Russian Identity Between Empire and Nation
Journal: Yale University Press eBooks
Year: 2022

President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia retained a historically and culturally rooted responsibility to protect Ukrainian citizens in Crimea and Donbas was consistent with a long history of Russian rulers shaping the borders of communal identity for strategic ends. The struggle for Ukraine (and Belarus) is the clearest manifestation of the dichotomy between cultural-national and imperial conceptions of Russian identity—between the mostly Orthodox East Slavic core centered on the medieva