Abstract
The Russian invasion of Ukraine calls for reflection on concepts and institutions in the field of Eastern European history. I argue in my essay that it is necessary to rethink the concepts of empire and nation. There appears to be a tendency to see the political order of empire as highly complex, while the political order of the nation is assumed to have a propensity to destroy complexity. This bias often has a distorting effect when it comes to the study of Ukrainian history. The second part of my essay addresses certain problems of bilateral institutional academic cooperation between Germany and Russia and between Germany and Ukraine. In both cases, politicisation can be observed, but it takes very different forms. Bilateral cooperation with Ukraine is promising because there is a mutual interest in exchange and because Ukraine has a policy of open archives.
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