Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Occupied Ukraine

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin expected a three-day campaign to topple the Ukrainian government and establish military control over the neighboring country. Instead, the attack ushered in a brutal and costly war on multiple fronts that is still ongoing two and a half years after the invasion. The scale of destruction far surpassed that of the war Russia had already been waging against Ukraine in that countrys south-eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions since 2014. So did the loss of life. Ukrainian soldiers died defending their country on the battlefield; civilians were murdered by indiscriminate and deliberate Russian missile attacks on residential areas and in massacres and forced disappearances on occupied territory. The casualties suffered by Russias own military significantly exceeded those of any other campaign Russian soldiers have been involved in since the Second World War. From the very first weeks of the war, Russian soldiers, politicians, and proxy administrators expended considerable effort interacting with monuments on newly occupied territory. They paid particular attention to war memorials, whether dating from Soviet times or built in independent Ukraine: memorials commemorating the dead of the Second World War first and foremost, but also those dedicated to a range of other military conflicts throughout the ages. They destroyed, damaged, or removed some of these monuments; renovated or others; and soon started installing memorials of their own, all the way from small plaques to large statues. Even as the war was raging, they also used memorials as venues and backdrops for numerous ceremonies commemorating past wars. War memorials and the associated practices were among the main motifs of Russian war propaganda, especially videos, photos, and news reports produced for a domestic audience. Ukrainians, for their part, used war memorials as symbols of defiance and resistance. Why did the Russian invaders care enough about war memorials to divert scarce resources to destroying, maintaining, or building them amid a massive war? Why did they remove some memorials and spare others? What was the point of commemorating past victories and defeats while bombing Ukrainian cities, and how did commemorative ceremonies in the occupied territories change over the first year of the war? What was the broader impact of monument-related practices beyond the local settings in which they occurred? And what does the Ukrainian case teach us more generally about how memorials to past wars can be used to justify new conquests? These are some of the questions this book explores, based on a detailed study of the treatment of war memorials in Russian-occupied Ukraine during the first year after the large-scale invasion.