Agnosticism or Bias? A Reply to Alexander Maxwell’s Analysis of Putin’s 2021 Essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”

In the first 2025 issue of Nationalities Papers, Alexander Maxwell published his article “Vladimir Putin, Normative Isomorphism, and the Language/Dialect Dichotomy.” In this paper, Maxwell analyzes Putin’s narratives of the history of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, as presented in Putin’s 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Based on a seemingly “agnostic” approach, Maxwell tends to renarrate traditional all-Russian concepts without any criticism. His bias is based on both methodological inconsistency and a striking lack of philological expertise. His repeated invectives against linguists should not go unanswered.