Russian ethnicity is of course still there, but nations are more a matter of ideas. Yes, the God-bearer Nation, the Third Rome, — that nation is now gone. A small remnant remains. We now have the New Historical Community of Men that Brezhnev proclaimed. When you look at the behavior in South East Ukraine: all this flocking to the Lenin monuments, the red flags, the militarism, the cult of the 1945 victory, — this is the Soviet Union spiritually. Has nothing to do with Russia.
Don’t you see the similarity between the God-bearer nation and the Communism-bearer nation? The both are taken for the ultimate teaching, source of truth and justice?
Moreover, if the nations are about ideas, what is your version of the Russian nation’s idea?
When anyone living today in Russia or Ukraine have at least one ancestor or an ansestor’s sibling deceased in the WWII, isn’t celebrating the Victory Day understandable, just because of common sense? For example, two sons of my maternal grandgrandfather were MIA in 1941, he himself was wounded into being invalid for service, my paternal grandgrandfather and two his brothers were MIA in 1942 at Kharkiv.
Speaking about the red flags and Lenin - this is just because the Communists were a far more successful government after the WWII that any of the Ukrainian or Russian ones since 1991.