Ukrainians vs Russians

When I was living in Ukraine it was really obvious that Ukrainians never liked Russians. It was always this quiet hatred towards their mentality, their habbits, their lifestyle. How strange is this? We all have same Slavic origin and we are all coming from the same nonexistent anymore union, how can we be so different, up to the point of hating each other?

Yuriy Lutsenko - former interior Minister of Ukraine, who was on the side of Yulia Tymoshenko's government explains what kind of differences he sees between Russians and Ukrainians.

According to him, for the Russian people the main thing in life is state, their own country. A typical Russian person is described by him this way: "A roof leaks in the house, the cow is not milked, the goat died, the children are hungry, but the Russian citizen stands on his knees in front of an icon of Jesus Christ and prays to Moscow and to the Tsar and to the State, because for him those are only things that are able to protect him.

At the same time, for the Ukrainians, in his opinion, the main value - is their own freedom. "Ukraine is the a country of fugitive slaves. They were always running from the tsar and a king and a prince and a wife and any type of chaos in general. In Ukraine, if the family works well independently of the state, it will survive without any interference,"- shared his thoughts Lutsenko.

Mikhail Zurabov, a Russian ambassador once in his interview stated that Ukrainians and Russian in fact, are the same. This has outraged the Ukrainian nationalists, who declared the Russian diplomat as persona non grata.