Metropolitan Onuphry’s statement is just one of many similar pronouncements, public and private, issued in Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine since the Russian attack. Onuphry’s own clergy demand from him to declare autocephaly or independence of his metropolitanate from Moscow. 

“No one will ever forget or forgive Russia for what is happening now” is a common leitmotif of Facebook posts and private exchanges. One can see in such statements not only defiance but also a sense of betrayal. 

The stubborn resistance of the Ukrainian government and public to Western warnings about the coming invasion was at least partly based on the belief that Russia, historically and culturally close to Ukraine, might launch a new round of hybrid warfare but would not dare to wage a large-scale war against Ukraine. And surely Russia would never attack Kyiv, which Putin had called “the mother of Russian cities.”  

That quote comes from the medieval Kyiv chronicle, which refers to Kyiv as the mother, or capital, of the Rus’ rather than Russian cities. 

There is a profound difference between the Rus’ tribes of the medieval era, which included all eastern Slavs and the Russians of today. But Putin has been following in the footsteps of the Russian imperial tradition that treated Kyivan Rus’ as a Russian state. 

In the 19th century some Russian historians argued that medieval Kyiv was in fact settled by ethnic Russians, who out-migrated from the area during the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. 

No such outmigration had actually taken place, as has been proven by the historical and linguistic data. There is also no proof to suggest the existence of a unified nationality in the medieval Kyivan state, which extended from the Carpathians in the west to the Don in the east, and from the Baltic in the north to the shores of the Black Sea in the south.

 It was originally ruled by the Viking princes and included Slavs and non-Slavs alike. But the imperial mythology claimed that there was one such nationality, and it was Russian. 

That 19th century understanding of history has been at the core of Putin’s claim about the existence of one Russian people that includes the Russians and Ukrainians. It faces its final death now in the skies of Kyiv.

The Russian assault on Kyiv has destroyed another symbolic bond between Russians and a good many Ukrainians, that of the history and mythology of their common resistance to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. One of the most famous Soviet songs about the start of the German attack referred to Kyiv in its first line: “On June the 22nd, precisely at four in the morning, they bombed Kyiv, and we were told that the war had begun.” 

The “they” of the song were the Nazis; now, those attacking Kyiv are the Russians, claiming that their purpose is to liberate the Ukrainians from Nazis in their own midst. The Ukrainians are now defending Kyiv, invoking its status of the Hero-City, which it received from the Soviet government for its resistance to the Nazi invasion in 1941.

Far from inspiring gratitude for ostensible “fraternal assistance,” the current war is helping to destroy a number of Russian imperial and Soviet myths. 

Instead of arresting the development of the Ukrainian nation and destroying its commitment to sovereignty, the Russian invasion in general and the assault on Kyiv in particular are strengthening the Ukrainian people’s sense of identity and unity, while endowing it with a new raison d’être, new narratives, and new heroes and martyrs, among whom a place of honour is already reserved for the defenders of Kyiv. 

Serhii Plokhy is the author of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. His new book, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters, will be published in May