This paper explores how Russia’s state-promoted memory of the so-called "Great Patriotic War"—and especially the sacrificial narrative of the Battle of Stalingrad—has (or has not) been reconfigured and deployed for English-speaking audiences in digital space. Extending previous analysis of Russian-language Telegram and VK communities, where Stalingrad operates as a mnemonic kernel fusing past sacrifice with present war, I investigate how Russophone narrative fragments are exported into English-language social media ecosystems such as Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram. Across these platforms in the Russian-speaking space, the Stalingrad myth functions as a connective device linking World War II’s redemptive struggle against fascism to Russia’s ongoing war of aggression in Ukraine.

Through critical discourse analysis, I explore how recurring textual, visual, and emotional tropes—sacrifice, endurance, the defence of civilization, and the cyclical triumph of good over evil—are (re)assembled within English-language posts that seek to translate Russian memory politics into globally intelligible moral frames as a means to justify military action in the present. These circulations exemplify what Andrew Hoskins terms connective memory: the transformation of memory into a dynamic, distributed process that is constantly renewed through sharing, emotion, and algorithmic propagation. The study traces how this connective faculty allows Russian narratives of Stalingrad to interact with transnational discourses of anti-fascism, resistance, and moral struggle.

In examining how mnemonic kernels migrate across linguistic and cultural boundaries, the paper illuminates the globalization of Russian wartime myth-making and the specificity of what William Merrin and Hoskins term the individualized experience of a "sharded war." Rather than direct propaganda, these fragments operate affectively and individualistically, cultivating ambient sympathy and historical plausibility for the Kremlin’s framing of its current war as a defensive and moral enterprise. The paper thus contributes to broader scholarship on digital memory, affective warfare, and authoritarian legitimation.