Understanding Public Engagement with Contested Pasts: Russia-Ukraine Monument Wars and Their Reception

Talk by Anastasiya Pshenychnykh (Loughborough University) on the occasion of her fellowship at the IOS.

The study uses the Russia-Ukraine monument wars as a case study to explore public engagement with memory conflicts and divergent interpretations of the past in the context of a hybrid conflict. The Russia-Ukraine war unfolds not only as a military confrontation but also as a struggle over the past, waged across physical and digital spaces through competing 'mnemonic regimes.' Drawing on 60 interviews with Ukrainians residing in Ukraine, relocated from Russia-occupied Ukrainian territories and abroad, as well as Russian citizens relocated abroad since 2022, the paper examines how audiences engage with the removal, preservation, installation, and interpretation of contested heritage on social media. Russian aggression mobilises history to legitimise imperial claims – materialised in the destruction of Ukrainian heritage and the restoration of imperial and Soviet monuments – while Ukrainian responses seek to remove symbols of Russian dominance and reassert national narratives. These dynamics intensify in digital environments, where platforms such as Telegram function as sites of documentation, evidence-making, and affective mobilisation in ongoing 'digital monument wars.' The presentation shows how Ukrainian and Russian audiences actively interrogate wartime memory politics with interpretations that complicate narratives circulated on social media.

Anastasiya Pshenychnykh is currently an Academic Visitor at Loughborough University (Gerda Henkel Foundation grant), where she explores public engagement with contested pasts through the case of Russia-Ukraine Telegram memory wars. Anastasiya was previously a CARA fellow at Loughborough, where she researched how Russia-Ukraine battles over material heritage are waged online, and how Telegram channels mobilise the past to shape conflicting spectacles during the full-scale war. In Ukraine, she held the position of Associate Professor at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and lectured in Multimodal Analysis. Alongside this role, she contributed to international research projects on digital media, conflict, memory and politics. Her earlier work examined Ukrainian news media perspectives on the EU, Russia and national identity in (post-)Euromaidan Ukraine, as well as struggles around decommunization in Ukraine.