There is no modernity anymore, but imperial thinking and vestiges endure. An empire after the Renaissance is a project of modernity; it is a story about the formation of state greatness through seizure, absorption, assimilation, and social experiments, which ended in remorses, slogans of "never again," and continental tragedies. This is a story about the subjugation of Latin America and African countries, the obliteration of individual ethnic groups and peoples, and the suffering of the European continent. The bloody twentieth century exhausted and slaughtered empires along with millions of people. Empires exhausted history and exhausted themselves.

From Rome to Moscow (which in its crooked mirror pursued the idea of a third Rome), empires are being depleted. Always. And then they die. Also always. This path is the same in form and different in content. The empire is exhausted by power, economy, corruption, arrogance, wars, peoples, conquered and unconquered cultures. The empire is drained by everything it tries to build around itself.

Etiological exhaustion. The empire is created by mental geography. The imaginary mapping turns into the physical capture of territories. The empire is weaved by myths, which, according to the rules of bricolage, should be "reflected" in the hearts and beliefs of its subordinates. It is in an everlasting search for an aristocratic origin story. National Socialism claimed its greatness, relying on the concept of the continuity of the three Reichs and the privatisation of philosophy and mythology (The Song of the Nibelungs). Byzantium was drawn upon its peculiar imperial idea through Orthodoxy and the distinction from Europeans. Russia tried to be Rome (at least the third) and built its own imperial genesis through the theft of history, starting with Kyivan Rus. When Volodymyr the Great, Prince of Kyiv, baptised Rus, Moscow did not exist yet. Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities were part of European history when there were steppes, forests, and swamps instead of russia. Nonetheless, the metropolis under Peter the First seized the concept of Rusian (from the word "Rus"), and controlled the textbooks and studies, wherein it attempted to establish its belonging to the "great past." Today, it unveils a monument to Volodymyr the Great and claims him as its own. Created from nothing, the metropolis is hunting for the origin place, the abducted foundation for standing, privatised and mythologised. Then, the empire grows obsessed with its "greatness," patching its cultural microcosm and seeking specific identification mechanisms, inexorably imbued with exceptionalism: "exceptionally beautiful" russian literature, art, ballet, and unique history. Their adaptation requires extensive resources. They are deficient, and the empire begins to exploit the peoples, distorting the human system of ethical coordinates.

Ethical exhaustion sets in. Prolonged, lacking a human face, even in search of socialism. This new imperial ethic is an ethic of hatred, subjugation, and thoughtlessness. Even the people of the metropolis were not worthy of attention in this empire, let alone the colonised population. In this regard, russia is a simulacrum of the empire. It invents some particular values it does not adhere to; it talks about freedom while forbidding it; it advocates for the end of violence, building the Gulag; it creates a police state in which everyone has the exceptional right to violence. It declares that all Slavs are "brothers" while willing to vanquish the siblings.

The empire blurted out its sole victory in World War II. The ethical settings of the collective memory system went astray. The empire steals victories and defeats, dates and admiration; it hijacks the Soviet horror, displaying a "good life" in the USSR on TV, ruminating on its own middle age. Russia is privatising ethics, reflecting it crookedly. Unfortunately for her, history has too many authors and bad imperial notaries. The struggle with history exhausts the empire even more.

Historical exhaustion. Russia is a simulacrum empire, a fake empire, a thief empire. And it steals not merely territories, myths and cultures, ideas and washing machines, but also, of course, history, holding it hostage. The empire has many institutes and subordinates to guard history. To rule them is exhausting. To rule history is even more exhausting because the latter resists. In russia's invented or stolen history, the empire seeks for arguments in favour of wars, its superiority, exceptionalism, and uniqueness. History, always a battlefield, is also a necessary condition for imperial existence. The empire claims it has never started a war. How then, since the sixteenth century, its territory has expanded almost seven times? The empire commenced more than fifty wars. In the sole twentieth century, russia attacked more than twenty times: the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, twice Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria. Brutally invaded Ukraine in 2014. And only once throughout the entire century did the empire call a war as it was — in the case of World War II.

Fortunately, the colonised facilitate the historical exhaustion of the empire. Ukraine is a country that was occupied but not absorbed by russia three times: during the empire itself (the sixteen–nineteen centuries), throughout the establishment of Soviet power, and after 1945. All this time, the empire relentlessly tried to eradicate the history of Ukraine, alter it, rewrite it. Ukrainians' resistance was exhausting. Russia denied the existence of the Ukrainian language and culture, stole the "Cossacks" and Ukrainian Orthodoxy, and appropriated the history of Kyivan Rus, claiming Kyiv. The fight against European history and values followed. And when the values are combated, it means the end.

Eschatological exhaustion. In the beginning was the Word... All empires created their vocabularies, clichés, and ways of explaining the world. Through the destruction or oppression of other languages, through pressure or violence, repression and "forgetting", in novoyaz (Newspeak). Through the destruction of Zaporizhzhya Sich, the Ems Ukaz, the Valuev Circular, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the Operation "Zahid" (the deportation of the population from the Western areas of Ukraine in 1947), russification, and the fight against dissent.

It is exhausting. Eventually, the empire is speechless. The empire is not a nation, meaning its language vanishes faster, and the dialogue is absent in the dark dumbness of colonial madness. The empire no longer finds words even for itself; it cannot articulate reality and being and begins to create symbols. It happened to Rome, Germany, and now to russia. The present-day symbols of imperialism, which are painted on tanks and APCs, houses and posters, are, in fact, nothing more than the barbarisation of a consciousness that uses force for its own existence. And it is greatly fatigued. In agonal gasps, the exhausted empire chases at least a single word just for itself, but the pursuit is not apt for the weary... Only wordless evil remains before the death of the empire. And we remember that evil is banal (Arendt). Imperial — often. And the death of the empire after exhaustion is even banaler. And inevitable. From Rome to Moscow, empires always die.