The ROMANOV Archive Manifesto: On the Defense of Russian Culture

By A. Sylazhov

Welcome to ROMANOV: an online constantly-updated archive for all “Russian-Originated Media Archetypes & Narratives in Occidental Videogames.”

Here, the Manifesto behind this Archive shall be outlined, the guiding principles behind this project. ROMANOV is not just a catalog of references, but a deliberate attempt to document, analyze, and preserve the many ways in which Russian culture has been represented, borrowed, distorted, or celebrated in gaming. It is a living record that defends the cultural depth of Russia against reduction to clichés, while also recognizing the powerful role these tropes play in shaping how millions of players imagine the country and its people.

Introduction: Why Russia in Games?

Have you ever wondered what that familiar piece of ballet music in your Sega Genesis game was? Or why levels set in Russia are always full of snow? What those Russian gangster enemies were yelling at you? Or how come the Russian Army is so obsessed with invading New York City?

Don't worry, we've got you covered. Whatever the reference, motif, or stereotype, it will be catalogued and explained here. ROMANOV exists to trace these patterns—musical, political, social, cultural, narrative, and visual alike—and to show how they have shaped our collective image of Russia in gaming.

All across media, Russians have long been a source of fascination, mystery, and, sometimes, caricature. From the Cold War era onward, Hollywood and other entertainment industries developed a knack for portraying Russia in specific, often exaggerated ways. Videogames are no exception. As we dive into these depictions, the goal is not to defend or criticize Russia’s real-world actions but rather to explore the cultural fabric that shapes these portrayals with facts and carefully-researched sources.

One popular all-encompassing stereotype—what Russians themselves call клюква or “cranberry”—represents an idealized, sometimes laughable, version of Russia, complete with eternally snowy landscapes, fierce bears, heavy accents and stoic, vodka-loving characters, who are almost invariably guaranteed to be street thugs, terrorists and spies, ruthless gangsters, totalitarian communists, idealistic revolutionaries, corrupt government officials, religious fanatics, billionaire oligarchs, disillusioned or mad scientists, decadent prostitutes or lethal femme fatales. These stereotypes are a staple in movies and videogames, painting an image that can be more folklore than fact, but, like all stereotypes, always created with a shred of truth. Through my analysis, we’ll look at how this idea persists in videogames, examining the broader impact and underlying themes that shape these portrayals.

The ROMANOV Mission

Having stated these facts and building on these contexts—and how they connect to the broader mission of this Archive—this series will ultimately examine the complex layers of representation and misrepresentation, allowing readers to form a more nuanced view of how Russian culture usually appears in videogames. This archive exists to catalog and analyze, but also defend Russian culture against erasure, distortion, and the lazy reliance on caricature. The purpose here is not to excuse governments or justify wars, but to insist that culture must remain separate from politics. Russian art, language, and memory are now under siege, not only through Western sanctions and boycotts, but also through Ukraine’s deliberate campaign to dismantle monuments, ban literature, and erase an entire cultural legacy even while presenting itself as the victim of Russia’s cultural repression. Such contradictions expose the double standards at play: the West has sought to isolate Russia, yet Russian culture endures. This archive itself is living proof of that endurance. By analyzing and denouncing stereotypes, vilification, and historical fictions, ROMANOV stands as a reminder that no amount of propaganda can succeed in making an entire people or their culture simply vanish. To put it simply, Russia matters. And shall continue to matter.

It should be noted, that for the sake of analytical coherence and also simplicity, Japanese-developed videogames are also included, as their representations frequently align with Western cultural perspectives and stereotypes regarding Russians, not to mention, many of them are directed to a Western audience or reference Hollywood stereotypes directly. Moreover, native Russian videogames, especially those that have made an impact abroad in Western audiences or have reached international audiences broadly, will be featured here, noting that the developers are native Russians.

No game is excluded here. American, British, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian—or from any other country—all titles that feature Western tropes and clichés are welcome and will be examined through the same lens, (although the focus will be on Western-developed games). Their biases, agendas, stereotypes, and prejudices will be noted, regardless of origin. As surprising as it may seem, even Russian developers can be highly critical of their own country, culture, and government, and sometimes they too adopt or replicate Western prejudices about themselves. In fact, Russian games can be just as shaped by these tropes as they are capable of influencing Western audiences in return. For that reason, it is equally important to feature Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and other post-Soviet games here, not only to highlight how they engage with these archetypes, but also to contrast them directly with their Western counterparts. Localization is just as important as design or narrative, and this archive will also explore how Russian culture appears through language itself: from Russian dubs of Western games to the way Russian dialogue is written and spoken in English titles—sometimes authentic, sometimes riddled with errors or clichés—revealing yet another layer of how culture is filtered, misrepresented, or reimagined in gaming, through language, transcreation and localization.

Our Mission Statements

• To catalog and analyze: every Western game that features Russian characters, settings, language, or themes—as well as Russian-developed games that gained recognition in the West. We provide context-rich interpretations that go beyond surface-level stereotypes.
• To preserve and spotlight: lesser-known, forgotten, or overlooked games that deserve renewed attention for their artistic, cultural, or historical value.
• To support game developers: by promoting creators who engage thoughtfully with Russian themes or come from Russian-speaking backgrounds.
• To foster cultural understanding: by using games as a bridge to the Russian language, history, and identity—making these accessible and engaging to non-Russian speakers and the curious alike.

Russophobia Under the Gaming Lens

We must also confront the fact that this exploration inevitably touches on Russophobia—the fear, distrust, or disparagement of Russia and Russians. While the archive’s purpose is not to excuse or justify any country’s geopolitical actions, it aims to understand the cultural underpinnings of these portrayals. By doing so, it shall hopefully reveal how certain narratives become ingrained, for better or for worse, and how they contribute to our perceptions of Russia in the gaming world. With ongoing geopolitical conflicts like the current one in Ukraine, these portrayals take on new layers of meaning, sometimes reinforcing fears and misconceptions. Russophobia has, thusly, resurfaced in different forms, finding its way into cultural expressions, including videogames. The mere mention of Russophobia can also make some readers think the author sides unequivocally with Russia, right or wrong. Thus, this must be stressed: this archive doesn’t aim to exonerate or defend any nation’s actions. While there is indeed much love for Russia here, please rest assured: the method here is neutral—document, compare, and cite. Which is a much-needed breath of fresh air in a world consumed by fanaticism, hatred, extremism and jingoism. Instead, my goal is to explore how and why these representations persist in Western games and to examine what they reveal about our collective perceptions.

I would like to mention and promote the authors Guy Mettan and Dominic Basulto, who have written extensively for Western audiences on the subject of Russophobia, and I recommend their books wholeheartedly. Having read their books, and the examples they quote, especially when it comes to the dirty tricks of Western mainstream media, it is not hard to see that all articles mentioned in this manifesto (mostly Western and Ukrainian sources) align well with the Russophobia playbook that has been in use by Western powers since even before the Cold War, in Russia’s imperial times, to smear the image of Russia and Russians in the West.

Please pay close attention to the sources cited throughout this document. Most originate from Western or Ukrainian outlets, and it is crucial to examine their own language carefully: observe how they frame their arguments, why they choose certain words, and what they may stand to gain if you accept their perspective. Then weigh these narratives against the counterpoints presented here. You will no doubt notice resentment, derision, manipulation, fanaticism, aggression, and double standards woven throughout these Western sources: and that's the point. This Manifesto emphasizes Ukrainian and Western cultural policies, as Russian actions—widely documented in global media—receive ample coverage, allowing us to highlight less-discussed perspectives on cultural representation in gaming.

It is understandable that war, with its immense suffering and division, breeds hatred and animosity, as seen in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine (and as we'll see later on with more historical examples). This manifesto does not condone or overlook the pain and hostility that arise in such times, nor does it dismiss the complexities of geopolitical strife. However, it firmly defends Russian culture—its art, language, and heritage—against erasure, distortion, and vilification, where it is pertinent to do so. By cataloging and analyzing representations in videogames, ROMANOV seeks to preserve cultural depth, reject lazy stereotypes, and foster understanding, insisting that culture must remain distinct from politics and propaganda, enduring as a bridge between peoples even amidst conflict.

Ukraine in Gaming: Historical Revisionism, Censorship and Suppression of Language

First, we must establish Ukraine's recent approach to gaming in order to directly see how this worldview shapes what we analyze here, which is the gaming industry. How games are made, censored, and received. The same impulses that tear down monuments, rename institutions, and police language inevitably reach into gaming, where Russian culture is erased or rewritten to fit current narratives. We’ve laid out these patterns because they matter when we turn to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.—a series whose recent remasters were stripped of Russian voices and Soviet-era relics, not for artistic reasons, but as part of the very same cultural systematic campaign of Russophobia we denounce.

Since 2022, companies like CD Projekt RED, Microsoft, Amazon, and EA suspended sales or even canceled Russian localizations, leaving countless players cut off from their own language despite having no responsibility for their government’s actions. Amazon went as far as halting the Russian localization of New World, while EA removed Russian teams from FIFA. The irony is that Russian studios themselves, even under immense political pressure, often continue to include Ukrainian as a playable language in their releases, proving that art and accessibility need not be held hostage to geopolitics. It also proves that, despite the conflict, the vast majority of Russians continue to view Ukrainians as a brotherly nation to be included, despite the vocal hatred, rejection and rampant Russophobia emerging from Ukraine in recent times. Simply put, Russians do not look at Ukrainians in the same way Ukrainians have learned to look at Russians in recent years. Cultural accessibility need not be hostage to geopolitics, even when hostility and distrust dominate the political sphere.

Remember: No Russian

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is one of the starkest examples. The remastered trilogy released in 2025 launched to “Mostly Negative” reviews not because of gameplay but because GSC Game World removed the original Russian voice tracks and deleted Soviet-era monuments from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. As many gamers noted, what once functioned as a “museum of time”—a reminder of Soviet negligence and the catastrophe it produced—was stripped of its historical markers, not to glorify Moscow, but to maintain immersion in a setting bound to 1986. Ironically, this undermines the traditional Ukrainian anti-Soviet narrative further. Fans thus argued that this was not propaganda, but revisionism: the Zone’s cultural and historical texture gutted in the name of contemporary politics. In censoring language and revising relics, the developers inadvertently proved the point that history and culture are not immune to war—they become its first casualties.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl became one of the most politicized game releases of recent years, shaped as much by war as by design. Developed under bombardment, with parts of the team evacuated to Prague and others fighting at the front, the studio GSC Game World openly tied its sequel to Ukraine’s survival, dedicating it to fallen developers and soldiers, and lacing the game with Ukrainian songs, imagery, and the newly adopted spelling “Chornobyl.” At the same time, it severed ties with its largest historic fanbase: Russia. The game was pulled from Russian platforms, Russian dubbing was scrapped, and hackers demanding its reinstatement were rebuffed. Western, Middle-Eastern and Ukrainian media framed these choices as defiant acts of cultural resilience, praising a “victory” for Ukraine as sales hit a million in 48 hours and Xbox executives championed it as a symbol of endurance.

But this celebration revealed a double standard. Russian fans — who had carried the franchise since its 2007 debut — were written off as expendable, while forums filled with complaints about the absence of Russian localization were dismissed as petty or malicious. When Russian state officials in turn threatened to ban the game as “extremist” because of its explicit support for the Ukrainian military, Western coverage decried it as censorship and propaganda, even citing disinformation campaigns. In effect, barring Russians from access was lauded as principle, while Russia reciprocating was condemned as dictatorship. The narrative around Stalker 2 thus became less about the Zone and more about the war itself: a cultural front where the exclusion of Russians was justified as moral necessity, and the game’s very existence was cast in the West as proof that Ukraine could not be broken. Everything ceased to be about the game and gained a political connotation. The game itself became yet another cultural and political symbol of "Ukrainian resilience in the face of Russian aggression."

The case of Tetris

When people talk about how culture and politics don’t matter in games, we need look no further than the phenomenon that was Tetris. Born in 1984 behind the Iron Curtain, at the height of the Cold War, it should have been the least marketable product imaginable in the West: a Soviet puzzle game from a communist state. And yet the opposite happened—its origin became part of its mystique.

From the moment Tetris crossed the border, Western marketing leaned heavily on Russian imagery to brand it as exotic and unmistakably Soviet. Box art featured Moscow skylines, the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral, red banners, hammers and sickles, cosmonauts in space stations, even stylized Cyrillic lettering to remind players that this wasn’t just another puzzle—it was a cultural export from the USSR. The soundtrack cemented the association with “Korobeiniki,” a 19th-century Russian folk tune that instantly stamped the game as foreign and distinctive. Its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, famously felt embarrassed by it, saying it would undermine Russian culture, as children would associate the folk song to the game. Despite communism being taboo in Western consumer culture, and despite political antagonism defining East–West relations, publishers made sure players knew they were buying a Soviet creation. Russianness was not hidden but highlighted, because it gave the game a unique aura that no Western competitor could imitate.

This is why Tetris remains such a revealing case study. If culture didn’t matter, its packaging and promotion would have downplayed national origin. Instead, the Soviet frame was used as a selling point. Now, decades later, imagine trying to market Tetris for the first time: in today’s climate, Russian flags, Moscow landmarks, or Cyrillic stylization would almost certainly be stripped out in favor of neutral neon minimalism or global retro aesthetics. The gameplay would be the same, but the cultural frame would be erased. And perhaps most sadly, even Tetris’s own creator has recently distanced himself from Russia, openly siding against his homeland in the war in Ukraine. It shows how deep the current fracture runs: a game once celebrated as a proud Soviet export is now caught in the same cultural fault lines that this archive seeks to examine. Pajitnov once worried the Western “Russian kitsch” wrapped around Tetris might trivialize his country’s culture; in recent years he has publicly taken positions read as aligning with Ukraine during the war, a shift that shows how far today’s fracture has reached into even the most emblematic Soviet-born game. Tetris proves that games are never “just games”—culture has always been part of the product, and sometimes, it becomes inseparable from it.

In the end, Ukraine’s approach to gaming has revealed a willingness to weaponize culture at the expense of its own authenticity. By censoring language, erasing monuments, and revising history, it punishes ordinary players rather than governments, and strips away the very texture that once gave these worlds meaning. What should have been preserved as art and memory has been turned into propaganda and grievance. In doing so, Ukraine has not defended its culture—it has diminished it, proving that in its bid to spite Russia, it is willing to impoverish its own heritage.

We now turn to Ukraine’s broader treatment of Russian language, memory, and symbols in public life. The same logic that censors voice tracks and scrubs monuments in virtual worlds operates in schools, museums, publishing, and state messaging, shaping a program of cultural separation. What follows examines that larger pattern and its consequences.

Culture as a Weapon of War

To truly understand how games portray Russia, we also need to understand the broader historical backdrop that has shaped these images. Stereotypes in media do not emerge in a vacuum; they are the echoes of older political struggles, cultural anxieties, and wartime reflexes. Many games here, as you’ll quickly notice, feature very political overtones, taking place in fictionalized Russian invasions of Western countries, or depicting internal Russian politics, coups, organized crime and civil wars. Just as today’s localization choices or narrative clichés reflect current geopolitics, earlier moments in history show how quickly art and culture can be conscripted into conflict. This pattern is not unique to Russia—it has repeated itself with German, Japanese, and other cultures before. With that in mind, we can turn to history to see how culture, in times of war, is often treated not as heritage, but as a battlefield.

History shows that in wartime, culture is invariably conscripted into politics. In 1917, King George V officially changed the surname of the British Royal Family from the German House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor due to strong anti-German sentiment. German-language newspapers in the United States were shuttered, schools dropped German, and even sauerkraut was rechristened "liberty cabbage"; dachshunds "liberty hounds"; and German measles "liberty measles." Germans were called "Huns." Orchestras trimmed Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and Wagner from programs because the composers were German. The Second World War repeated the reflex in harsher ways; Japanese-Americans were interned in camps, Japanese language schools and cultural associations were closed, and Japanese arts were banned or discouraged. Allied repertoires again sidelined German and Austrian composers, while in the Soviet Union German music was suppressed after 1941. The Cold War added suspicion toward Russian and Soviet culture in the West regardless of artistic content. McCarthyism and witch-hunts for communists became commonplace in the West, particularly the United States, and artists and culture in general suffered as a result. Meanwhile, in the Communist East, Western music, art and literature were equally forbidden and discouraged.

How Enemies Become Allies

Now, teleport yourself from the war-torn wastelands of 1945 Germany and Japan, and come back to the present. Would you ever think of banning or demonizing the culture of present-day Germany or Japan, portraying it as eternally evil and tyrannical? Would you even consider people from those countries as enemies because of their past actions, so greatly vilified during their time to the point of attacking and suppressing their cultures?

We must dare to ask ourselves extremely uncomfortable, unnerving and complex questions: if the preceding points were untrue in any way... would it be conceivable that today we would be witnessing a former Al Qaeda leader speaking at the UN building, in New York City?

To cite one of the most recent examples of this, the shifting image of Jewish identity in the West shows how history can quickly transform cultural perception. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish people were widely memorialized in art, cinema and literature as victims of persecution and symbols of resilience in the face of systematic racism, political persecution and oppression. Today, with Israel’s war in Gaza and mounting accusations of atrocities and genocide, that narrative has fractured: Jewishness is increasingly entangled in the politics of the Israeli state, fueling both rising antisemitism and Islamophobia, and Jews are now compared to their erstwhile oppressors. Antisemitism is resurfacing in troubling ways, often tied to how current events reshape collective memory. The Holocaust, once a near-universal symbol of Jewish suffering, is now met by some with apathy or revisionism, as voices—especially in light of Gaza’s devastation—draw parallels between Nazi atrocities and Israeli military actions. At its most extreme, this rhetoric has even led to attempts to justify, excuse or relativize Nazi crimes. In this way, the policies of Israel risk eroding the moral authority long associated with Jewish history as a persecuted people. From a moral standpoint, after seeing the atrocities in Gaza, it is hard to ask people to empathize with the Israeli population, especially when said population appears to not care about Gaza or the Palestinians as a whole, wanting only for their hostages to be released and not really caring about the suffering of Palestinians. As a result of all this, Israel is undoubtedly becoming a pariah in the world stage, but the world's response was slow and hesitant, whereas with Russia it was immediate and decisive.

Within weeks of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia was banned from international sporting events, the Olympics, film festivals, and a wide range of cultural exchanges. By contrast, in Israel’s case, despite years of occupation and escalating conflict, boycotts or suspensions in forums like Eurovision, the Olympics, or major art festivals were not seriously considered until the devastation in Gaza reached unprecedented levels in 2023–2025. Only now, with Netanyahu politically isolated and Israel facing mounting condemnation, do we see calls for the same sweeping bans that Russia endured immediately: exclusion from Eurovision and even football. The time it took to reach this point is staggering. Such double standards fuel resentment, distort cultural legacies, and complicate any honest dialogue. More importantly, they show how quickly cultural identity can be redefined by politics—and how dangerous it is when entire peoples are judged through the prism of war rather than through the richness of their art, traditions, and voices.

The Elephant in the Room: The War in Ukraine as a Cultural Fault Line

Today, the same reflex surfaces still in new guises. Thus, we shall now address fully the elephant in the room of this website: Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine (SMO), referred to in the West as the "Russo-Ukrainian War" and "Russia's Invasion of Ukraine", or the more politically-charged “Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” “Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine” or "Russia's unprovoked/unjustified/illegal/brutal invasion of Ukraine." These terms are ever-present in the media, and they feature in Western news outlets style guides and official EU statements. No other war is described in such harsh terms, let us remember, and this includes the many US wars, some of which have notably been discovered to have taken place under false pretexts.

The conflict has notoriously been consistently portrayed in the West as a stark contest between good and evil, with Ukraine cast as a flawless democracy and Russia as a uniquely malevolent aggressor. Within this narrative, any acknowledgment of Western policy’s role in shaping the conflict, or any attempt at nuance, is immediately condemned as appeasement or “Russian propaganda.” Such absolutist framing makes genuine dialogue impossible and erases the complexities of culture, history, and perception that projects like ROMANOV aim to examine and preserve.

If I said "Special Military Operation" or "SMO" that would automatically label me as a "Kremlin mouthpiece." However, I also refuse to fall for the language and the propaganda of the other side. For the sake of simplicity in English, however, we shall refer to it simply as “the war in Ukraine,” since it’s the most general term Westerners will recognize. Although we could, we will not attempt any in-depth discussion of the root causes of the war, about the side of the argument supported by Russia and the multipolar world contrasted against the position adopted by the Western world, about who is right or wrong or who to side with. That is not only pointless in today's discourse, but also beyond the scope of this archive. We will look at this "elephant in the room" through the cultural lens mentioned before, to establish the overall attitude this archive shall hold when it comes to any such topic. The war in Ukraine is not the first war that seriously challenges cultural perceptions and sensibilities of people, as we shall see shortly, and it won't be the last. That is why, going further, it's important for the archive to establish its stance.

Culture Under Siege: Erasing Russia as a Form of National Identity

Across Europe and Ukraine since 2022, Soviet-era monuments have been dismantled or boxed; statues of Pushkin and Catherine the Great removed or vandalized; Lenin toppled, and symbols recoded or renamed. Daily life and the most mundane aspects of culture are also valid targets. In Ukraine, Russian-language books are recycled, hidden, or destroyed, while others argue for curating and contextualizing rather than erasing. Book burning, it need not be said, is one of the most ancient and barbaric forms of censorship and repression, acts tied in historical memory to the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazis. I have not come across records of Russians ever doing the same with Ukrainian books. As we shall see later, these are very questionable actions for a 'democracy,' yet Western media, like The Guardian in this case, seem to promote such stories of cultural destruction as noble, humane stories of resilience in the face of war.

Across the pond, in New York City’s Brighton Beach, the politics of a distant war reshaped cultural life almost overnight. The longtime grocery store Taste of Russia dropped its name within days of the invasion and rebranded as International Food, signaling how even a shop sign could become politically charged in just a matter of days. Local community groups followed the same pattern, with the Russian Parents Network renaming itself the Russian-speaking Parents Network to distance itself from the word “Russian” and to include Ukrainians and others from the former Soviet Union. On the boardwalk, anti-war activists introduced a new white-and-blue flag (designed by a Berlin-based Russian dissident artist, Kai Katonina) as an alternative to the tricolor to protest Russia (the flag has gone on to be used by anti-Putin demonstrators and the Ukraine-aligned anti-Russian Freedom of Russia Legion militia). It should also be noted, this flag fulfills a similar role to the Belarus opposition flag, which is identical but with a red stripe, except this flag is historical, whereas the new anti-Russian flag is made up.

Meanwhile restaurants across Manhattan erased “Russian” from their branding or menus in response to boycotts and vandalism. At the same time, the arts faced their own wave of cancellations: orchestras quietly removed Tchaikovsky from their repertoires, university courses on Dostoevsky were suspended or “balanced” with Ukrainian authors, and international theaters canceled Bolshoi Ballet performances even when individual artists had spoken out against the war. Each of these acts—renaming, rebranding, or canceling—illustrates how culture is caught in the crossfire of geopolitics, where language, music, and symbols cease to be neutral and instead become proxies for state policy. The cost is a narrowing of cultural expression and a diaspora community pressured to reframe its identity simply to remain visible and accepted.

In Lithuania, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was suspended as part of what officials called a “mental quarantine” from Russian culture, with the national opera house replacing it for two seasons. When a new culture minister later suggested there was no danger in enjoying a Christmas fairy tale, the resulting uproar laid bare how deeply politics now dictates cultural life. In July 2025, more than 700 intellectuals and Nobel laureates signed an open letter to Ursula von der Leyen and Italian authorities demanding the cancellation of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev's scheduled concert in Caserta, denouncing it as Kremlin propaganda disguised as art. Days later, Italian organizers indeed canceled the event after political outcry and EU pressure. This happened despite years of Western institutions working with him, in spite of performances that allegedly supported Putin. The affair shows how Russian culture is now treated not as art but as an extension of state power—an assumption that erases nuance and collapses centuries of cultural heritage into a single political narrative. These acts arise from grief, rage, and a drive to decolonize public space, yet they also reveal a persistent habit of judging art by the passport of its creators. This archive rejects that habit. Culture is not an extension of any army. To confuse creators with commanders narrows the imagination and severs the channels through which societies can still speak to one another in times of war. Ukraine is framing all of this narrow-minded and hatred-driven cultural violence and suppression as noble "anti-imperialist," "anti-colonialist" struggles, actions usually associated to the political left, however, as we shall see, Ukraine is anything but leftist. The effect has been such that, in the West, some have denounced it as a form of Ukrainian "cancel culture" that will inevitably weaken Ukraine culturally.

Names, Language, and Cultural Power

So what’s in a name? When I studied at the University of Granada, the “Russian Center” was still proudly called the Centro Ruso, a space explicitly dedicated to the study and diffusion of Russian language and culture. Today, however, the same institution exists under a different banner: Centro de Culturas Eslavas (Center of Slavic Cultures). The change is not merely cosmetic but deeply symbolic. In 2022, the university severed ties with the Russkiy Mir Foundation and moved to rebrand the center, reflecting broader political pressures that made “Russia” a problematic word to display on a Spanish campus. The new name seeks neutrality by expanding to “Slavic cultures,” but in practice it dilutes the visibility of Russian culture, reducing it from a central focus to one component of a broader and less defined category. To further showcase the anti-Russian bias behind this decision, the center now prominently features the Ukrainian flag in its website and courses on Ukrainian language, with Ukrainian speakers being hosted. It is a stark contrast from the prominent Russian flags and Soviet-Russian veterans and artists that used to be hosted. This renaming illustrates how politics reaches into cultural and academic institutions, reshaping not only international relations but also the very vocabulary with which students encounter language, literature, and art. I should also add that it was a pleasure to take part in a public reading of my own Pushkin translation and to take photographs standing beside the Pushkin Monument (inaugurated on September 15, 2015) in Granada with Russian Center organizers, professors and invited artists. I attended the site on its second anniversary during the MAPRYAL Congress. That monument honors a figure revered in the Russian-speaking world as deeply as Shakespeare is in the English-speaking world—yet in Ukraine today, Pushkin’s statues are being torn down and defaced, acts openly sanctioned and even celebrated by Western media. With the Russian Center having forsaken its own name and identity, it remains to be seen whether the monument itself shall survive in the coming years.

You will notice that, through this manifesto (and this website in general), the Russian spellings of Ukrainian cities are used. The reasons for this are simple: the Ukrainian government launched entire campaigns aimed at the West urging the public to abandon Russian spellings in favor of Ukrainian ones—“Kyiv” not “Kiev,” “Odesa” not “Odessa”—with Ukrainian journalists, officials and activists insisting (quite aggressively and heavy-handedly) that correct language was a matter of respect, identity, and decolonization. Yet, within the European Union itself, Catalan continues to be denied official status, blocked by Germany and Italy on the grounds of cost and bureaucracy. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, even went so far as to suggest dismissively that artificial intelligence will soon make interpreters unnecessary, as though machine translation could replace political recognition. The contrast is striking: while Ukrainian linguistic sovereignty was framed as a moral imperative against Russian dominance, Catalan, spoken by millions within the EU, is dismissed as an inconvenience. It shows that principles loudly invoked against Russia are selectively applied when the issue lies closer to home. It is, once again, also, a question of anti-democratic origin: who consulted us whether we would prefer to say Kyiv instead of Kiev? Linguists and experts have commented, as is the case in Spanish, that Kyiv is simply an unnatural spelling in the Spanish language and makes no sense, which is a valid point. After all, in Spanish, the correct spelling for Catalonia is Cataluña, not Catalunya (something denounced by Catalans themselves in similar “anti-colonialist” stances). Yet, who are we to demand of others to use certain spellings, especially when they’re not natural in our language? Such is the case with Turkey and Turkiye. While it is indeed noble to defend a country’s right to self-identity, sometimes it is simply not feasible or pragmatic for a foreign language when the term has taken root, and language itself over time decides what it’s most comfortable with. Russia does not demand of others to be called Rossiya, after all, or for us to call Moscow Moskva. Such is the case with Kiev and Kyiv, however, but the motives here are purely political, not linguistic. Ukraine simply seems far more interested in imposing its own narrative and truth. When dismissing why it's not the same that we don't say Roma instead of Rome, Ukrainians are quick to dismiss this as "it's not the same anti-imperialist struggle," in a victimhood "you're ignorant and don't understand Ukraine" stance which has been very prevalent in the media every time there is resistance to cave in to Ukrainian cultural demands.

Diminishing Others: Ukraine’s Lowercase Guerrilla War

Ukraine has adopted another more subtle linguistic tactic that diminishes its adversaries by refusing to capitalize their names. In many Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian media outlets, references to “russia,” “russian,” and “belarus” appear deliberately in lowercase (something we might think of as typos at first), a symbolic gesture that denies these states the dignity normally accorded to sovereign nations. Publications openly acknowledge this choice, explaining that it is done as a form of protest, and the practice has become widespread enough that Ukraine’s own National Commission on State Language Standards has stated that writing “russia” in lowercase will not be considered a grammatical mistake. This practice functions as a cultural weapon: by breaking with standard orthography, Ukraine embeds a statement of defiance directly into everyday language, ensuring that every mention of its adversaries carries a subtle undertone of humiliation. Over time, this stylistic choice has spread across journalism, social media, and even academic or activist writing, creating a shared code that signals both solidarity with Ukraine and disdain for its opponents. In this way, the rejection of capitalization becomes more than a matter of typography—it is an institutionalized strategy of narrative warfare, designed to strip disliked countries of symbolic legitimacy while reinforcing Ukraine’s own national identity in opposition to them.

Ukraine: A Former Russian Colony?

Ukraine's victimhood narratives of having been some kind of oppressed colony of Russia are extremely controversial to say the least. In recent years, a noticeable trend has emerged in Western discourse: the sweeping use of “anticolonialism” or “decolonization” as a catch-all moral badge applied to virtually any struggle or narrative—even when historical circumstances do not align with classical colonial paradigms. Scholars and critics have warned that such ideological inflation risks erasing the very specificity of colonial history and turning the term into a rhetorical trope.

In the case of Ukraine, invoking the language of colonial liberation positions the country as if it endured the kind of overseas colonization faced by nations in Africa, Asia, or Latin America—an analogy that flattens both the Ukrainian experience and those histories of violent subjugation. It is a narrative of emotional blackmail used only to keep Western nations interested. Let us remember Ukraine's embarrassing efforts trying to persuade Spain by citing its own history fighting fascism. This, coming from a government that worships the likes of Stepan Bandera, was thought of in Spain by the left as some kind of joke in bad taste. Meanwhile, Western media coverage of Ukraine has at times adopted frames reserved for “victims of empire,” contrasting it with non-European conflicts in which resistance is often dismissed or criminalized. This rhetorical shift, distorts historical truth: conflating Ukraine’s complex imperial legacy with the classic colonial model not only misleads but also dilutes the suffering of peoples whose lives were broken by actual colonial conquest.

Ukraine’s central bank released a 20-hryvnia commemorative note on February 23, 2023, marking one year since Russia’s invasion. One side shows three soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag in a clear imitation of the Iwo Jima photograph, surrounded by the flags of its Western backers, while the other depicts tied hands symbolizing alleged Russian war crimes. Presented as a symbol of resistance and “decolonization” from Russia, the note inadvertently reveals the contradiction at the heart of Ukraine’s narrative: while denouncing Russian imperialism, it proudly aligns itself with the very colonial powers it claims to reject—Britain (and its former colony Canada), the EU (containing former colonialist countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands), and the United States (a country often considered an empire). Rather than asserting independence, the design exposes a state that has absorbed Western imagery, myths, and interests wholesale, recasting subordination as sovereignty.

Not even religion has escaped the notice of things Ukraine can do away with in its "anti-colonialist" struggle. Ukraine’s decision to move Christmas celebrations from January 7 to December 25 was less a theological reform than a political gesture—a deliberate break with Russian Orthodoxy. While the government and the newly independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine framed it as “abandoning Russian heritage,” many faithful were reluctant to follow, and even Western outlets admitted the shift was embraced as a symbolic protest rather than a majority tradition.

It raises a serious question: as Ukraine aligns itself more and more with the West, does continuing to use Cyrillic even make sense? Why not adopt a Latin alphabet, as Poland, Czechia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Slovakia have done? If the goal is to abandon the old orientation entirely—even down to moving away from Orthodox Christmas—then such a step would only seem consistent.

Dehumanization of the Enemy: Orcs, Pigs, Devils, Rats and Subhumans

Dehumanization is another aspect we in the West are tolerating openly. It is fine to refer to the Russian military as being comprised of a mass of orcs in a horde; not only is it fine, as we shall see later, it is also fine to explain why it is fine.

In this Ukraine Crisis Media Center article, the tone is unapologetically hostile toward Russians, openly equating them to Tolkien’s evil, subhuman race. It frames Russians not just as enemies, but as inherently cruel, sadistic, and beyond redemption, drawing on Tolkien’s mythology to “explain” their supposed nature. It ends up justifying the orc metaphor as not exaggeration but reality.

The RUSI piece, while more academic and analytical, still validates the use of the “orc” metaphor, describing it as a powerful “tactical narrative” that boosts morale and simplifies the war into a story of good vs. evil. It compares it to past dehumanizing wartime language (like calling Germans “Huns” in WWI) but frames it positively, as a necessary myth to inspire Ukrainians. Both articles clearly show how dehumanization is normalized and even celebrated in mainstream Ukrainian and Western-aligned discourse. Russians are reduced to monsters or a “horde,” with little or no recognition of them as human beings.

It reminds one of the American caricatures of the Japanese during WW2, portraying them as ugly, rat-like, sneaky little animals with big ears and teeth. When extrapolating such treatment to other peoples, say, for example, the Jews (with Nazis often comparing them to rats) anti-defamation leagues and institutions would be in an uproar today; this is not the case for dehumanization rhetoric and racism against Russians, which has been so normalized no one raises an eyebrow.

Ukrainian Boorishness: Trolling, Meme Culture and Celebrating Profanity as a Proud Symbol of Defiance

A major part of its cyber warfare and propaganda campaign, we can see indeed how a lot of Ukraine’s wartime messaging has leaned into outright provocation and meme culture. Ukrainians, throughout this conflict, have consistently reveled in a rude, boorish demeanor they even trace proudly to their Cossack heritage, as depicted in Ilya Repin's 19th-century painting of Zaporozhian Cossacks drafting an insulting letter to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV in 1676, taunting him as a "hen-thief," "drunkard," "sausage," and "fool" in a barrage of juvenile mockery rather than measured defiance.

I should note that the Ukrainians beat me to the punch on this subject. While researching this history of crudeness (inspired by constant Ukrainian diplomats and politicians conveying their vulgarity through Twitter) I had begun writing myself about this very Ilya Repin painting and the Cossacks on 25/02/2023:

"I remember in university, in our Russian culture class, when our professor had a lot of fun translating this letter, the kind of "I know this is so crude the class will surely laugh" type of thing a teacher does to make history things less boring. Vulgarity is funny. Now, with the current context of this war, and the general Ukrainian attitude towards Russians, it bears even more relevance culturally. Perhaps, it is true that Ukrainians are such an inherently crude people after all?"

With the Ukrainian article itself taking pride in it, this is pretty much confirmed. Much like their modern "Russian warship, go fuck yourself" postage stamp, a profane and defiant retort from Snake Island border guards immortalized in 2022 as a symbol of vulgar bravado complete with a raised middle finger. It ends up conveying a very "punk rock" feeling of adolescent, edgy defiance, an image that could very well be the artwork for a punk rock album. This contrasts sharply with Soviet and Russian traditional refined stamps honoring arts, literature, and achievements like Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight, eschewing crass obscenity for cultural elevation. Another episode in Sudzha, where retreating Ukrainian forces scrawled “Russians, learn to fight” across the town square, illustrates again the crude and juvenile register so often paraded as proud defiance in Ukraine media. The slogan, written with spelling mistakes and aimed more at humiliation than wit, pales in comparison to the historic Russian precedent it clumsily mimicked—graffiti left by Russian troops in Gori during 2008, which carried irony and even a teacherly admonition. Where Russian soldiers once turned an insult into a memorable cultural meme, Ukraine’s attempt in Sudzha exposed little more than bitterness and boorishness, a spectacle of adolescent spite rather than dignified resistance.

The same unrefined spirit fuels NAFO's trolling legions, a meme-driven "Twitter army" of Shiba Inu dog avatars harassing Russian diplomats and propagandists since May 2022, blending childish antagonism with donation drives for Ukrainian forces while disrupting online narratives through relentless mockery. The West, with its predictable penchant for sanctimonious cheerleading, swiftly lionized NAFO’s “army of cartoon dogs” as plucky do-gooders, a ragtag band of Shiba Inu avatar-wielding pranksters supposedly outwitting Russian propagandists since May 2022. Hailed by outlets like Politico, DW and The Wall Street Journal, and bolstered by endorsements from NATO-adjacent figures like Estonia’s Vice-President of the European Commission, the passionately russophobic Kaja Kallas, NAFO’s juvenile trolling—spamming diplomats with #Article5 hashtags and crude memes—was framed as a noble stand against Kremlin lies. Yet this veneer of grassroots heroism concealed a rotten core: its founder, Kamil Dyszewski, a Polish antisemite with a history of Holocaust-denying posts and Hitler-glorifying memes, steered NAFO’s crowdfunding to the Georgian Legion, a militia notorious for war crimes and harboring neo-Nazis like Paul Gray and fugitive murderer Craig Lang. Far from a virtuous uprising, NAFO’s spiteful digital antics and ties to extremist violence expose it as a grotesque mockery of principle, cheered by a gullible West blind to its own complicity in elevating a Nazi-admiring troll to info-war sainthood. Even Western officials and analysts conceded NAFO’s value while warning it was ad hoc and unsustainable , arguing it must be professionalized: create regional coordination and loose leadership chains, build formal ties with Ukrainian embassies and funds like UNITED24, tie fundraising to specific units and equipment, and adopt measurable metrics and battlefield feedback so the movement’s meme power translates into lasting operational and material impact.

DeepState (DeepStateMap.live) is the most-watched public battle map in Ukraine, and its interface leans hard into meme-ified, mocking visuals without the seriousness a war monitoring map interface is due (it's their own men and territory being compromised, after all). Beyond the standard NATO symbology, the legend lets users swap the “enemy unit” marker for a pig icon—an overtly derisive cue baked right into the UI. This syncs with a broader Ukrainian info-space that cheerfully frames the invader as a Tolkienian “orc horde." The project is also famous for playful—and pointed—Easter eggs: if you zoom in on Moscow, you'll see a message near the Kremlin, "Путин хуйло" ("Putin khuylo," "Putin is a dickhead"). Russia, Belarus and even North Korea are, for some reason, represented with Soviet Red Stars, with Hammers and Sickles at the center. Clown emojis represent Slovakia and Hungary, under the names "Pro-Russian clown Fico" and "Orban's pro-Russian regime." Ukrainians clearly don't forget whoever doesn't side with them automatically. Ukraine is represented by its national coat of arms. If pressed, a war drone will appear and hover around, and when pressing on any of these enemy capitals, it will head over and obliterate them, complete with an explosion animation.

Various regions are labeled with tendentious captions. Kaliningrad (Kaliningrad Oblast), for instance, is marked in red as “East Prussia temporarily occupied, annexed in 1946 as a result of WWII.” The same treatment is applied to “occupied Latvia and Estonia territories under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.” Karelia (Republic of Karelia, Russian Federation) in Finland is tagged “Occupied in 1940 in result of the Winter (Karelo-Finnish) War. Re-occupied in 1945.” Petsamo (Pechenga District, Murmansk Oblast) and Salla (part of Murmansk Oblast) are also included, as "Occupied in 1945." Transnistria (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, de facto; internationally Moldova) is described as “Occupied in 1992 by the 14th Army of Russia.” The map extends this logic to the “temporarily occupied territory of the Republic of Ichkeria,” claiming it was “Occupied in 1995 after the First Chechen War, recognized independence of CRI, and re-occupied in 2009 after the Second Chechen War.” Tskhinvali (capital of South Ossetia, de facto independent; internationally Georgia) is labeled “Occupied in 1994 as a result of separatist support, re-occupied in 2008 by ‘peacemaker troops,’” while Abkhazia (Abkhazia, de facto independent; internationally Georgia) bears nearly identical wording. Even the Kuril Islands (Kurilsky District, Sakhalin Oblast) are marked "Occupied in 1946. Not returned to Japan since 1956." The reality is that these islands have been administered by Russia ever since the end of the Second World War and are integrated into Sakhalin Oblast. Japan continues to claim them as its Northern Territories, but Moscow considers the issue settled by the outcome of the war. Although the Soviet Union once discussed transferring two of the smaller islands back in the 1950s, Cold War politics froze the deal, and no peace treaty was ever signed. Today, only Japan contests the status of the islands; for Russia, they are not “occupied” but sovereign territory secured in 1945.

The inconsistency is clear: the map jumbles together lands that are fully recognized Russian territory, like Kaliningrad, with genuinely disputed zones by the West against Russia, such as Transnistria. This makes the whole exercise look less like a sober geopolitical critique and more like a bitter attempt at score-settling. By the same strained logic, one could label Texas, California, and other U.S. states as “rightfully Mexican, stolen by America.”

WIRED describes a hidden “Baby Yoda” (Grogu) animation that, when triggered, pulverizes Russian unit markers on screen. Like the drone mentioned earlier, this is a quite sad form of spiteful wishful thinking since, if you bother to check daily, you'll quickly see all battlefield update notifications start with "the enemy advanced/the enemy occupied."

But not everything is juvenile troll armies posting crude memes. Ukraine's own top diplomats revel in this behavior too. Exemplifying this attitude, then-Ambassador Andriy Melnyk's October 2022 "Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you" tweet to Elon Musk—dismissing his peace plan to cede Crimea (which is actually something Zelensky himself inevitably ended up considering)—mirrors the Cossacks' insolence, prioritizing shock over diplomacy and even risking much-needed Starlink support. Capping the capitalist hypocrisy, Ukraine's State Border Guard Service sought to trademark the warship slur since 2022 for souvenirs, bags, and clothing to monetize their profanity, only for the EU General Court to reject it in November 2024 as a non-commercial political slogan, underscoring a tacky bid to profit from rudeness amid wartime desperation rather than fostering genuine unity.

Ukraine’s relentless appeals for money and weapons, often framed in tones of urgency or even emotional blackmail, have drawn mounting criticism from its own allies. British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace famously warned Ukraine that “we’re not Amazon” after being handed yet another shopping list of arms, while Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico went further, branding President Zelensky a “beggar” and “blackmailer” who pressures Europe with endless demands. Such rhetoric reflects a growing fatigue in Western capitals, where leaders increasingly resent being cast as suppliers expected to deliver on cue, while receiving little more than scolding in return. Unsurprisingly, the demanding and often heavy-handed tone of Ukrainian officials at the highest diplomatic levels has done little to improve Ukraine’s image in the long run. Ukraine's tonedeaf appeals to the West, generating culture shock, have also resulted in things such as this: a cringe-inducing video appealing for French artillery through romantic metaphors borders on satirical absurdity, blending war with bizarre sexual undertones (Ukraine's own stereotypical view of France, perhaps).

'Liquidating' the Enemy: The Ukrainian Kill List, Myrotvorets

The Myrotvorets (“Peacemaker”) database is one of the most disturbing byproducts of Ukraine’s post-2014 political transformation — a self-proclaimed “NGO” that functions as a quasi-intelligence blacklisting system, naming anyone deemed “an enemy of Ukraine.” Founded by politician Heorhiy Tuka and an ex-SBU officer known as “Roman Zaitsev,” it publicly doxes thousands of journalists, activists, and even foreign celebrities who have expressed dissent, visited Crimea, or criticized Kyiv’s government. Its slogan, “For the public good,” feels grotesquely ironic when set against the fact that many people whose data appeared there later turned up dead.

The site was launched in late 2014 and quickly integrated into Ukrainian law-enforcement routines — its data reportedly used at border checkpoints and in court proceedings. It presents itself as a “public service,” yet its content routinely includes addresses, phone numbers, and photographs marked with red stamps reading “liquidated.” Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the European Parliament have all condemned it as a threat to privacy and safety, urging Kyiv to shut it down. Instead, Myrotvorets expanded — and with it, the quiet normalization of digital proscription in the name of “defending democracy.”

The moral corrosion behind this practice became evident through the individuals it targeted. Musician Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s co-founder, was denounced as an “enemy of Ukraine” for saying NATO provoked the war and for criticizing Western Russophobia. His profile included his address and a call for “law enforcement” to act against him. The Week recently reported that Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn, celebrated worldwide for his role in Anora, was also added to Myrotvorets for having filmed in Crimea years before the invasion. The entry accused the 23-year-old of “attacking Ukraine’s sovereignty” — a bureaucratic euphemism for blacklisting an artist who merely crossed an invisible political line.

According to People’s World, the same “Purgatory” database has included nearly 200,000 names — journalists, academics, politicians, even children — many of whom received threats or died violently soon after listing. Journalist Oles Buzina and former MP Oleg Kalashnikov were assassinated within days of their addresses being published. Italian reporter Andrea Rocchelli was killed in 2014; his Myrotvorets profile was later updated with the word “liquidated.” Even high-profile cultural figures like Steven Seagal, Gérard Depardieu, and Bashar al-Assad were added, as if to turn the page into a surreal pantheon of the damned.

In Bulgaria, the case has caused diplomatic outrage. The Sofia Globe documented how several Bulgarian politicians and journalists — including EU parliamentarian Elena Yoncheva — were added to the list simply for attending a Crimea-related conference. When investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva was labeled an “enemy,” the Union of Bulgarian Journalists called Myrotvorets “a death row list.” Bulgaria’s president, Rumen Radev, demanded government protection for those named, and parliamentarians openly called the site a “digital Gestapo.” Fact-checking organizations later confirmed that although Kyiv denies official control, Myrotvorets’ founders have longstanding ties to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry and the SBU.

The macabre character of this project is not accidental. It was conceived during wartime hysteria and has since become a moral litmus test of loyalty to the state. Wikipedia’s documentation shows that Myrotvorets has been praised by Ukrainian officials, used in court rulings, and never properly investigated despite international condemnation. Even the European Parliament’s 2021 resolution urged Kiev to ban it as an “extremist and hate-inciting platform.” The United Nations, OSCE, and Human Rights Watch all recognized its existence as a direct violation of basic human rights. Yet it continues to operate freely, adding names ranging from former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Henry Kissinger, Israeli singer Eden Golan, and even Ukrainian historians like Marta Havryshko — herself a Holocaust scholar accused of “Russian propaganda” for her nuanced academic work.

That such a database remains online, tolerated by Western governments that claim to defend “liberal democracy,” reveals the grotesque double standard surrounding Ukraine’s image. It is morbidly symbolic that a website literally named Peacemaker functions as a de facto death registry — where critics are exposed, shamed, and occasionally killed. This is not an aberration but the logical end of a culture that treats dissent as treason and moral policing as patriotism.

As Patrick Basham learned when Kyiv’s “Center for Countering Disinformation” blacklisted him for publishing neutral polling, Ukraine’s new “cancel culture” carries lethal overtones. His experience — like that of Waters, Eydelshteyn, and countless others — underscores a brutal truth: in modern Ukraine, to question the official narrative is to risk being marked for erasure, digitally first, and sometimes physically later. The fact that this continues with silent Western approval makes the entire spectacle not only cynical, but profoundly morbid — a grotesque parody of the values it claims to defend.

Adding to this, the macabre legacy of Myrotvorets lives on in other ways. As I recently learned, if you type “Russia” into Bluesky’s search bar, one of the first accounts that appears is Killed in Ukraine — a Czech-based group dedicated to documenting Russian officers’ deaths in the war. With 7,200 followers and over 1,000 posts, it’s prominently promoted by the platform. Yet, notably, there is virtually no visible pro-Russian or even neutral content on Bluesky, reflecting how tightly curated the Western social media landscape has become when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict.

Saint Zelensky, the New Churchill: Blind and Immediate Media Praise

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, once a comedian known for parodying politicians in his own TV show where he became a fictional president, has been transformed into a near-mythical Churchillian figure by Western elites and media, praised and hailed as a modern-day Churchill—a “hero of our time,” as described by outlets like The Spectator. Yet, beneath the saintly veneer lies a leader whose actions often reek of arrogance, opportunism and superficiality, raising doubts about his true priorities.

Zelensky was even chosen as Time Magazine's 2022 Person of the Year. This article by Thierry Meyssan on Voltairenet.org criticizes the decision, arguing that while the magazine praised his courage against Russia, in reality, he has turned Ukraine into an authoritarian state. Meyssan claims Zelensky used the war to consolidate power, banning opposition parties, Russian media and language, seizing assets, and outlawing the Orthodox Church linked to Moscow. The piece depicts his government as enforcing cultural and political repression under martial law, framing Time’s recognition as a misleading celebration of what the author calls an ethnonationalist regime.

Zelensky’s penchant for theatrics is evident in his public appearances, such as the tone-deaf Vogue photoshoot alongside his wife, where he posed like a fashion icon amid Ukraine’s devastation, projecting an image of vain elitism while his people suffered. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s fawning—from Sean Penn gifting his Oscar in a narcissistic gesture to visits by stars like Ben Stiller—turns a grave conflict into a celebrity circus, reinforcing Zelensky’s role as a scripted performer rather than a statesman.

Even as Chinese netizens on Weibo mockingly called him “Saint Zelensky” for his defiant Oval Office stance against Trump, seen as a bold underdog move, a darker reality emerges. Critics like Guy Mettan highlight Zelensky’s double-dealing, accusing him of betraying peace promises and aligning with corrupt oligarchs like Ihor Kolomoisky. His tolerance of far-right nationalists and the crude behavior of diplomats, such as Ambassador Melnyk’s “fuck off” to Elon Musk, further tarnishes his image. Belarusian sources, branding him an “evil clown”, argue he prolongs bloodshed for personal power, prioritizing celebrity adulation over Ukraine’s future.

Even mainstream outlets have begun to adopt a more skeptical tone. In a recent Al Jazeera profile, Zelensky is described as a “trickster” figure—someone who manipulates perceptions, shifts personas, and thrives on breaking norms. The article portrays him as a political shapeshifter whose “carefully curated, shape-shifting image” and reliance on showmanship have fueled both his rise and the growing doubts surrounding him. While acknowledging his courage during Russia’s invasion, the report underscores how his rule has increasingly blurred the line between performance and politics, with corruption scandals, power centralization, and clashes with figures like General Zaluzhnyi eroding his once-heroic aura.

Zelensky's Oval Office Clash with Trump

Portrayed in the media as the embodiment of an entire nation at war, Zelensky has had to also adopt this boorish and defiant behavior. His rhetoric is often inflammatory, very insulting towards Russia and Russians, and occassionally matches Trump's in terms of bombastic crudeness and hyperbole, contrasting heavily with the carefully selected words of the equally respected and feared Russian diplomatic team, Lavrov, Peskov and Zakharova, who often hide insults within allegories and produce sardonic witty comebacks aimed at making their opponents look ridiculous. With the obvious exception of Medvedev, who uses thet same crude hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric of Trump and Zelensky and stands unique in the Russian side as pretty much the only figure that does this so vocally.

But even President Zelensky himself was forced to soften his approach after his famous 28 February 2025 Oval Office sharp clash with U.S. President Donald Trump—a confrontation in which Trump’s own bluntness collided with Zelensky’s defiant posture, leading him to talk over the President several times, make faces, cross his arms, roll his eyes constantly and even resorting to disrespectfully addressing U.S. Vice President JD Vance on a first-name basis, just because he didn't agree with what the VP had said about security guarantees (which went against Ukraine's maximalist endwar demands).

During the Oval Office spat, Zelensky’s attitude came across as arrogant, combative and off-key (the Ukrainian delegation was even kicked out of the White House before the planned lunch). Such was one of Zelensky's remarks to Trump: “First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean, and don’t feel [it] now, but you will feel it in the future.” Trump retorted sharply: “You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we’re gonna feel." The reference to America’s “nice ocean” sounded flippant and condescending, highlighting the arrogance in Zelensky’s tone and prompting Trump’s immediate rebuke. This, it must be said, is not an isolated incident of Zelensky using such arrogant language.

Zelensky then insisted, “from the very beginning of the war, we have been alone,” prompting Trump to immediately counter, “You haven’t been alone … We gave you military equipment. Your men are brave, but they had our military. If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks,” to which Zelensky added "In three days, I heard it from Putin, in three days," talking over the U.S. President. Trump added, "maybe less," and Zelensky, probably misunderstanding the word "less" and Trump's meaning, said "of course, yes."

A side note here on Zelensky's use of his objectively poor English level for diplomatic meetings; it is not his first language (his native language is Russia, not even Ukrainian, which he started learning to become president), and this has also cost him dearly in diplomatic meetings and messaging. His refusal to use interpreters could be considered arrogant and reckless, given that most diplomats at the highest spheres still choose to use them to avoid misunderstandings, the kind Zelensky has been a victim of. Many articles stressed this, agreeing that his decision not to use an interpreter resulted in these misunderstandings and lack of cultural nuances. The Washington Post itself reported that Zelensky’s choice to forgo an interpreter in a tense meeting with U.S. leaders led to miscommunication and escalated the dispute, indicating that his command of English was insufficient for the complexities of high-level diplomacy.

Among Zelensky’s linguistic missteps was the notorious confusion of “costume” for the Russian kostyum (костюм), as well as his misinterpretation of Trump’s phrase “maybe less” as “maybe yes.” Another striking moment came during Trump’s use of a “playing cards” metaphor. Trump told him: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” Zelensky, missing the figurative meaning, replied literally: “I’m not playing cards…” Trump pressed back: “You are playing cards. You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.” To which Zelensky responded, haltingly: “I am the president… ('in war', he appears to say).” Trump escalated further: “You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country.”

This exchange underscored how Zelensky’s imperfect grasp of English nuance left him vulnerable to miscommunication in a setting where metaphor and tone carried heavy political weight, as his arrogance, reckless demeanor and desire to address the Anglo-centric Western world in English cost him dearly. Notably, after the meeting, he still addressed Trump and the U.N. in English.

When Trump described Ukrainian cities as destroyed with “not a building standing,” Zelenskyy immediately objected: “You have to come to look… we have very good cities. Yes, a lot of things [have] been destroyed, but mostly cities [are] alive, and people work and children go to school. Sometimes it’s very difficult. Sometimes, closer to [the] front line, children have to go to underground schools or online. But we live, Ukraine is fighting, and Ukraine lives.” Here lies the contradiction: Ukraine is cast both as “alone,” devastated, and desperate for help, and at the same time as resilient, functioning, and defiant in the face of Russia’s assault. Zelenskyy takes offense at Trump’s bleak portrayal of Ukraine, yet his own rhetoric often leans on the language of catastrophe and victimhood. This oscillation between fragility and strength allows Ukraine to argue for maximum sympathy and support while projecting endurance—but it also exposes a tension that undermines the consistency of the narrative. Trump, later on in the meeting went on: “You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers.”

Again, we must stress the contrast; the Russian diplomatic messaging has largely emphasized restraint and decorum, with double-entendres and sharp, sardonic witticisms in place of straightforward profanity; only Dmitry Medvedev stands out as the principal figure whose language at times matches the provocations hurled from the Ukrainian side. Zelensky went on to say that Putin was a "crazy Russian" as well as a "killer and terrorist." Putin has never gone on record saying anything remotely equivalent about Zelensky. The worst he has said on record was in mid-2023, when he said, “according to my Jewish friends, Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people.” In an era where we feel entitled to criticize our top politicians and leaders as boorish and crude, in comparison to the more refined and polite leaders of old, it comes across as particularly disingenuous that Ukraine celebrates its Cossack-like boorishness as something to be proud of culturally, when Donald Trump has always been criticized in the media for the exact same behavior. Speaking of Zelensky’s Jewish heritage and the broader question of Israel, I cannot substantiate this at present, but it has been striking how frequently the media once highlighted and celebrated his Jewish identity, only for such references to diminish noticeably as Israel has grown increasingly isolated in the aftermath of its genocide in Gaza.

Finally, one point must be made abundantly clear: Western media has heavily propagated the narrative that the confrontation was a calculated "ambush" orchestrated by Trump and Vance. However, a careful viewing of the entire meeting reveals a different story. It is clear that Zelensky arrived already in a combative mood, intentionally escalating tensions by showing Trump distressing battlefield images of wounded children, among other things—none of which seemed to captivate Trump's attention. Zelensky also attempted to shape the narrative in his usual manner. The situation remained calm and cordial until Zelensky abruptly and bluntly challenged Vance with the question, 'What diplomacy are you talking about, JD?' Prior to this, the meeting proceeded without incident, following standard protocol. The only real disruption came from reporter Brian Glenn, whose question about Zelensky's attire—specifically his lack of a suit—momentarily created an awkward tension. However, this was swiftly defused by Trump himself.

Ukraine's Blatant Lies: Propaganda, The Ghost of Kyiv, Wunderwaffe, Nord Stream and Gambling with WWIII

Ukraine and the West have emphasized Russian disinformation and propaganda, portraying themselves as the absolute arbiters of truth. The reality is far murkier, with Ukraine itself having engaged many times in known fabrications for propaganda and morale-boosting purposes—not to mention in efforts to escalate the war and keep it going, particularly to convince its allies to come to its aid.

The so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” stands as one of the earliest and most emblematic fabrications of Ukrainian wartime propaganda—a modern myth carefully engineered to project heroism and defiance in the face of an overwhelming adversary. The story of a lone MiG-29 ace allegedly downing half a dozen Russian jets within hours of the invasion was seized upon by Ukrainian officials and Western media alike, circulated as fact, and emblazoned across T-shirts and NFTs before collapsing under its own absurdity. Even Ukraine’s own Air Force eventually admitted the legend was fictional, a “superhero” invented for morale. What makes the episode revealing is not its childishness, but how readily major Western outlets echoed it without scrutiny, turning a video-game clip and a recycled photograph into a patriotic fable. In the end, the “Ghost” exposed far more about the performative nature of Ukraine’s information war—and the Western press’s appetite for mythmaking—than about any real battlefield success.

One of the most striking patterns in Ukraine's wartime narrative has been its relentless media-driven campaign for ever more advanced weaponry—what can only be described as a constant demand for Wunderwaffe, or "wonder weapons," that will turn the tide of the war in its favor. What began with the glorified myth of the "Ghost of Kyiv" as a symbol of Ukrainian resilience soon gave way to a series of increasingly urgent calls for weapons that could secure victory. First came the Javelins, hailed as the key to neutralizing Russia’s armor. Then it was the M777 howitzers, followed by Excalibur precision shells, cluster bombs (already highly controversial in their own right, due to their potential to harm civilians), and Leopard 1 and 2 tanks. Each new request was framed as the breakthrough needed for Ukraine’s triumph. Next were the M1A1 Abrams, Storm Shadow missiles, ATACMS, anti-personnel landmines (another controversial munition, banned by the Ottawa Treaty for its high harm to civilians), authorization for long-range strikes, and, most recently, the F-16 fighter jets. With every new addition to this growing arsenal, the message was clear: This weapon would be the game-changer that could bring Ukraine closer to victory. Yet, each success in securing one weapon was swiftly followed by another demand, with a consistent refrain that victory was within reach—if only the West would provide the next essential tool. The ever-expanding list of "essential" weapons—culminating in the request for Tomahawk missiles, which was ultimately denied—served as a striking reflection of the media's role in perpetuating the illusion of a military solution. In this cycle, propaganda seamlessly blended with tactical requests, with each Wunderwaffe serving not just as a strategic asset, but as a media spectacle (as we've seen before, often with that familiar Ukrainian manipulative and coercive heavy-handedness), designed to keep Western enthusiasm high and the flow of support steady, even as the goalposts of victory constantly shifted.

In the chaotic fog of the 2022 Przewodów missile incident, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky swiftly seized the opportunity to amplify tensions, initially insisting that a Russian rocket had struck Polish territory and killed two civilians, framing it as a deliberate escalation that warranted invoking NATO's Article 5 for collective defense. This bold assertion, made without concrete evidence and amid preliminary reports suggesting otherwise, appeared calculated to rally Western allies behind Ukraine's cause, bolstering his wartime leadership by pressuring NATO into deeper involvement and securing more military aid to sustain Kyiv's resistance against Moscow. Critics, including some Western commentators and Russian propagandists, accused Zelensky of recklessly gambling with global stability to advance his personal and national agenda, especially after investigations revealed the missile was likely a stray Ukrainian S-300 air-defense projectile, forcing him to backtrack amid accusations of misinformation aimed at dragging the alliance into direct confrontation.

The September 2023 “Romanian drone incident” perfectly encapsulated the uneasy balance between wartime hysteria, political theater, and Western reluctance to admit confusion. When Ukraine first announced that Russian drones had detonated on NATO territory, Romanian officials flatly denied it—only to reverse course two days later after fragments were found near the border. Kyiv’s foreign minister publicly accused Bucharest of “denial” and released photos as proof, effectively shaming a NATO ally into acknowledgment. The episode exposed how Ukraine’s leadership has often rushed to frame any cross-border event as proof of “Russian aggression against Europe,” a tactic that simultaneously pressures NATO and dramatizes Ukraine’s victimhood for Western audiences. Romania’s later admission—after initial categorical denials—revealed both the government’s instinct to avoid panic and its discomfort with being dragged into someone else’s war narrative. What emerged was not a case of Russian escalation, but of Ukrainian opportunism and Western incoherence: a drone fragment became another headline weapon in an information war that long ago stopped distinguishing truth from usefulness.

The Nord Stream affair stands as one of the most revealing examples of how swiftly narrative control and propaganda overtook facts in the early stages of the war. When the pipelines were blown up in September 2022, Western governments and major media outlets instantly attributed the explosions to Russia, framing them as a self-inflicted “false flag” operation meant to terrorize Europe or manipulate gas prices. The accusation never made strategic sense—Russia lost both revenue and geopolitical leverage from the destruction of infrastructure it controlled through Gazprom—but the reflexive blame fit neatly into the wartime propaganda script. Months later, that narrative unraveled. German, Danish, and Swedish investigators began tracing the operation to a small team of divers who allegedly sailed a rented yacht, the Andromeda, from Rostock into the Baltic, where they planted several high-yield charges near Bornholm Island, crippling three of the four gas lines. Evidence suggested that the saboteurs were linked to a pro-Ukrainian network, not to Moscow.

By 2025, German prosecutors had identified two Ukrainian suspects: Volodymyr Zhuravlov, a trained diver detained near Warsaw, and Serhii Kuznietsov, arrested in Italy while on holiday. Both denied involvement. Polish and Italian courts blocked their extradition to Germany—Warsaw’s judge calling the sabotage a “just act” of self-defense in wartime and invoking “functional immunity” under Ukraine’s martial law. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk publicly endorsed the decision, while Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó denounced it as a “scandalous precedent,” accusing Poland of legitimizing terrorism. Germany’s extradition requests were further hampered when its own prosecutors admitted they could not prove direct Ukrainian government orders, though the suspects were alleged to be part of a seven-person team tied to a private diving school in Kyiv. Sweden and Denmark quietly closed their investigations without naming any culprit, while the German probe stalled under political pressure.

What emerged from this tangle of court rulings and media spin was a striking reversal: the early claims of Russian guilt collapsed under the weight of evidence pointing toward Ukrainian involvement, yet Western media largely avoided acknowledging the shift. In place of outrage came silence—a tacit admission that the initial rush to accuse Moscow had been driven more by politics than proof. The Nord Stream case thus joined the “Ghost of Kyiv” and the “Romanian drone” as another episode in a pattern of wartime mythmaking, where Kyiv’s actions were shielded by Western complicity and narrative convenience. What began as one of the gravest acts of peacetime sabotage in Europe since World War II now stands as a monument to the dangers of propaganda: an operation likely carried out by those the West once swore to defend, excused under the banner of “just war,” and quietly buried once the truth no longer served the desired story.

Ukraine's Struggle with Endemic Fascism

Another uncomfortable truth is that Ukraine itself has struggled with a genuine fascist inheritance—one that Western outlets openly acknowledged and expressed worry about, during and after Euromaidan, but have since increasingly whitewashed. In 2014, the BBC reported on Svoboda banners, Confederate flags and portraits of Stepan Bandera in Kiev’s city council, noting the far right’s “outsized” role in the street battles, but their tone was whitewashing even when confronted with all the evidence. The BBC continued to report, now at least finding something wrong with Ukraine's openely fascist icons; the Azov Battalion's symbology, the fascist Black Sun and Wolfsangel rune (this last one taken from Andriy Parubiy's own Ukrainian Nazi Party). Up until 2020, the West admitted something wrong with Ukraine's endemic fascism, particularly the Azov Battalion, but by 2022 everything was apparently normalized by a change in logos (note: the Wolfsangel is still in use to this day). NBC News in the same year observed that Svoboda secured nearly a quarter of cabinet posts in the interim government, despite its leader’s history of antisemitic rhetoric. Andriy Parubiy, founder of the official post-Soviet Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Party, the Social-National Party of Ukraine, and one of the most prominent engineers of the Euromaidan, was eventually assassinated in Lvov, by the disgruntled father of a deceased Ukrainian soldier killed in action in Bakhmut. Prominent assassinations of other Ukrainian fascists, such as Demyan Hanul, organizer of the Odessa Trade Unions fires massacre (often countered and denied as mere Russian propaganda), are spoken of in the same terms as Parubiy, not as known fascists, but mere “activists”, "nationalists" or “prominent politicians,” greatly bringing down the ideological tone, increasing the media whitewashing of Ukraine’s known problem with deep-rooted fascism. Military staffers, while not openly fascist as more politically-motivated agents, also undergo the same treatment in the media. SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) colonel Ivan Voronych, known for war-time sabotage operations inside Russia, was killed in a similar fashion as the prominent fascists, and his death was welcomed by Russian pro-war bloggers, who cited similar Ukrainian-engineered assassination plots of prominent Russian military staffers, as well as terrorist operations inside Russia that Ukraine celebrates as “take that” tit-for-tat victories. On 1 July 2025, a Ukrainian drone strike happened on the Kupol Electromechanical Plant in Izhevsk, killing three and injuring 45, according to Russian officials. The factory, located more than 1,000 km from the front line, produces air defense systems such as Tor and Osa. Ukrainian sources confirmed the SBU carried out the attack, framing it as a blow to Russia’s military industry. Beyond the headlines, Google Maps comments and social media were flooded with Ukrainians celebrating the blast and the deaths, turning tragedy into spectacle, whereas the news portrays every Russian strike on Ukraine, with similar bodycounts, as unacceptable tragedies which quickly flood headlines. The visceral war-time hatred between both factions, while understandable to a degree, shows nevertheless that the media bias and hypocrisy is apparent, and that Ukrainians are clearly not above their hated Russian enemies when it comes to lack of empathy and celebrating the deaths of civilians.

Consortium News has documented how U.S. and British intelligence after the Second World War worked with Ukrainian nationalists tied to atrocities against Jews and Poles, keeping Bandera’s cult alive in exile. More than 50 Bandera monuments now stand across Ukraine, with torchlight parades on his birthday an annual ritual. Even sympathetic voices in the West admit the Azov Regiment grew out of openly neo-Nazi origins, later absorbed into the National Guard but never entirely cleansed of its symbols or mythology. The irony is sharp: when Russia frames “denazification” as its pretext for war, the West reflexively denies Ukraine’s far-right elements altogether, as if admitting them would hand Moscow propaganda victory. The result is selective amnesia. The same Europe that once warned against Banderism now tolerates Bandera statues in Kiev, provoking outrage in Poland, where the massacres of 100,000 Polish Jews by the UPA in Volhynia and Galicia remain officially recognized as genocide. Warsaw’s recent calls to outlaw Banderite symbols as equal to Nazi and Communist ones show how unsustainable this whitewashing has become, at least in some EU member states like Poland.

In January 2023, Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE, in a report meant to highlight the Orthodox Christmas traditions of Ukrainian refugees, inadvertently filmed walls adorned with portraits of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, alongside the insignia of the Waffen-SS “Galizien” Division and a Right Sector flag. The images, quickly noted by viewers, sparked controversy online, with commenters on the YouTube video quickly noticing and expressing outrage, and underscored how symbols once universally condemned as fascist can now pass almost unnoticed in the effort to present Ukrainians solely as victims.

Canada’s 2023 “Hunka scandal”—when Parliament honored a Waffen-SS Galicia veteran for “having fought the Russians in WW2” before retracting and apologizing—further exposed how Western institutions can stumble into historical revisionism without even noticing, too blinded by their pre-conditioned hatred of Russians. incidentally, the incident brought to light how Canada, an Allied Nation during WW2 who fought the Nazis, has streets named after Nazis or Nazi collaborators. What's worse: it was revealed that Hunka wasn’t an anomaly, but merely one of the thousands of Nazi collaborators who had been welcomed to Canada after the war, many of whom had quietly escaped prosecution.

In March 2022, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council suspended the activities of eleven parties on the basis of purported Russian ties, including all those with leftist or socialist leanings—among them the Left Opposition, the Union of Left Forces, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, and the Socialist Party—citing alleged ties to Russia. The Communist Party had already been outlawed years earlier under decommunization laws. In effect, this means that, as of today, Ukraine is still a country with no legal left-wing parties, leaving the entire political spectrum dominated by nationalist, centrist, and liberal-conservative forces. How this aligns with Ukraine’s status as democracy, an aspect often invoked by its Western partners—who often contrast it with Russia’s status as an “autocracy”—, remains a matter of interpretation for the reader. Think for example, what would happen in a European country such as Spain, France, Italy or Germany if the ruling government suddenly erased all left-wing parties in one fell swoop for suspected Russian ties. How would people in a true democracy react? The Ukrainians, and by that I mean the whole of the population, didn't seem to mind... that is, of course, not counting the Eastern population, which rose up in arms.

It needs to be said: Ukraine has a far-right problem: it may not define the country in its totality, as Ukraine, like any other country, is vast and varied, with many regional, language and cultural variations across it. But it the problem remains significant. Let's admit that we've seen enough evidence to suggest this is not what a normal democracy looks like. Its government, what is referred to in Russia as the Kiev Regime or Military Junta, openly celebrates Nazi collaborationists like Stepan Bandera, officially a Hero of Ukraine. "Denazification" in this context becomes easier to see when the true nature of these "heroes" is laid bare. The country was divided for a reason, with the Russophone East taking up arms to denounce it. Ignoring it, or worse, sanitizing it as the Western media and governments have done, corrodes credibility and distorts the cultural record.

Racism, Convict-Soldiers and Western Media Double Standards

The racism and right-wing sentiment associated to Ukraine goes beyond claims of fascism, however, and this was very easily seen in the early media coverage of the 2022 invasion: sharp criticism was immediately drawn for racial double standards in reports by Western, something particularly criticized by Middle-Eastern journalists who felt the hypocrisy closer to home. High-profile broadcasts and columns framed Ukraine as “civilized” and “European,” contrasted against wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or “the Third World,” with on-air references to refugees being white, Christian, “blue-eyed and blond.” Journalist associations and human-rights monitors flagged this as orientalist bias that normalizes violence elsewhere and humanizes only victims who “look like us.” Many journalists ended up having to apologize for their words, saying they were "emotional." Media analysts further noted how such framing shaped policy and philanthropy: Ukraine’s suffering received granular storytelling and extraordinary mobilization, while simultaneous atrocities in places like Mali or Yemen were sidelined. In other words, the same news ecosystem that swiftly sanctioned Russian culture often fell back on old hierarchies of whose pain counts—and whose doesn’t.

Furthermore, although the war is filled with such examples of double-standards, let's focus on a specific one that made it extremely apparent: the Western coverage of convict-soldiers illustrates the double standard clearly: when Russia does it, outlets stress menace and moral collapse; when Ukraine does it, they highlight redemption and patriotism. When Russia emptied its prisons, outlets such as the BBC and The Week churned out horror stories of “murder sprees” and “cannibals” let loose, of pardoned killers burning their sisters alive, of an entire society supposedly collapsing under a wave of prison scum emboldened by Putin. Wagner’s 50,000 inmates were “cannon fodder,” their return a “time bomb” for Russian towns. Readers were told that violence itself was being legalized in Russia, that these men were not heroes but monsters in uniform. Yet the very same outlets, when covering Ukraine’s near-identical program, changed their tune completely. The BBC suddenly found “high morale” and “redemption”: drug dealers and burglars became brave patriots, one boasting of his “score of Russian heads” as if it were a badge of honor, another quipping “I know how to kill—only here I won’t be convicted for it.” Ten thousand prisoners, including murderers, were recast as tragic heroes, stormtroopers of “patriotic feeling,” even decorated with medals. The BBC admits the “uncomfortable comparisons,” but then dutifully supplies the alibi: Russian convicts fight for money, Ukrainian ones for honor. The facts are identical—prisoners freed to fight and die—but the moral lens flips entirely. Russian convicts are demons; Ukrainian convicts are martyrs. Needless to say this is not journalism (it hasn't been for quite some time); it is merely war propaganda dressed up as reporting, but it is now par for the course.

There has also been an active effort in the West to carefully select what news sources we must hear; while Russian news outlets popular in the West such as RT, Sputnik and others were swiftly banned across Western platforms on the grounds of “fake news” and pro-Russian propaganda (“pro-Russian” journalists also still get banned on YouTube to this day), entirely new channels dedicated to promoting Ukraine’s perspective were simultaneously launched, from 24-hour news networks to even a Ukrainian-themed Nickelodeon. The contrast is striking: there was never a “Nickelodeon Afghanistan,” “Nickelodeon Yemen,” or “Nickelodeon Gaza” during those wars, let alone entire 24/7 channels in their language about their wars. The creation of entertainment and children’s programming explicitly aligned with one side of a conflict marks an unprecedented development in how culture and media are mobilized during wartime.

This article by The Conversation highlights how Ukraine’s 2022 Eurovision victory was deeply political despite the contest’s supposed neutrality. In reality, the event mirrored yet again the West’s broader cultural alignment with Ukraine, where solidarity was not spontaneous but systematically encouraged. Presenters wore yellow and blue, performers displayed Ukrainian flags, and any expression of dissent or neutrality was effectively excluded under the guise of “values.” The show’s atmosphere—beginning with “Give Peace a Chance”—was steeped in pro-Ukrainian messaging, reflecting the same media ecosystem that banned Russian outlets while amplifying Ukraine’s voice across every cultural platform. Far from being an impartial celebration of music, Eurovision 2022 revealed how the West had already chosen its side, turning entertainment into a tool of soft power and emotional propaganda. It should also be noted how Israel was anothere country severely defended until the very end too, until it was apparently no longer benefitial to do so.

Ukraine and Palestine: Not the Same

Yet another example of wartime double standards arise from Ukraine and Palestine contrasts; it is stark to see how each country is treated. In September 2025, Dutch MP Esther Ouwehand was forced to leave parliament for wearing a shirt with the colors of the Palestinian flag, only allowed back once she replaced it with a “watermelon” pattern—an indirect symbol of Palestine. In Spain, the Madrid regional government recently ordered public schools to remove Palestinian flags and symbols, declaring them “too political,” even though the same authorities had openly encouraged schools to show solidarity with Ukraine in 2022. Meanwhile, across Europe, the UK, and the US, politicians proudly wrap themselves in blue and yellow. Ukrainian flags are flown above Downing Street, the European Parliament is draped in them, and American leaders wear them as pins and ribbons without anyone questioning “political neutrality.” Ursula von der Leyen has always been proudly draped in the colors of the Ukrainian flag as a sign of support, as well as traditional Ukrainian outfits. The Palestinian flag is censored, the Ukrainian flag is sanctified. This selective symbolism exposes not a principled defense of neutrality, but a nakedly politicized hierarchy of causes, and has severely damaged the West in terms of credibility due to its double discourse.

Ukraine, the corrupt 'democracy'

Furthermore, Ukraine’s often-cited chronic corruption problem is no invention of Russian propaganda. Transparency International has for years ranked it among Europe’s most corrupt states, and even in wartime the issue remains acute. In July 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law curtailing the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, triggering the largest street protests since the full-scale invasion began. Demonstrators in Kiev, Lvov, Odessa, and Dnipropetrovsk accused him of abusing martial law to consolidate power and shield allies under investigation. The Kyiv Independent itself published an editorial condemning the move as a “betrayal of Ukraine’s democracy,” warning that the president was dismantling one of the few post-Maidan reforms that gave Ukrainians real oversight over their leaders. International backers, from the EU to the G7, expressed concern that Kiev’s backsliding threatened not only its EU candidacy but also the credibility of the aid it receives. Zelensky was forced to reverse these measures or else. The fact that even Ukraine’s most prominent pro-Western outlet and civil society activists openly criticized Zelensky underscores a reality often glossed over abroad: corruption is not a Russian talking point, but a structural weakness Ukraine has yet to overcome.

These contradictions highlight how political crises, corruption, and selective narratives do not remain confined to parliaments or news cycles—they spill over into the cultural sphere, shaping how nations and their people are portrayed, remembered, and even imagined in popular media. When governments struggle with corruption or suppress dissent, those realities inevitably filter into the way outside observers construct their images, whether through journalism, cinema, or videogames. The result is that culture becomes a mirror, but also a battleground: a place where stereotypes are reinforced, where political grievances are projected, and where nuance is often lost in favor of easily digestible archetypes.

Russia Must DIE: The Agents of Russophobia

The modern crusade against Russia is not a spontaneous moral awakening, let alone the work of Ukraine alone—it is the work of professional ideologues and state-aligned propagandists who have made careers out of pathologizing an entire nation. Figures like Anne Applebaum serve as polished instruments of this machinery, packaging old Cold War hostilities into glossy moral narratives for Western audiences. The Ukraine conflict has succeeded in effectively unmasking the vile feelings that some of the most celebrated Western “experts” have always harbored for Russia, and, in a way, the conflict itself serves to illustrate the rage-filled boiling point this vitriol was bount to manifest.

Anne Applebaum’s piece in The Atlantic, The Russian Empire Must Die is little more than Cold War propaganda dressed up as liberal commentary. Taking a look at such articles, it becomes clear that these so-called “expert” historians, who apparently know so much about Russia, even more so than Russians themselves, know better than you or me what needs to be done with the country too. Please note the aggressive and violent language being used as well. The Russian “empire” mustn’t just “disappear”: it needs to DIE.

A lifelong, well-paid anticommunist and mouthpiece for Western capital, Applebaum recycles the same narrative that has sustained her career: Russia and socialism are inherently “barbaric” and must be civilized through total submission to Western neoliberalism. Even historians like Mark Tauger have called out her earlier books (Red Famine, Gulag) for distortions, hearsay, and ideological bias. A fixture of the Council on Foreign Relations and the NED—both extensions of U.S. soft power—Applebaum operates less as a historian than as a propagandist, laundering Cold War talking points into moralistic prose. Her sanctimonious defense of “democracy” masks an uncritical faith in NATO expansion, capitalist privatization, and Western hegemony, reducing complex histories to a sermon on why capitalism must always prevail.

“Imperial” is also a good indicator of how lost these people are when it comes to word choices. Anne Applebaum hails from the “Empire” of the United States of America. There are no 750 Russian bases spread across 80 nations, to my understanding.

It is remarkable that we still need to remind people which country actually embodies global empire today. The United States remains the most expansive and aggressive power on Earth, projecting dominance through hundreds of foreign military bases and economic coercion on a planetary scale. Against this backdrop, the claim that Russia harbors “imperial ambitions” rings hollow. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow’s behavior in its own borderlands pales in comparison to Washington’s long history of conquest and annexation—one might recall how California, Texas, and New Mexico were “integrated” into the American map. Yet these moral arbiters never call for those lands to be returned to their original owners.

Applebaum is hardly alone in this hypocrisy. A whole class of Western Sovietologists and popular historians—Robert Service, Simon Sebag Montefiore, the late Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes—has built its prestige on pathologizing Russia while glorifying the West. Applebaum is merely the loudest of them. Their work, dressed up as scholarship, oozes ideological bias and cultural superiority. British authors in particular tend to speak with an almost ecclesiastical certainty, as if their worldview were the measure of civilization itself. Robert Service’s declaration that “the future does not lie with Leninism” is a telling example: not a historian’s conclusion, but a politician’s slogan masquerading as academic judgment.

Not all Russophobic agents are Western, however; some are Russian or post-Soviet figures who have also built entire careers catering to Western hostility toward Russia, setting up shop comfortably in a West all too eager to receive Russia haters. The usual suspects are already well-known, the vocal but small traditionally anti-Putin "opposition": Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Masha Gessen, Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, and Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich all fit into this category of professional dissidents celebrated by the West. Of particular note, however, is Alexievich, due to the impact of her writings in popular culture and the grim picture of the Soviet Union she painted, one apparently entirely based on "suffering." She helped bring about this vision in a new generation of Western readers in need of a new retelling of Soviet grim tales straight from the horse's dissident mouth, even popularizing it through pop culture phenomenons such as HBO's hit series Chernobyl. And there is something darker at play here, something very dishonest when it comes to portraying the Soviet Union in the way Alexievich does. Unlike traditional russophobes like Applebaum, who put on the label of "expert" but still hail from the West and lack the "native" legitimacy, Alexievich can claim to have experienced the Soviet Union and all its horrors firsthand, and enhances it through her "voices," interviews and testimonies with other Soviet victims of any atrocity she encounters, be it Chernobyl, the War in Afghanistan, etc. But these convenient voices are practically made up as she goes along. As The New Republic once noted in its review Witness Tampering, Alexievich’s supposedly “documentary” works such as Secondhand Time and Voices from Chernobyl are not genuine oral histories but heavily edited ideological constructions, reshaping testimonies to fit Western expectations of Soviet tragedy and Russian moral failure. Even her French translators have exposed how she rewrote interviews, altered facts, and inserted scenes to make her books align with liberal, anti-Soviet sensibilities more palatable to Western audiences. It is precisely this narrative engineering that made her the perfect Nobel laureate for a “new Cold War,” as the article observed—a post-Soviet voice reciting the Western script of repentance and guilt, painted on the bloody canvas of the Soviet Union's greatest hits of "suffering".

In this sense, Applebaum and Alexievich belong to the same ideological continuum: one speaks about Russia from without, the other against it from within. Both have mastered the art of turning Russophobia into a moral credential, a marketable export for Western consumption.

Conclusion: No Enemy is Eternal

I would really like to take the opportunity to address this: throughout this manifesto, Ukraine has been spoken of in very harsh terms, and there is a reason for this. Without descending into the same kind of hatred Ukraine expresses towards its enemies, it is necessary to record its cultural wrongdoings and to highlight how far beyond the ordinary retaliations of a wartime country its hostility has reached. What we see is the reality of a nation consumed by hatred, seeking self-identity in animosity towards the enemy, one that has actively fostered hostility, cultivated Russophobia and fanaticism, celebrated fascists as heroes and suppressed Russian culture even at the risk of tarnishing its own legacy, encouraging others to do the same. It is necessary to speak about Ukraine here also because this archive exists to denounce Russophobia in all its forms, and it will never extend leniency to nations that actively promote or enforce it. This site stands in open defense of Russian culture.

Even when the war ends, no matter the outcome, it is safe to say the animosities between Russians and Ukrainians won't go away quickly; in fact, Ukraine may also end up feeling animosity towards the Western allies who didn't do enough or couldn't come through with what was promised. However, be that as it may, like all wounds, it will heal, no matter how long it takes. This seems impossible as of today; but, like all conflicts, this one will end too.

In confronting the ugliness and hatred now poisoning relations between Russians and Ukrainians in all aspects of life, it is worth recalling the words of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater’s The Boss:

“Is there such a thing as an absolute, timeless enemy? There is no such thing, and never has been. And the reason is that our enemies are human beings like us. They can only be our enemies in relative terms. The world must be made whole again.”

This truth echoes an older maxim from British statesman Viscount Palmerston, who declared in 1848: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

Few lines in gaming capture so directly the truth that enmity is never eternal, that the lines we draw in moments of war are fragile and contingent. To forget this is to accept division as inevitable and eternal, when it is anything but. While it might sound very cynical to say this now, while people are suffering and dying in untold ways… this will come to pass, just like any other conflict in human history. Relations will inevitably normalize, mutate, change invariably. Any rogue, repressive or enemy state in history, be it the US Confederacy, the Russian, British or French Empires, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, the Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, any political regime, no matter their ideology, left or right, democratic or not, inevitably falls, relations normalize as wars come to an end and people come together. To remember it is to keep alive the possibility of reconciliation, and to affirm that culture—whether Russian, Ukrainian, or any other—must outlast politics, propaganda, and conflict. Always.

And thus, we finally reach the conclusion of this manifesto. Without further ado, join me in exploring these cultural aspects with curiosity and enjoyment, as we look at Russia through the lens of art, gaming, and translation!

The ROMANOV Archive is ongoing and entries shall be constantly added, as well as edited and updated when needed.

References

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