalism, whatever ugliness it throws up in the comment sections, wants one thing: to expel the aggressor and set its own order on its own land. Its content is “leave us alone.” No Ukrainian nationalist is organizing to seize Russian territory or to annihilate Russians; the demand is to remove the occupying troops and to pull down the imperial monuments — the Catherines, the Suvorovs, the Pushkins — that were planted as markers of someone else’s order. Russian chauvinism is the opposite in its very essence: it is expansionist by nature, it seeks to impose its order on foreign territory, and it pursues that aim through the destruction of other peoples. A nationalism that says “get off my land” and a chauvinism that says “your land is mine and you should not exist” are not mirror images. To call them symmetrical is to flatter the aggressor and slander the attacked.
The asymmetry is not an accident of the moment; it grows straight out of the two roots. A nationalism whose deepest wish is to be left in peace on its own soil is the natural politics of a people raised inside self-rule — people who learned, over centuries, that a community governs itself and asks only not to be governed by others. A chauvinism that measures a state’s worth by the territory it swallows is the natural politics of an autocracy raised inside the Horde’s matrix, where power is proven by the reach of conquest. The two ugly things people lazily equate are not the same disease caught by two patients; they are the symptoms of two different conditions with two different histories. One is the overreaction of the besieged. The other is the appetite of the besieger.
The second corollary is darker, and it concerns what the regime is actually doing when it tries to make the lie true by force. If two peoples really were one, you could simply reabsorb them. But you cannot reabsorb a separate nation; you can only erase it. And so the project of “de-Ukrainization” turns, of necessity, into genocide — not only in the crude sense of killing, but in the precise legal sense. To destroy a nation you need not shoot every member of it; it is enough to strip people of their national identity by force, to russify them, to remake them as something other than what they are. That, on its own, meets the definition of genocide. We have seen its instruments: the abduction of Ukrainian children to be raised as Russians, which became the basis of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant; refugees funneled only into Russia and denied the road back to Ukraine. This is what it looks like when a state confronts a real, distinct people and refuses to admit that it is real. Unable to win it over, the state sets out to dissolve it.
The collaborator class that wasn’t there
Here is where the regime’s misreading of history becomes its undoing. An occupier does not, in fact, hold ground with tanks; he holds it with quislings — a local class willing to serve the invader and run the captured territory in his name. France under wartime occupation had one. The territories the Nazis took had theirs. Every successful occupation in modern history rested on a domestic class of collaborators, because betrayal, as a political phenomenon, was available.
In Ukraine it was not. The pro-Russian pundits who had decorated Russian television for years, the men who were supposed to be the natural nucleus of a collaborationist authority — they went silent the moment the invasion began. The very people on whom a puppet regime would have been built simply evaporated as a political force. And without that class, the occupier’s problem becomes insoluble: he can seize territory, but he cannot install power, because there is no one to install. Ukrainian national unity turned out to be not a slogan but a military and political fact — a guarantor of victory in itself, precisely because it left no foothold for betrayal.
The architect of the thing he meant to destroy
This brings me to the final, almost unbearable irony, and it is the strongest evidence that “one people” was always a lie.
At independence, Ukraine was not a settled nation at all. Its people carried at least three competing identities at once. There was a Soviet identity — the early parliament was thick with Communists, the residue of the old order. There was a “Little Russian” identity — millions who genuinely felt themselves part of the Russian people, who looked east and saw kin. And there was a Ukrainian identity, real but not yet dominant. For years these three layers coexisted and contended, and Ukrainian politics, for all its noise, never managed to fuse them into one. Pre-2014 Ukraine was, in a real sense, a different country: saturated with Russian intelligence and Russian media, a place where a Russian president out-polled any local politician and where most people could not imagine raising a weapon against Russians. Being a “warrior nation” was not some eternal ethnic trait waiting in the blood; in 2014 there was no warrior nation at all — Ukrainian troops let themselves be blockaded in their Crimean barracks without firing. The warrior nation did not pre-exist the war. The war awoke it, as war would awaken the same dormant potential in Poland or Finland.
And what awoke it, what finally fused the three identities into one, was not any Ukrainian statesman. It was the invasion. Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and his full assault in 2022 did to Ukrainian identity what no Ukrainian politician had been able to do: they burned away the Soviet layer and the Little-Russian layer like husk, and left a single Ukrainian nation standing — Russian-speakers included, now Ukrainians without reservation. The man who set out to prove that Ukraine was not a real nation has, with his own hands, finished the nation-building he meant to abort. He is the involuntary architect of Ukrainian unity, the unwilling physician who cured the country of its multiple identities.
That is the answer to the founding lie, written by the liar himself. You cannot, by force, melt a separate people back into yours — but you can, by force, finally convince that people that it is separate. The two roots were always there, reaching back through the Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on one side and the Horde-matrix of Muscovy on the other. The war did not create the divergence. It only made it impossible, at last, for anyone to pretend the divergence was not real.