Il sole ha tramontato Kiev il 1322 ° giorno dell’invasione su vasta scala. L’ambasciatore francese in Ucraina Gaël Veysière riflette su come l’eredità dell’Ucraina è stata a lungo etichettata come la storia di qualcun altro – e perché la bonifica di queste voci è vitale per l’Ucraina oggi.

What’s worse is that Russians from all walks of life to this very day have kept practicing this strain of colonialism with their foundational chauvinism and supremacist complex relative to the Ukrainians.

To be a Russian, it has practically come with the territory to ~~uphold~~ **impose** the unforgivable and indefensible *opinion* that the Ukrainians (if not all **non**-Russians) are inferior, always and everywhere.

Exceptions in the form of the couple thousand Russian dudes dispersed among the Freedom of Russia Legion, Siberia Battalion, and Nomad Unit amount to a *gоddаmnеd rounding error* in a pool of more than 140 million. They make up the exception that proves the rule.

In her book, “Russia’s War”, Jade McGlynn recounts an interview from 2022 about Russian popular culture in this century with the former Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, [Vadym Prystaiko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadym_Prystaiko).

>*I started to realise they [Russian writers] were introducing Ukrainian characters. While Russians are described almost like angels, Ukrainians are like оrсѕ on the ground, above whom the elites are flying. And they (оrсѕ) always had these accents, like Ukrainians. So I started to understand that they are actually creating something more dangerous than media propaganda because, in Russia’s case, the media propaganda may change tomorrow. Papers will start saying something and then in a week they will think Ukrainians are good again. But books and films are different. I understood that from the mid-2000s, the younger generation were being educated to, not to hate, but to have contempt for Ukrainian-ness, to have contempt for everything Ukrainian – our ways, traditions, church, all these things. Over the years Russians came to understand that this contemptuousness is expected social behaviour, it is the norm: you have to hate Ukraine a bit – just a bit.*

(McGlynn, Jade. “Russia’s War” Polity Press: Cambridge, UK. p. 110)

Who needs the Nazis of the last century who openly flapped their gums about being Nordic *Übermensch*, when the oh-so-victimized Russians in this century routinely throw their [grechka-laden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasha#In_Russia) weight around about being Slavic *Übermensch*?