[Cronos]

Well, the Ukraine has strong anti-Jewish sentiment -- I believe it's from the days of demonisation of Jews by the Tsars.

Essentially I see the Ukrainians as a people searching for an identity and the best way is to say who you are not.

This is due to their history -- as the birthplace of Eastern Slavs (Muscovites, Belarussians and Ukrainians), they want to link to that past, but that's gone. The Mongols destroyed it and then the 3 East Slav regions went under the Influence of Mongols (Muscovites), Lithuanians (Belrusyni) and Poles (ukrainians). The Ukrainians under Khlemnitskiy made a pact with the devil signing up with the Muscovite Tsar. Since then for 300 years they have been the in-betweeners

Communism exacerbated this -- this is a land of people who self-describe their nationality as "tutajsi" -- "from here only". They have never been allowed to create a sense of nationhood greater than the local area. And let's not be proud of other nations that HAVE -- this sentiment is only 200 to 300 years old in most of the world.

[Netz]

Eastern pride and nationalism plus the Church, toppled by the Communists have not helped throughout Russian history. The Antisemitism is deeply ingrained and is there to stay but the eternal outsider, the Jew has born the brunt of their confusion, frustration or whatever excuses you want to ascribe to these Slavic peoples. The bottom line is that to be a Jew there is to live on a tightrope and get “Pogromed”, exiled and murdered every so often. It doesn't matter what epoch you live in, the Jew gets hit. At some point in the distant future, you'd hope they'd outgrow this genetic flaw (Antisemitism) but it is not going to happen.