DISINFO: Russians and Ukrainians are one people
SUMMARY
At their core, Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and what is happening now is a huge tragedy, similar to a civil war between brothers, when the brothers found themselves on opposite sides.
RESPONSE
This article offers an absurd interpretation of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine with the use of the classic disinformation narrative about the Russian world. At the same time, the claim rejects the right of Ukraine to exist as a sovereign state.
For many years, since 2014, Moscow pretended and claimed not to be a party to the war it launched together with armed separatists from Donetsk and Lugansk against the Ukrainian government. Moscow pretended it was a fight among "Russians".
Russia's military invasion is not a civil war, but a brutal aggression against a sovereign state and a clear violation of international law.
Ukrainian and Russian are two distinct people, despite multiple attempts of the Kremlin to deny it. Ukraine is a well-defined nation-state with a long history and its literature and identity, despite foreign rule for long periods. Ukrainians and Russians belong to the Slavs ethnolinguistic group, but they are not a single nation. The "all-Russian big nation" is an imperial Russian and Russian revanchist ideology that is a favoured pro-Kremlin narrative aimed at weakening the national identity of Ukrainians, as well as undermining the state sovereignty. Read more in our article One Nation Myth.
The "brotherly attitude" of Russia towards the Ukrainians is evidenced by the statements of the Russian leadership and propaganda.
An example is an article by Timofej Sergeitsev "What Russia should do with Ukraine". According to the author, “denazification of Ukraine” means carrying out a policy of genocide against the country: Ukraine should be liquidated as a nation and as a state, and fragmented into separate “people’s republics” controlled by Russia, and the very name “Ukraine” should be eradicated; the Ukrainian political class and any armed formations defending Ukraine must be destroyed; on the territory of Ukraine occupied by Russia, mass repressions and ethnic cleansing should be carried out. He claims that Ukrainians must "assimilate the experience" of the war "as a historical lesson and atonement for [their] guilt". After the war, forced labor, imprisonment and the death penalty would be used as punishment. After that, the population would be "integrated" into "Russian civilization". The author describes the planned actions as a "decolonization" of Ukraine.
RT presenter Anton Krasovsky said that Ukrainian children should have been thrown straight into a river with a strong current. "They should have been drowned in the Tysyna (River). Just drown those children, drown them. They could be shoved into huts and burned.”
Vladimir Putin called the leadership of Ukraine "a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis".
See similar disinformation narratives in our database: Russia is not an external aggressor, because Ukraine is part of the Russian world; Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are a single nation, Russians and Ukrainians are a single nation, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are three Russian political nations.