How to tell Ukraine from Russia when Putin blurs the lines

The difference goes deeper than language, culture, and geography. Knowing the answer is key to busting a dictator’s lies.

Photo by Karollyne Videira Hubert on Unsplash

What makes Ukraine different from Russia?

To pro-Ukraine Americans, the answer might seem obvious: Ukraine is fighting for its freedom; Russia is fighting for the sake of imperial conquest.

But not everyone takes that fundamental truth for granted. Standing alongside a slackfaced U.S. President Donald Trump last week in Alaska, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeated the line that Russia and Ukraine are “brotherly” nations. To be effective advocates for Kyiv’s just war of self-defense, we need a deeper understanding of just what separates Ukraine from Russia beyond the prism of the ongoing invasion. And that’s where things get more complicated.

Ukrainians and Russians of my generation were born in the same country: the Soviet Union. Someone in Kharkiv, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, would have spoken the same Russian language, read the same newspapers, and sang the same songs as someone just 120 miles north in the city of Kursk, Russia.

If you hear echoes of Putin’s propaganda about Ukrainians and Russians being one people who ought to live under the same empire again, bear with me. Ukrainians, of course, have a rich heritage distinct from Russia, but the reality is that centuries of forced assimilation buried a lot of that culture so that by the time the USSR collapsed, it really was hard to tell Ukrainians and Russians apart.

Even after 1991, the border remained porous. In a lot of ways, it would be harder to tell post-Soviet Kharkiv and Kursk from one another than it would be to distinguish New York from, say, Virginia. Family ties persisted across what was had become an international boundary. Volodomyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s heroic president, is a native Russian speaker who first made a name for himself on Russian television.

Yet, in those first years after the Cold War ended, a more subtle separation was taking place. In a word: democracy.

Ukraine and Russia’s first post-Soviet presidents cut similar figures. Leonid Kravchuk and Boris Yeltsin were both stocky, white-haired former Communist Party bosses born just before World War II. But they made choices that set their countries on fundamentally different trajectories.

In 1993, Yeltsin decided to resolve a constitutional crisis in Russia using tanks and spetsnaz commandos. The army shelled the country’s parliament building. The next year, Russia went to war in Chechnya to boost the president’s flagging approval ratings. As Yeltsin’s first term drew to a close, the debate among his nominally “liberal” allies was whether to rig the elections in the president’s favor or to cancel them outright.

The same year that Russia sent troops into Chechnya, Ukrainians went to the polls in a presidential election. Kravchuk, the incumbent, lost. That’s when he did the unthinkable.

He accepted the outcome of the election and stepped down.

Ukrainians, in their formative years as an independent nation, experienced a peaceful transfer of power after a free and fair election.

Ukraine is not perfect. No country is. But democracy quickly became a part of Ukraine’s national DNA. That is why every time a leader overstepped, the Ukrainian people turned out to pull the country back from the brink—in 2004, in 2013, and even now, in the middle of a war. Russians, by contrast, have been largely passive, if not outright supportive, of their country’s post-Soviet dictatorship.

Ukrainians learned early on not to accept authoritarian bullying—not from their own government and not from their neighbors. It is precisely because Ukrainians and Russians have many similarities that Putin cannot tolerate a free, democratic Ukraine, which would demonstrate to Russians that they do not have to settle for a mafia regime. The Ukrainian tradition that Putin hates the most is that of holding your leaders accountable.

Though the Ukrainian language is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance in the wake of Russia’s aggression, the open secret about the country is that, in a lot of contexts, people still speak Russian (recovering from hundreds of years of cultural genocide is no simple feat).

But that doesn’t make Ukrainians Russian. It doesn’t mean Putin has a claim to his neighbors’ territory any more than Russia can claim Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. Many countries share similar languages and customs with one another. Bold ideas are what truly set nations apart.

Ukrainians are who they are in large part because they stand by the ideas of liberty and the peaceful transition of power. Today, Ukrainians and Russians are much further apart than the British and the colonists were in 1776. Americans should be the first to recognize how a simple belief in democracy can make a nation—and they might consider what it means for their own national identity when so many of their once-freedom-loving neighbors have lost the faith.

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move on Substack.

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