Authors

Discussion

Since the beginning of Russia's war on Ukraine in 2014, and especially since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, numerous memorials to those killed in this war have been built in both countries. While some of these are standalone monuments, the vast majority are added to existing memorials to earlier conflicts, especially those honoring the dead of the Second World War (or the Great Patriotic War). Drawing on numerous cases from different regions of both countries, this paper analyzes the different ways in which the memory of the ongoing war is articulated with that of World War II. In Russia, there is uncertainty about the forms and extent to which the fallen of the present war can be commemorated, and thus adding their names to existing WWII memorials endows their commemoration with legitimacy and a ready-made frame of remembrance. Soviet-era WWII memorials both in Russia and in the occupied territories are thereby reframed through the lens of Russian nationalism, since all of Russia's wars are reinterpreted as a string of events contributing to national greatness. In some Ukrainian regions, the more recent dead are also added to WWII memorials in order to inscribe them in a history of resistance against foreign invaders; elsewhere in Ukraine, however, the relationship is reversed: in response to incoclastic activists who seek to remove Soviet-era WWII memorials that they see as markers of Soviet/Russian dominance, local residents and local authorities often attempt to resacralize the older memorials by associating them with the more universally legitimate memory of those dying in the ongoing war.