The 2022 invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation under Putin marks a pivotal moment in the cultural history of Eastern Europe. Russian aggression is driven in part by the longstanding Russian imperial project to subsume Ukrainian culture as part of the Russian grand narrative of civilizational unity. This ambition is made explicit in Putin’s 2021 speech “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” where he asserts that “Russians and Ukrainians [are] one people – a single whole.” U