Ukrainians and Russians as ‘One People’: An Ideologeme and its Genesis

Abstract

Vladimir Putin has numerous times claimed that ‘Ukrainians and Russians are one people’; this was part of the legitimation for the attack on Ukraine in February 2022. This article examines the prehistory of this claim in Russian nationalist thinking both in recent times and in the tsarist era. It is argued that the claim differs from and is more sinister than the pre-revolutionary idea of a ‘triune Russian nation’ consisting of Great Russians, Little Russians ( = Ukrainians) and Belarussians, for the simple reason that the term ‘Russians’ (russkie) does not refer to the same group of people in the two contexts.