Authors

Anastasiya Pshenychnykh¹;  ¹ Loughborough University, UK

Discussion

The paper is an investigation of how memory wars are waged online on social media and how the public is engaged in them. It uses Russia-Ukraine memory conflicts (2022-2025) as a case study to understand public engagement with contested pasts in the context of a hybrid war, focusing on regional, national and transnational dynamics and participatory nature of memory conflicts, as well as the role of social media in them. The most recent studies on Ukraine and Russia in the context of the full-scale war and of the contemporary process of decolonizing Ukrainian history and culture (Bekus, 2022; Betlii, 2022; Pshenychnykh, Pfoser, Mihelj, 2024; Tolz, Hutchings, 2023) indicate that the invasion of 2022 changed the nature of Russian-Ukrainian memory wars, significantly reducing the diversity of history interpretations and aggravating polarized narratives – Ukrainian vs Russian interpretations of history – on media. For example, the author’s monitoring of pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian channels on Telegram over the period of 24 February 2022 – 24 February 2024 and the analysis of over 2000 posts reporting on monuments (their dismantling, installations, modifications; commemorative events, protests, performances next to them, as well as their visual interpretations on social media) show that the same offline events involving monuments are visible on pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian segments of Telegram, yet are used to construct reversed interpretations of history, national identity and current events from opposing perspectives – pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian – to undermine opponent’s position.
However, the studies on memory and media do not take into account the attitudes of citizens from different Ukrainian regions or attitudes among Russians. Moreover, the year of 2022 is marked by waves of both Ukrainian and Russian emigration – a process which is still underway, yet on a smaller scale. Provided that a significant part of Ukrainians as well as Russians relocated outside of their countries of origin, this might have impacted and changed their engagement with memory conflicts – an issue that has not been studied so far at all. The proposed paper seeks to fill in this gap by comparing pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian perspectives constructed and circulated online with public interviews from diverse Ukrainian groups (Ukrainians from different regions in Ukraine, displaced Ukrainians within Ukraine and abroad) and Russian citizens relocated abroad after 24 February 2024. It addresses the concept of disruption in several ways: do the public hold the same polarized perspectives or do they hold more nuanced opinions about the past contested online, as well as about current events and national identity? If and how does the relocation from the country of citizenship affect their patterns of history and identity perception and selected online news reception, as well as their participation in memory wars online and on-site?