People way over sell how long Slavic identities have been in Europe, mostly because slavs themselves have an interest in artificially extending that time frame. I don't mean just slavs as an ethnicity, those have been bumming around europe for awhile, i mean the actual national identity of a given slav nation. Be it Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Poland and so on and so forth. Realistically most of these identities were formed somewhere in the early to late middle ages and most of the time formed by third parties either for administrative purposes or as puppet states (which i find amusing since that's basically the role they fill now as well). These were people with no culture and no history until other people gave it to them.
One of the reason Peter the Great is considered...well great, is because he said "Fuck this gopnik shit" and started mimicking western european cultures and adopted illuminist thought (which were primarily French and German thinkers at the time). The only reason slavs aren't basically just slightly fairer gypsies now a days is because they adopted Orthodoxy and accepted everything that came with it without condition. Their entire writing system, Cyrillic, is just a slightly more refined version of a writing system created specifically so Orthodox priests could teach them Orthodoxy because guess what, they didn't have a unified language or a well defined language before that.
That's why your average european looks down upon the slavic nations, that's why your average european doesn't give a fuck about slavs killing each other, because only Americans think 200 years is a long time. There are plenty of peoples that have existed before them, still exist with them and will continue to exist after them. People like to make fun of Hoteps about "We wuz kangz" but the entirety of modern slavic history is a fucking LARP of that, that despite not having a proper language, or religion or culture, or hell even know what a chair or a spoon was that they somehow were the most powerful *insert administrative unit* of the region in *insert earliest plausible century they can give*.
Autistic rant aside small clarification on Orthodoxy.
Sects of Orthodoxy are autonomous, meaning they are completely independent from other sects and they can change as many things as they like as much as they like. Meaning a Greek orthodox is separate from a Russian orthodox, is separate from a Polish Orthodox etc etc. There is technically a orthodox Pope figure that resides in Istanbul, no one actually gives a shit, and while it helps to be recognized by him as a separate sect, it doesn't really matter.
So they aren't as unified from a religious aspect as people like to say.
