War

This chapter discusses the impact of the war on the final stage of the decolonial process in Ukraine and the new wave of self-colonization in Russia, looking at these processes through an ambicolonial lens. It focuses on how the destruction, war crimes, and atrocities perpetrated by the Russian army represent the entanglement in both the fabricated and real imperial past, fueled by Russian propaganda. The deaths of civilians and the damage to cultural heritage have incited an unprecedented revival of Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance—a phenomenon that is anachronistic to the postcolonial stage yet, as the chapter argues, eventually reflects the decolonial situation. The popular solidarity and participatory democracy fostered by Ukraine’s revolutions further evolved with the outbreak of the war in 2014 and its culmination in the full-scale invasion in 2022. The war in Ukraine has been impacting cultural representation by erasing colonialist elements and deconstructing habitual visual narratives used before the invasion. The principle of solidarity has also transformed into one of more radical resistance, along with a profound reconsideration of the past, which marked contrast within Ukrainian society. The war catalyzed and transformed decolonial processes in Ukraine and sowed discord in Russia. This chapter gathers reflections on the wartime epistemology of violence and explores how they are linked to identity changes, agency formation, and the ideas of destruction and reconstruction. I explore how the visualization of the atrocities and the testimonies of the war crimes through audiovisual, literary, and visual projects fueled the anti-colonial resistance in and beyond the cultural domain. The chapter also discusses the turn to documenting the war as a cultural practice that establishes the basis for epistemological delinking from colonial and postcolonial entangled narratives.