This paper critically explores the actual duality of Russian-Ukrainian intercultural relations and examines the topic of politics of active and selective recollection as the asserted origin of present disputes and military pressures. Via rhetorical analysis of historical and modern national narratives, it shows how culturally determining experience of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War is recollected, rethought, and reused by separate parties to reinvent the Self and the Br/Other, as well as rethink ones world arena positionality.