Russian Imperialism and the Politics of Assimilation

I think it is very important to understand in which way the Russian imperialism is different from the British imperialism, let's say. There is no clear idea that you will never be the same as me, there is an opposite idea that you'll never be different than me. That's what Russians are telling Ukrainians, to Belarusians, but also even people who are ethnically more different. And why is that? My answer is that we have a paradox that there is a Russian nationalism, but there is no Russian nation. For Ukrainian intellectuals of the 19th century, the key idea was that why the future is within us, because we lack hierarchy. We have the horizontal relations. I don't