Sunflowers Eventually Survive, Matrioska Dolls Eventually Break.

The Cultural Context Behind the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Part 2.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine should put an end to the cultural delusion that the US (and to a lesser extent, Western Europe) has labored under since the end of the Soviet Union: that Russians are really Europeans, but just of a different sort, and that they can therefore be relied upon to behave with western values. I suppose this failure to understand Russian culture for what it really is, at least in the US, can be partly blamed on the American cultural tendency to want to believe that underneath any apparent differences, people everywhere are really the same, i.e., just like Americans (which says more about a very important aspect of US-American culture than it does about, in this case, Russians). Hence, forty plus years of refusing to acknowledge Russian culture for what it really is: not European (though geographically, partially in Europe), and not Asian, but a unique culture struggling for a definable identity in the world, a culture that, being neither one thing or the other, repeatedly acts from a massive inferiority complex, periodically convulsing itself, or engulfing its neighbors in self-aggrandizing aggression.

Ukrainians, on the other hand, are European. They do not suffer with an ill-defined and endlessly searching soul…