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.



The Pereyaslav Agreement, Holodomor, and WWII are analyzed, highlighting their ideological significance in Ukraine’s national identity and its conflict with Russia.



“This book is a profound and intellectually rich exploration of Ukrainian history and cultural identity, combining academic rigor with a vivid analytical style. It convincingly demonstrates how historical narratives become a field of contemporary informational and semantic confrontation.” –Mykola Vaskiv, professor of the Drohobych Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University, philology



“This is not merely a book about war – it is an attempt to hear its deeper echo in culture, memory, and myth. Moving from Stalinist repression to the fragile openings of the Thaw and the quiet tensions of late Soviet stagnation, Yaroslav Petik reveals a conflict that unfolded long before the first shot was fired and continued long after the guns fell silent. Here, war appears not only as a clash of armies, but as a struggle over language, history, and identity – over the very right to remember. With intellectual rigor and moral clarity, this work uncovers the persistence of cultural resistance beneath ideological control, showing how, even in the absence of open confrontation, the battle for meaning endured. It is a powerful reminder that the deepest wars are fought not only on the battlefield, but within the human spirit and the stories a nation tells about itself” –Ihor Pavlyuk, writer, professor of the Lviv University, social communications