A case study on Russian cultural war on Ukrainian ethnicity - a casual interview with a girl from Kozinka village in Belgorod oblast bordering Ukraine, aired long before the war started. The girl speaks in Russian but explains she comes from a village where an "unique dialect" is used with words "found nowhere in the world". Then for a while she speaks in the mysterious dialect, which is just a regular everyday Ukrainian language. The word "Ukraine" is not even a single time mentioned in the clip in spite of the fact that the village is a few hundreds of meters from the Ukraine's border.

Russian government and elites have since 2014 frequently denied actual existence of distinct Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture, dismissively calling it "southern" or "village dialect" of Russian. In reality, most Russians don't understand Ukrainian any more than Polish or Slovak, that is they understand some words but barely catch the sense. Russian TV, while claiming it's just a "dialect", routinely provides dubbing or subtitles with translation when quoting spoken Ukrainian in its programs.