The Crisis in Ukraine and the Split of Identity in the Russian-speaking World (original) (raw)
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Operationalization of a Unique Russia Diaspora in Eastern Ukraine, 2018
Russian President Putin and his political-military apparatus have determined that the active and deliberate engagement with a hypersensitive Russian diaspora living in Eastern Ukraine can be adequately harnessed and operationalized through an entire spectrum of vehicles to include the Russian military, the Russian Orthodox Church, and a state-controlled media machine. These three elements have served as the vanguard of a new Russian experiment. This resourced and directed campaign utilizes a variety of active and resourced mediums, cultural and historical connections, and sensationalized political chaos to target and connect with a sizeable Russian diaspora in an attempt to create an alternative to a perceived Western, European Union, and NATO empire. In the end, Russian leadership surmises that its engineered scheme to actively support Russian diaspora will help restore Russian prominence in a new multi-polar world and present a Russian government with a logical and defendable vehicle for both foreign influence propagation and national consolidation.
Introduction: Language, Identity, and Ideology in Ukrainian Media
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2018
n contemporary societies, mass media are increasingly important as a means of both communication and discursive representation. Media interaction is one of the main practices where people use language to learn about others and tell about themselves. Hence, it is one of the key sites for constructing identities and articulating ideologies. As technological means of mediated communication evolve, so too do ways in which people use them to exchange their beliefs about themselves and the world, and, with just a little delay, methods scholars employ to study these exchanges. It is therefore no wonder that studies of media communication and representation is one of the most vibrant fields within the social sciences and the humanities. Apart from those specializing in it, media attract scholars primarily working in linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, and other disciplines. Within Ukrainian studies, this field has not yet received the attention it deserves, so by publishing a special issue with an explicit focus on the media we hope to help obviate this shortcoming. In our call for proposals, we encouraged scholars from various countries and disciplines to engage in the critical examination of language use, identity construction, and ideological representations in diverse practices of mass media in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora. We did not prioritize proposals focusing on the present over those dealing with the past or analyses of the "new" media over more traditional kinds. Yet we were not surprised to find that most of the scholars who responded to our call were interested in recent and novel media practices, first and foremost communication in social media. Equally understandable is a keen attention to the effects of the Euromaidan and the Russian military intervention. These two phenomena are of enormous importance to Ukraine's present and future and have been extensively covered by various media organizations and discussed by ordinary citizens on Internet forums and social networking services. At the same time, texts presented in this issue shed new light on some of the core topics of Ukrainian studies, including Ukraine's positioning between the East and the West,
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In the context of conflict between Ukraine and Russia and increasing polarisation, symbolic boundaries between the two spaces are shifting. Here I investigated the themes and strategies of borderconstruction between the concepts of 'Ukrainianness' and 'Russianness' through everyday acts of communication of Russianspeaking Ukrainians. The article utilises materials of 14 in-depth interviews with Russian speakers from various Ukrainian regions (2018). The results show that the polarisation and hardening of borders between Ukraine and Russia prompted two responses: acceptance vs. negotiation/denial. The underlying tension behind opposing border-narratives was caused by the competition between ethnic and civic elements for the dominance in the national identity discourse.
2015
THIS IS A PRELIMINARY DRAFT VERSION. FOR THE APPROVED AND EDITED VERSION WITH PAGE NUMBERING PLEASE GO TO THE PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE USING THE LINK ABOVE. The developments in Ukraine in 2014, including Euromaidan demonstrations, annexation of Crimea by Russia, and war in the country's two Eastern regions, became so intensely reported by Russian media that they often overshadowed internal news.1 In this review, I will try to take a closer look at the Russian discourses on Ukraine.
Radicalization of Russians in Ukraine: from 'accidental' diaspora to rebel movement
The article examines different types of macropolitical identities in Ukraine and their interaction in establishing political order in the country. The authors argue that political institutional design was unfavourable to the Russian diaspora in eastern and southern regions. It hindered stable development of post-Soviet identity between Russians in the country. But during the Euromaidan protests, the Russians reacted to unpleasant political situation by exploring who they were and what social and political goals they had. Having been incipient for decades, the identity of the diaspora evolved in a soaring way within three or four months. The violent actions of the newly established government in Kiev radicalized the Russian diaspora. Diasporants started establishing alternative authorities in regions where government had no monopoly on the use of force. The involvement of Russia and international volunteers complexifies the situation in Donbass and the identity formation process in unrecognized republics also known as DNR and LNR.
the editors of this collection decided to use the more common, anglicised, version of Russian and Ukrainian words in order to make the publication readable for a diverse audience.
'Two Ukraines' Reconsidered: The End of Ukrainian Ambivalence SENA 15:1
The 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war, euphemistically called the 'Ukraine crisis', has largely confirmed, on certain accounts, a dramatic split of the country and people's loyalties between the proverbial 'East' and 'West', between the 'Eurasian' and 'European' ways of development epitomized by Russia and the European Union. By other accounts, however, it has proved that the Ukrainian nation is much more united than many experts and policymakers expected, and that the public support for the Russian invasion, beyond the occupied regions of Donbas and Crimea, is close to nil. This article does not deny that Ukraine is divided in many respects but argues that the main – and indeed the only important – divide is not between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, or Russophones and Ukrainophones, or the 'East' and the 'West'. The main fault line is ideological – between two different types of Ukrainian identity: non/anti-Soviet and post/neo-Soviet, 'European' and 'East Slavonic'. All other factors, such as ethnicity, language, region, income, education, or age, correlate to a different degree with the main one. However divisive those factors might be, the external threat to the nation makes them largely irrelevant, bringing instead to the fore the crucial issue of values epitomized in two different types of Ukrainian identity.
European Security, 2019
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