Reframing the Present: An Analysis of Competing Russo-Ukrainian Historical Narratives and Their Role in the Ongoing Ukrainian Crisis

Since the 2013-14 Euromaidan protest movement and the ousting of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and his administration, Ukraine has been embroiled in a political crisis both domestically and with its neighbour, Russia. Namely, the Ukrainian state has lost the Crimean Peninsula to a Russian military incursion and remains engaged in the local Donbas War against pro-Russian insurrectionists. Alongside these events, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration has been waging an information war against Ukraine through its employment of Russian state media. In doing so, Russian state media has revived and internationalized Soviet historical narratives of the Great Patriotic War, discrediting the present Ukrainian state by associating it with historic examples of fascism. Thus, this paper argues that contemporary Russian attempts to reframe Ukrainian national history along a Russo-Soviet narrative, without consideration for the more authentically Ukrainian nationalist narrative, is irrespective of the Ukrainian historical experience and is a dangerous abuse of Great Patriotic War imagery in the present. Considering the legacy of the former imperial relationship between Russia and Ukraine, and the Russian state’s current interest in restoring bygone prestige, this dimension of the current threat to Ukrainian sovereignty should not be ignored.&nbsp