Russian and Pro-Russian Academia as a Component of Information Warfare Against Ukraine: Origins, Methods, and Tools

• In Event: Truth, Quasi Truth, and "Pure" Fake: Russia's Ongoing War Against Ukraine

Abstract

The paper will present an analysis of the key tools and methods of distorting information about communist and Nazi crimes in the first half of the 20th century used by contemporary Russian, as well as Russian-oriented Ukrainian and Western historians and analysts of memory policy.
These tools and methods, deeply rooted in Soviet historical policy and censorship. Colonial clichés and fakes of Soviet propaganda on the "modernization" of Ukraine by the Soviet authorities during the 1920s and 1930s and large-scale support for the Nazis during the German occupation of Ukraine are inherited by modern Russia from Soviet memory policy, developed by modern Russian and pro-Russian scholars and are actively used in discussions about the historical roots of the full-scale invasion.

Author

• Nadiia Honcharenko, National Academy of Arts (Ukraine)