Volodymyr Kukharenko

Helping translation companies to automate business and project management | ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕥𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕤 𝕋𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝔹𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕤𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕟𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥 𝕊𝕪𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕞

Sept 19, 2024

As I regularly get the comments that I hate Russians and even accuse me of “racism” (which is meaningless as Ukrainian and Russian phenotypes are very similar, you won’t distinguish us by face or hair/eyes/skin colors), so let me clarify things.

The problem is the terminology. Many understand different things by “Russian”:
–       Ethnicity
–       Nationality
–       Self-identification

These are not the same. Many ethnic Russians are citizens of Ukraine and they are fighting for Ukraine now. Even more, do you know that the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine, general Oleksandr Syrsky, is ethnic Russian? He has quite a strong Russian accent when he speaks Ukrainian. But he’s citizen of Ukraine and he’s commanding our army. And he’s Ukrainian to me. President Zelensky is an ethnic Jew, Minister of Defense is a Crimean Tatar. They are all Ukrainians.

On the contrary, many citizens of Russia have Ukrainian roots and were even born in Ukraine. Even some of their generals and top politicians are ethnic Ukrainians. But they are coming here as invaders and committing crimes just like any other ethnicities from Russia. Many of them are bombing their own relatives. In Putin’s 2023 New Year speech, 3 people on the background had Ukrainian surnames (and several others obviously belonged to other ethnicities of Russia). To me, they are Russians, even if their surnames are ending with Ukrainian “-ko” and “-uk”. Once I received a comment from a Russian who had the same surname as me, it felt like I met an evil twin. As one of my friends who left Russia said, “If you forgot who you are, then you are Russian”.

So I do not have any negative feelings about any ethnicities, but I do have them about political systems and people identifying themselves with such systems, I do have feelings about death cult cultures that come together with those political systems.

That being said, I do not have any other recognizable and understandable term to use instead of “Russians”. These are the people that identify themselves with Russia and have feeling they belong to their political tradition. And I won’t stop repeating that it’s a centuries-old tradition of bloody conquests, genocides, and slavery that still does not want to change.

If a Russian feels offended by my post, this is because he still associates himself with the country and culture. But culture comes as a package: you cannot just pick something to be proud of and disregard the shameful part if you have integrity. So if you feel pride for having Tolstoy and Chaikovsky, winning the space race or Olympic medal, you should feel the opposite about Russian aggression, which is shame and guilt, and you have to live with it. If you say “It’s not me killing in Ukraine” and feel nothing about it, that it’s also not you who wrote “War and peace” and won the gold medal in Olympics, and should have zero feelings about it too, and not offended by my post as in fact you separate yourself from Russia.