A Long Ongoing War. Putin’s Imaginary Ukrainians and a Mythic Russian Identity

Mykola Riabchuk, « A Long Ongoing War. Putin’s Imaginary Ukrainians and a Mythic Russian Identity » In  CERI [en ligne],  April 2022

https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/fr/content/dossiersduceri/long-ongoing-war-putin-s-imaginary-ukrainians-and-mythic-russian-identitybf7d.html

Back in August 2014, a notorious neo-fascist philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin, then professor at the Moscow State University and author of a number of popular textbooks on geopolitics that bred several generations of Russian General Staff officers, was so bitterly disappointed by Ukrainians’ fierce resistance to the Russian invasion of Donbas that he wrote vehemently on his website Vkontakte: “I can’t believe these are Ukrainians. Ukrainians are wonderful Slavonic people. And this is a race of bastards that emerged from the sewer manholes... We should clean up Ukraine from the idiots. The genocide of the cretins is due and inevitable…”. Most people, especially peace-loving Westerners, refused to take seriously this kind of statement, made by various other Russian mavericks as well. They argued, quite reasonably, that radicals can be found in all countries and do not necessarily express any official position or have any notable impact on it.