Moscow in the summer of 2015: still adorned with St. George ribbons, though they are already fading; fewer cars, people frowning, store shelves depleted, street advertisements mocking the sanctions, and television only talks about how miserable life is in the chaos-stricken Ukraine, as if Russians have no life of their own. There is only one politician in the country, and it seems there will be no others.

Kyiv that same summer: front-line soldiers in uniform stroll the streets with ladies in mini skirts, billboards advertise military-patriotic movements, stores are filled with products banned in Russia, everyone speaks Russian on the streets and in restaurants, and on television, in both languages, they broadcast reports from the battlefields where Ukrainian soldiers fight against Russian occupiers. Everyone tries to be a politician. Two different states! Yet they share something in common: on both sides of the border, where Russians are now questioned – are you going to Ukraine to fight against us? – there is a rise in national spirit. T-shirts and iPhone cases with Putin are in vogue in Moscow; yellow-blue flags fly over private homes, shops, cars in Kyiv. Both here and there, people are finally proud of their country. For the first time in over twenty years.

For twenty years after declaring its independence (from what? The imperial burden?), Russia tried to find a new national idea, ideology, a belief in itself. But the people inventing this for us in the Presidential Administration and expert community were themselves too unbelieving and cynical, too engrossed in budget appropriation and side businesses, so their national ideas turned out half-dead, like a homunculus in a test tube. Our democracy is stillborn, our modernization stillborn, our energy superpower status is sour cabbage soup. Nothing took root among the people and nothing worked, except for one call: "Enrich yourselves!" Although most decided that to get rich meant to take out consumer loans.

While Russia tried to invent itself as independent and new, Ukraine simply tried to become. To become a real, united state, to build a new identity common to both its East and West, to believe in itself; but even there, only people with a commercial streak ever came to power. Everyone was only interested in business – some white, some gray, some black. Politics and all national construction were just side effects of business clans fighting over enterprises, minerals, and gas transit, distracting the population from these important processes. And ordinary Ukrainians, like us, simply tried to survive and earn money all these years.

Neither we nor they had an idea or belief that people would accept, that they would raise on banners, with which they could lead their country forward. So we drifted in timelessness – both we and they.

And the only thing that turned out to help us define ourselves was hatred for each other. Understandable – and inexplicable.

If anyone could truly be called brotherly peoples throughout the USSR, and before that in Tsarist Russia, it was the Russians and Ukrainians. Let's be honest, we were not truly, fraternally close with Estonians or Uzbeks. Literally: every Russian family has a Ukrainian relative, and every Ukrainian family has Russian kin. We fought side by side for hundreds of years, mixed in the same mass graves. Our fates are intertwined like Siamese twins, and whether they can be separated without killing one or both is still unknown.

Of course, there were always frictions between us – like those between neighbors in a communal apartment waiting in line for the stove, or like between brothers whose wives didn't get along. These names – Khokhols, Moskals – weren't invented today. And the prejudices: we are supposedly weak and lazy drunkards, they are greedy and cunning drunkards – we've been saying this about each other for a thousand years. And yet: we were true brothers, and we have nowhere to go from this communal apartment of ours the size of a fifth of the landmass.

Only by becoming jealous, quarreling, tearing apart from our brothers, only by opposing ourselves to them, did we manage to understand who we really are. The entire new Russian patriotism-nationalism is built around jealousy of Ukraine, which the West is taking away from us. Around the feeling of betrayal, around the contempt-envy for Ukrainians who try to climb out of our eternal manure pit to the dream-Europe.

All our policy towards Ukraine is: "Where are you going? What about us? You'll be deceived there! Do you need it more than anyone else? You're nobody! You have no name! They have the same pit there, with bestiality too!" - but behind this refrain, you can hear: "Where are you going? What about us?!"

Only thanks to Ukraine, which is leaving us for Europe and America, did we understand now that we ourselves do not want to go there at all. Only thanks to Ukraine did we understand that order is more important to us than freedom. That the Great Patriotic War never ended and never will, and that we will always heroically fight on its front lines, and that we are ready to live by wartime laws: receive meager food rations by cards, hunt enemies of the people, inform on neighbors, worship the Leader. We realized that we don't need any new Russia and never did. We only need the Russia that was before: imperial, under one sauce or another, and there's no need to invent anything else. There is no other future for us but the past.

And independent Ukraine only thanks to us, thanks to the war we unleashed against it, understood what its independence really means and why it should be cherished. Only because we tried to snatch the Ukrainian East after Crimea, and because we engaged all central television, all Internet factories of lies and hatred to pit East against West, did Ukrainians finally – precisely in spite of and to spite Russians – feel themselves as one people, regardless of their nationality. All their previous efforts – attempts to make the whole country speak Ukrainian, traditional embroidered shirts, Shevchenko, and so on – could not make them believe that their own Ukraine was a real and whole country. But we helped them – to feel it and believe.

This is all studied and described in history, political science, and mass psychology: an external enemy helps people unite in difficult times, to forget about the complexities and inconveniences of life. There's nothing new here, in general.

It's just a shame that we became this enemy to each other. It's a shame that we became real states only by breaking up with each other, and going in different directions, they into a gloomy future, we into a swampy past. It's a shame that we can no longer walk side by side, together. And that we only know one thing about ourselves: that we are not them.