Russian Resentment: Its Application in the Case of Ukraine

Abstract

According to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, resentment means a feeling of resentment and hostility towards those who – in the subjective sense – are responsible for someone else’s failures. Russia as a state and Russian society often attribute the blame for their problems to external factors, instead of looking for it within themselves. Therefore, the authors use the concept of resentment to analyze the Russian attitude towards Ukraine and Ukrainians. The full-scale aggression of Russia against Ukraine is justified by its organizers as the need to regain something allegedly lost. To this end, the history of Ukrainian statehood has been completely falsified, and its significance has been diminished against the background of the Russian historical narrative. The authors analyze Russia’s actions aimed at denying the existence of an independent Ukraine, repeated attempts to ban the Ukrainian language, and imposing a Russian version of Orthodoxy. The contempo rary expression of these aspirations is the ideology of the so-called “Russian peace.”