There are certain tropes that keep showing up in discussions. It is not very easy to answer those using only a limited cultural background of a post-Soviet STEM major (as I said, so called "world-class" Soviet education system was actually very weak in humanities and social sciences. Matters did not get better during early post-Soviet time: the 90ies, my formative years). So here is a piece someone from PEN Club Ukraine wrote, on how "great Russian culture" brands are used in global politics: Works of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy as shields for Putin’s army ~ PEN Ukraine If you want, I can also Google-translate some quotes from speeches and letters by a prominent pre-1917 Zionist, Ze'ev Zhabotinsky, on how Russian culture got to tower over other cultures in the Empire, or if you will, how "Pushkin and Dostoyevsky are included in the Great Books collection while Franko and Shevchenko are not". That was because the Imperial machine outright oppressed all significant minority cultures, ESPECIALLY Ukrainian. The guy wrote that in 1911, is known as a rather fanatical champion of Jewish national interest, and seeing how Jews had no obvious reason for sympathy to the Ukrainian cause. The latter is because, well, our biggest national icons (like Bohdan Khmelnitsky) treated Jews in ways that would today be called war crimes (and were kinda grim at the time, too).
OK, Zhabotinsky quote. This is in response to the argument that Russia has a legitimate interest in keeping Ukraine a "loyal buffer state". Nope. Putin is rather archaic in this thinking, so 1911 logic still applies: Ukrainians are essential for building the kind of Russian Empire they want (with Russian domination); it's just they would need to cease being Ukrainians.
As you suggest, I have very limited knowledge of Imperial Russia, Soviet, post-Soviet culture, and what's happening to Ukraine. However, Engaging in conversation is often the best way for me to learn. Here's a part of a conversation between William F. Buckley and Mortimer Adler. Adler explains at one point how the British Empire shaped the West's idea of what are the Great Books and Great Ideas.
This has nothing to do with anything I said. So let me go on another tangent: how come this rather random YouTube video has Russian subtitles? What I was trying to say is that sometimes political might defines what counts as "high culture". Zhabotinsky points it out very directly. He uses a quote of one of his opponents on how "you can not count yourself as a man of culture in Kyiv, or Tbilisi, or Vilnius, without knowing Russian" and then points out how in all these places Russian state outright banned all culture in local languages, up to and including literacy. This same great culture is still used abroad to recruit allies or at least apologists. Who can point to the Great Books collection and say "look - Dostoyevsky!".
Here is a low culture example from Soviet times, very much relevant today. Soviet Union was in the business of raising "new historic unity - Soviet people", very much on the basis of Russian culture. Local cultures were relegated to folklore. Ukrainians were hit harder, an extension of old Imperial policy. A Ukrainian in mass culture could fill one of only 4 roles: someone from a distant past (or a folklore performer), an unlearned comic relief, a traitor, or a Soviet russophone indistinguishable from a Russian. Enter Volodymyr Ivasiuk: In 1970, he was a 19-year-old medical student, who entered and won a song contest with folklore-inspired love song, "Chervona ruta". Soviet media tzars were asleep at the wheel; the song was both old-fashioned and utterly unobjectionable. Suddenly, it became a USSR-wide hit. Ivasiuk didn't stop there; he teamed up with this person: Sofia Rotaru. Armed with Ivasiuk songs, she became the #1 pop singer in the whole of Soviet Union. Singing songs that were modern, catchy, and unmistakably rooted in distinctive Ukrainian culture and national soul. Again, without breaking any kind of explicit Communist dogma rules; these were love songs. Long story short. Ivasiuk died in 1979. Official version was that he drove into a winter forest outside Lviv, walked couple of miles, climbed a tree with rather high branches, and hang himself. Very few people in Ukraine buy this story. Sofia Rotaru was given new authors, started singing forgettable Russian lyrics, and emphasizing Moldovan heritage instead of Ukrainian. She was still popular, enjoying decades of success. She barely aged physically, a Carpathian Cher. Culture matters. Despots know it too, and wield it to oppress people.
