Biden Suddenly Discovers That Russians, Ukrainains Share “Deep Ties of Family, History, and Culture”

In his last Ukraine speech Biden also tried to make an appeal to the Russian people:

To the citizens of Russia: You are not our enemy.  And I do not believe you want a bloody, destructive war against Ukraine — a country and a people with whom you share such deep ties of family, history, and culture.

Biden, who was Obama’s point-man on Euromaidan, suddenly discovers that Russia and Ukraine share “deep ties of family.”

At the time these “deep ties” did not prevent Biden from trying to violently break them.

When Russia proposed that Ukraine enhances trade ties to Russia and the West both, the West scoffed at this. No deep Russo-Ukrainian historic ties were on Biden’s lips back then.

When one half of Ukraine violently removed the leader chosen by the other half — and did so by murdering 50 of its own people in a false-flag butchery — Biden considered it a great success. No harm to “deep ties” was considered then.

When the new coup leadership dispatched the military to assert itself over the other, more Russian half of the country by force, Biden didn’t caution this would go against “deep ties of family, history, and culture.”

Biden has consistently worked to alienate Ukraine from its “deep ties of family” to Russia, to bring the Western-Russian confrontation to the Ukrainian-Russian border, and to manufacture Ukrainian-Russian conflict, disagreement, and bitterness. Now that he has largely succeeded, and that Moscow seems poised to decapitate Kiev before the in-family feud gets any worse, Biden suddenly discovers the importance and sacred nature of deep Russian-Ukrainian ties.

Sorry Biden, that’s not how this works. Yes, the Russians and Ukrainians share “deep ties of family, history, and culture.” Probably to the extent that it’s impossible to draw a non-arbitrary border between them. The idea that it’s any more natural for Kharkov, Donetsk to be in the same polity with Lviv but separate from Voronezh and Kuban than the other way around, is nonsense. It is a matter of gradient and it is in fact impossible to tell where Russians stop and Ukrainians begin, or even if Russians and Ukrainians are discrete categories or if Ukrainian is a type of Russian. (Or more precisely if both are not more properly designated Rusini — the ethnic description Ukrainian peasants would offer for themselves until the Bolsheviks.)

If a war happens it will be precisely because Moscow — rightly or wrongly — deems that without ending the Maidanites in Kiev the “deep ties” between the two inheritors of Rus will be lost. And because it believes that an escalation of Ukraine’s civil war into a general East Slavic civil war nonetheless poses less risk to these ties than does allowing the post-Maidanites to continue their Cultural Revolution against them indefinitely.