ABSTRACT
The legacies of history inherited by all three members of the East Slavic conundrum--Ukraine, Russia and Belarus--produced deformed national identities that shaped the direction in which nation and state building and security policies in all three states evolved after the disintegration of the former USSR. The divergent development of all three states was a direct outgrowth of their troubled legacies. Russian national identity was subsumed within both a tsarist and Soviet identity, a factor that defined its preference for union with other states and inability to accept the right of Belarusians and Ukrainians to a separate existence outside the East Slavic conundrum. In Russian eyes all three east Slavic peoples are branches of the one Rus 'ldy narod, whose 'natural' state of affairs is unity under Russian leadership.3 Meanwhile, this inheritance is compounded by the profound national identity crisis affecting Russians themselves in the aftermath of the disintegration of the former USSR. Russians are therefore in the 'Ottoman stage of national identity,' adjusting their horizons to the 'unnatural' borders of the Russian Federation.4
