Authors

Discussion

Since 2014, the Russian state has drawn on the Holocaust framework in order to publicly condemn developments in Ukraine. The state argues that Russian-speakers in the country are victims of ‘genocide’. On other occasions, Vladimir Putin has made comparisons to another genocide, the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica: he has argued that ‘the massacre [in Ukraine against Russian-speakers] […] - and even worse than in Srebrenica - will be carried out by the so-called nationalist battalions’.

This paper will examine how the Holocaust has been used as a reference point in the Russian state’s toolbox of memory discourses. It will assess the reasons for which the Russian state believes that comparisons between the Holocaust and contemporary developments in Ukraine are legitimate. It will examine how Russian state officials talk about acts of the Holocaust committed on occupied Ukrainian territory, as well as local participation in these massacres, and how this serves to condemn Ukraine, its mnemonic narratives, and to delegitimise the contemporary Ukrainian state.

[1]‘Bol’shaia press-konferentsiia Vladimira Putina’, Prezident Rossii, 14 December 2017