Even as Vladimir Putin has built up an invasion force on his borders, he has repeated a refrain that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, bemoaning a fraternal conflict he himself has provoked.
As Putin speaks on Tuesday with Joe Biden, western analysts have likened Kyiv to an obsession while Russians have said Putin believes it is his duty to reverse Ukraine's path towards the west.
Putin has threatened a war in Ukraine over Nato enlargement and demanded legal guarantees to make sure Ukraine does not join the military alliance or become a kind of unofficial member of the defence infrastructure.
But that fear has gone hand-in-hand with chauvinistic bluster that indicates Moscow has a distorted view of modern Ukraine and the goals it wants to achieve there.
Pavlo Klimkin, the former Ukrainian foreign minister, said Russia fundamentally misunderstands Ukraine and its nature. Russia is trying to prove that Ukraine is a failed state, that Ukraine has no history, no language, no religion. It is a kind of separate reality. In June, Putin published an article in which he claimed Russians and Ukrainians were one who said that the formation of an ethnically Ukrainian state hostile to Moscow was comparable to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. Analysts in Washington were alarmed by the rhetoric because it came shortly after Russia had engineered its first troop build-up, causing a war scare in April. Eugene Rumer and Andrew S Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment called Putin's text a historical, political, and security predicate for invading it if and when it became necessary. Putin's 5,000 word essay is not only seen as an empty treatise, but rather a window into the mind of a leader seeking historical arguments in his conflict with the west.
Fyodor Lukyanov, a leading Russian foreign policy analyst, said that this article was very much his idea, his wish to prepare this, and he was personally very involved in this text.
He said that the issue of an independent Ukraine that could potentially serve as an informal ally of Nato on Russia's border has become a red line for Putin.
Lukyanov said he thinks it is his duty as president not to leave this problem for the next leadership.
Putin does not appear to have factored into his thinking, because he is responsible for annexing Crimea and then launching a proxy war in East Ukraine that has left 13,000 dead.
Some close advisers are more hawkish than Putin. Nikolai Patrushev, a former intelligence officer who now heads the Kremlin's security council, has represented Russia at meetings with the CIA director William Burns. In recent remarks he called Ukraine a protectorate and warned of a potential outbreak of tensions so strong that millions of Ukrainians will flee to other places. Even though the Kremlin bluster is a smokescreen for Russian power politics, Kremlin officials have indicated that they think they can merely conclude agreements over Kyiv's head or manage public opinion through friendly elites. There has been virtually no direct engagement with the administration of Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Orysia Lutsevych, a research fellow and manager of the Ukraine forum in Chatham House, said Russia denies Ukraine any agency. They believe that Ukraine is a kind of puppet state. That's why I believe that the situation is so dangerous because Putin demands something that Biden can't give. Moscow has said that Biden should force Kyiv to negotiate directly with Russian-backed separatist governments as agreed in a 2015 peace deal. Both sides strongly opposes direct negotiations with Russian proxies, because they are viewed as a Russian proxies and both sides have violated that deal. The demand is a non-starter.
Putin's anger over Ukraine's 2014 revolution, in which a pro-western government replaces that of Viktor Yanukovych, has been linked with other historical grievances, including the accession of former Soviet countries into Nato in 2004.
Putin does not believe in his rhetoric about Ukrainian statehood, said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R.Politik political analysis firm, but is focused on the perceived security threats posed by Nato.
If he begins a military operation against Ukraine, it won't be for him to try to regain what he considers Russian land, he said. He believes there could be Nato missiles in the territory where it will be staked out. Ukraine is viewed as a junior partner for many Russians.
They view Ukraine as their little brother and they have a subconscious fear that the little brother will achieve more than the older, said Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and former speechwriter for Putin.
Putin's rhetoric has convinced many that he is among them.
Klimkin still believes that Ukraine is a kind of conspiracy, a kind of aberration. It's all about Slavic unity, about trying to get Ukraine out of Russia. I believe it is all sitting deep in his mind, which you can read from his very different statements.