What is responsibility, and how is a feeling of responsibility connected to recognizing a person as a free citizen rather than a serf or a slave? Why do some Russians acknowledge collective responsibility for the war, while others are outraged that responsibility for crimes of the regime – crimes in which they were not personally involved – is being attributed to them?
One of the mistakes made by the Russian authorities, who expected to gain the support of the local population after invading Ukraine, stems from their failure to understand Ukrainian identity and the fact that identity cannot be imposed as an ideological construct.
The aggressive political myth used to justify war – not only against Ukraine but against the entire Western civilization – penetrates much deeper into the public consciousness than Kremlin propaganda, disinformation, or fake news.
If Soviet ideology was monolithic, the current ideology of the Russian authorities appears loose, combining seemingly incompatible elements – for example, the cultivation of the Soviet past alongside the idealization of Tsarist Russia. Nevertheless, Russian propaganda has shown significant success, attracting a wide range of political forces, sometimes even those hostiles to each other. This demonstrates that modern Russian ideology functions differently from the Soviet one
Will the Russian people have the right to self-determination after their defeat in the war, or will their fate be decided by a coalition of the victors? To answer this question, it is necessary to clarify the concept of “agency,” to which Nikolai Karpitsky has devoted another article in the Dictionary of War on PostPravda.Info.
Over the years of the war with Russia, the word “Rashism” has become firmly established in Ukrainian usage, although some political scientists regard it as a vague and unscientific notion. However, Ukrainians clearly understand what rashism is and how it differs from other forms of fascism. On May 2, 2023, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a definition of the term “rashism,” enumerating its main characteristics. This definition is descriptive in nature, and has therefore become the subject of another article by Nikolai Karpitsky for PostPravda.Info’s Dictionary of War.
An ordinary person perceives as evil anything that harms them or contradicts their ethical and religious beliefs. On this basis, researchers often conclude that evil is an evaluative concept and should therefore be excluded from the objective analysis of social processes. However, with the outbreak of the war, Ukrainians came to realise through their own experience that the question of evil is not abstract but existential: it is bound up with their right to life.
The tragedy in Kryvyi Rih prompted the editorial team of PostPravda.info to choose the term “necro-imperialism” as the subject of the next article in the Dictionary of War by Prof. Nikolai Karpitsky.
