War and Memory: Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Strategic Engagement with North Caucasian Causes

• In Event: Narrating Repression, Rewriting Trauma: Contested Legacies in Museums, Memory, and Discourse

Abstract

Amid the Russo-Ukrainian war nearing its third year, on January 9, 2025, the Verkhovna Rada unanimously recognized the Circassian genocide. Ukraine thus became the second nation to do so, after Georgia in 2011, framing the move as a response to its prolonged conflict with the Kremlin, which escalated into Russia’s invasion of another post-Soviet state. Earlier, Kyiv declared Chechnya an occupied state and expressed support for the Ingush people's right to self-determination, hoping to highlight historical grievances against Moscow and garner support from nationalist groups in Russia’s North Caucasus. The Ukrainian Parliament has also condemned Russia's military involvement in the 1992 Ingush-Ossetian conflict, as well as the mass deportation of the Ingush people in 1944. These actions occur against the backdrop of Chechen soldiers fighting on both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian war, reflecting the Chechens’ own internal divisions in political vision and collective memory. Kyiv’s political maneuvers mirror those of Tbilisi, which sought to align itself with North Caucasus groups in the aftermath of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. Tbilisi supported the Chechen and Circassian causes as part of a strategy to undermine Moscow’s position in the Caucasus, while also attempting to rebrand Georgia as a champion of Pan-Caucasus unity—a vision that aimed to de-emphasize conflicts with its breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. While Chechens represent a potential force for loosening Russia’s grip on the North Caucasus, however, they also pose, together with the Ingush, a threat of regional destabilization, including to Georgian sovereignty.

Author

• Matthew Kelbaugh, U of Maryland, Baltimore County