For decades, the art worlds of Moscow and Kyiv operated like estranged siblings who shared an apartment building but kept separate keys. They went to the same academies, studied the same avant-garde giants, and shared an uneasy geographical intimacy that dates back centuries through Soviet and imperial eras. Kazimir Malevich—born in Kyiv to Polish parents, but globally canonized as a titan of the Russian avant-garde—is the perfect symbol of this historical blur. For a long time, the Western art market didn’t care enough to untangle the knots. Anything coming out of the post-Soviet space was lazily swept into a single, lucrative bucket labeled “Russian culture.” Then came February 2022, and…