Thread by @ukraine_world

Battles on the field of memory politics: Ukrainian VS Russian approaches. UkraineWorld spoke to Anton Drobovych, the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. Key points – in our brief, #UkraineWorldAnalysis 1/12

RU society’s culture of memory is, to a large extent, based on the Soviet narrative of WW II, or as it is called in RU, the “Great Patriotic War.” The cult of victory replaced all other aspects of the war in the RU collective consciousness, particularly its human dimension. 2/12

And this model of remembering which they finally settled on is aggressive and revanchist. On one hand, it feeds RU chauvinism and the idea of ​​RU exceptionalism. On the other hand, it is rooted in the revanchist logic like “we reached Berlin once, we can do it again”. 3/12

The boundaries of understanding and revisiting our difficult past have been expanded. The process called decommunization, started at the state level in 2015 after the Revolution of Dignity, covers the 70 years of Ukrainian past under the Soviet communist totalitarian regime. 4/12

But now, it is obvious that even the heritage and culture of the Russian Empire is especially toxic, as the Kremlin uses culture as a weapon. This is not a coincidence that the director of the Hermitage Museum said that RU culture is also a weapon used to defeat the West. 5/12

It explains why, for example, the monument to Catherine II couldn’t stay in the public space of Odesa. It was a symbol of the Russian Empire and its expansionist policy, so this monument normalized this imperialistic discourse and approach. 6/12

In 2022, there was a shift in Kremlin rhetoric as a result of their losses in Ukraine. In 2014, Russians celebrated a “victory,” meaning Crimea's annexation. And the ruler who bloodlessly seized Crimea and “returned it to the homeland” was at the center of this rhetoric. 7/12

But now that Russian military forces are facing strong resistance from Ukraine’s defense forces and are taking heavy losses in this war, the Kremlin is forced to change its rhetoric. They have to look for excuses for their military defeats. So they blame the collective West. 8/12

The full-scale invasion has been a powerful stimulus for these Ukrainians who until February 2022 weren’t sure about their Ukrainian identity. An identity is based on 2 conditions. The 1st is understanding who we are not. 9/12

The RU war against Ukraine has made this perfectly clear for many Ukrainians. The 2nd is our narrative about ourselves. This common narrative about our path to our own independent state, about the source of our thirst for freedom and dignity is not fully crystallized yet. 10/12

Ukrainian history is complicated and full of dramatic stories. For example, we can recall the Kyivan intellectuals from the XVII century from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy who helped crystalize the idea of the Russian empire. 11/12

We can’t cut off a 300-year period of our history because of the Russian presence in it. But we certainly can evaluate those historical events based on documents and other sources. 12/12