But the war, which Russia initially saw as a chance to unite within its empire all of its Slavic brethren in “Little Russia,” as it called Ukraine, also planted suspicions that poison Russia’s dealings with Ukraine to this day.

It left many Russians convinced that Ukrainian national sentiment and even the Ukrainian language, dismissed by czarist officials as a “Little Russian dialect,” were fictions invented by its enemies to undermine Russian rule. In Russia, the wartime exploits of Ukrainian troops at Makivka and other battles in the Carpathian Mountains are remembered, when they are mentioned at all, not as an example of Ukraine’s fighting spirit, but as evidence of the perils of division among Slavic peoples.

“Now is the right moment,” the czar’s foreign minister said in 1916 after a series of military setbacks, “to rid ourselves of the Ukrainian movement once and for all.”

Austria and Germany constantly stoked nationalism among Ukrainians, Poles, Finns and other peoples then ruled by the Russian Empire. The United States, a late entrant to the war, did not fight on the eastern front. But it added to Russia’s alarm when President Woodrow Wilson in 1918 enunciated his famous Fourteen Points, proclaiming the right of “self-determination,” a principle that encouraged Ukrainians and others to demand their own countries.

Russia had long played the same game, fanning nationalist resentments against the Hapsburgs in Serbia and other territories governed or coveted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Reinforced during World War II by the collaboration of some Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis, Russian suspicions of a Western hand behind Ukraine’s national movement helped shape Moscow’s response to protests in Ukraine this year, which toppled President Viktor F. Yanukovych and led to the establishment of what Russia condemned as a fascist government engineered by the West.