Authors

Discussion

In Finland, the indirect impacts following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have been noteworthy. The country, which formerly had a pragmatically friendly relationship with its eastern neighbour, joined NATO and closed its Russian border in response to Russia’s hybrid operations in 2023. Domestically, conflicting perceptions about the security-political circumstances leading to these decisions have stirred tensions and distrust between the majority of the population and the relatively large minority with family, citizenship, and other bonds to Russia.

Surveys have indicated that Russia was perceived as much less of a credible national threat by Finland’s Russian speakers compared to the rest of the population, largely due to differences in media consumption. In this regard, the role of collective or national memory and commemoration has been noted in previous studies in Finland, as well as in other European countries with relevant minorities, but it has not been examined with a systematic focus on conventions in in-group discussions.

In this context, the current paper examines national memory as a source of societal friction and a sense of (non-)belonging in transnational cyberculture on four of Finland’s Russian-language forums between 2023 and 2024. The applied approach is systematic long-term auto-netnography, which helps to analyse group norms and social interactions in specific online group communications.