InformNapalm founder Roman Burko published an essay in which he explained how in the post-Sovie...

InformNapalm founder Roman Burko published an essay in which he described how, in the post-Soviet period, many Ukrainians rejected their identity in an effort to join the Russian imperial paradigm.

After the full-scale invasion, this process reversed, the Russian idea collapsed, and now Ukraine has become an example for representatives of other peoples absorbed by Russia and seeking to reclaim their identity.

Roman believes that Ukraine must not miss its chance to become a support and center of attraction for them, while they, in turn, will help shape the Ukrainian political nation, which has suffered heavy human losses during the war.

Here are the theses from Roman's essay in retelling. Coming from a person born in Donbas, they take on special value.

▪️In the 1990s and 2000s, many people lived in a number of Ukrainian regions who had lost or deeply buried their Ukrainian identity, pulling the Russian imperial paradigm over themselves.

▪️In Sevastopol in the 2010s, I even joked that some local residents were so pompously trying to present themselves as "Russians" that it sometimes seemed as if they were striving to be more "Russian" than Russians themselves.

▪️Similar processes took place in Donbas, where I was born and spent my childhood and youth. There were plenty of caricatured manifestations of "Russianness" there, although they were often combined with another illusion, the "cult of success," which people saw in their trips to Moscow for work.

▪️The paradox is that despite all attempts to hide their origin and assimilate, in the Russian Federation itself, people from Ukraine were treated as second-class people. That is why since 2014, the thesis about "one people" looked artificial: Russia in fact never sought equality and brotherhood.

▪️There is a saying: the cruelest slave owners are former slaves. Some of the cruelest servants of the Kremlin were often people of other origins. Perhaps that is precisely why among Russian Armed Forces personnel we so often see people with Ukrainian surnames and biographies, for example Major General Sergey Atroshchenko, a native of Zhytomyr region, who gave the order to bomb the drama theater in Mariupol.

▪️Now people are beginning to look for other meanings, identity, and a connection with their origin. For some, this is a story of forced resettlements, camps, and deportations. For others, it is a story of voluntarily moving to Russia in search of a better life that turned out to be a trap of assimilation.

▪️Ukraine has already intuitively begun to feel out a new principle: the right to belong to the Ukrainian political nation can be defined not only by origin or passport, but also by personal choice, actions, responsibility, and willingness to fight for freedom and justice.

▪️For decades, Russia has been pulling people, brains, resources, identity, and history out of Ukraine. Putin repeats that he is ready to "fight to the last Ukrainian." Because his concept of "one people" in fact means only one thing: this people must become Russians.

▪️Now Ukraine has a chance to turn this process in the opposite direction. To stop being a donor for the empire's population and become a recipient of new citizens ready to break with the imperial past. Not through coercion, child abductions, re-education camps, ethnic hatred, but through its own success in contrast to an empire that is degrading morally and economically.

▪️Ukraine's current migration policy leaves much to be desired. A huge number of foreign veterans have been unable to obtain citizenship for years. There are also examples of deportations, including directly into the hands of the enemy.

▪️Perhaps Ukraine should already now be thinking about creating integration mechanisms for those who are ready to act in its interests: to work, take risks, serve, help, fight for Ukraine, and tie their future to it.

▪️States in the 21st century compete not only for territory. They compete for people, talent, motivation, meanings, and models of the future. And if Ukraine learns to turn the human resource of the empire into its own strength and human capital, this could become one of the most effective tools for dismantling the Russian paradigm from within.