Russia's heinous invasion of Ukraine has unleashed terrible human suffering and catastrophic destruction. That this is brought about with reference to 'denazification' as a key Russian war objective highlights that this war is also a 'memory war', which Russia has been waging against Ukraine already for a long time. Indeed, this 'memory war', driven by the determination to leverage narratives about the past for present geopolitical ambition, has been waged on several fronts - to shore up domestic regime legitimacy, to destabilize the position of pro-Western political forces in the post-Soviet space, and to maintain, in particular through the narrative of the 'Great Patriotic War', Russia's symbolic capital as Europe's liberator and thus its claim to Great Power status internationally. In light of the significance of this memory dimension to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, the virtual roundtable will address not only the relevance of memory politics in leading up to the war, but also the further challenges the war is likely to pose for memory politics in the future. We would like to explore this with regard to the immediate context of Russian-Ukrainian relations, but also with regard to repercussions in other European regions (e.g. Western Balkans), as well as more general implications at the international level.

PARTICIPANTS /
Maria Malksoo, University of Copenhagen
Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Centre for East European and International Studies Berlin
Alexander Etkind, European University Institute
Florian Bieber, University of Graz
Tchavdar Marinov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Thomas Fetzer, Central European University
Moderator: Ivan Nikolovski, Central European University