Ukraine could be France and Kiev could be Paris, if it weren’t for those damned easterners and Russia, you see. In that sense, easterners were portrayed like the MAGA people in the United States - like reprobates and deplorables, monsters with the wrong ideology who ought to be punished for preventing progress. In a nutshell, the official narrative for “good” Ukrainians stated that these backwards people, with their pro-Russian sentiment and geographical distance from Europe, were the source of all of Ukraine’s woes. https://roloslavskiy.substack.com/p/the-hhol-diaries-chapter-1-pining?s=r