Manipulation of language plays an important role in the way Vladimir Putin’s regime presents the war in Ukraine.

Concepts take on an Orwellian ability to mean the opposite of what we think they should mean. One could speak of the weaponization of language, in much the same way as Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, among others, have spoken of the weaponization of information (Pomerantsev and Weiss 2014).

Because of the Russian disinformation campaign, the word nation­alism is now contested both in Ukraine and in the world media. It is instructive to begin by casting our minds back a couple of decades. Twenty-five years ago, one might have wondered whether there were any nationalists left in Ukraine. Soviet propaganda insisted on their complete marginalization in political life and described them as a patho­logical phenomenon. They only existed abroad and represented a kind of Western virus smuggled into the country by emigres, a sickness that needed quarantining and removing. Today, however, Putin would have us believe that nationalists of the most nightmarish, “Banderite” variety rule the country, that a Nazi fascist “junta” is in power in Kyiv, and every Ukrainian citizen from border to border is forced by the junta to wave the yellow-and-blue flag.

Since 2014, the confusion surrounding the term “nationalist” (and its linking to the words “Banderite,” “fascist,” “junta,” and “Kyiv”) has been deliberate, a conscious policy of equating opposition to Russian military invasion and dominance with chauvinism, racism, and political violence. The Putin narrative presents any anti-Russian sentiment as a perversion of the natural order in which Russia is the irresistible great power that right­fully attracts and controls the geopolitical bloc to which Ukraine belongs.

An observer is left wondering how after seventy years of Soviet campaigns raging against nationalism (then the attached adjectives were “bourgeois”

Living With Ambiguities 163 and “zoological”), and after seventy years of extolling the friendship of Soviet peoples, all of Ukraine has suddenly turned out to be one national­ist camp. The “virus” was first portrayed in Soviet propaganda as a nasty element restricted mainly to Western Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains. If Putin’s propaganda is to be believed, it now appears that these ghosts from the past have crawled out of their Second World War bunkers and imposed their anti-Russian ideology and Ukrainian language on the rest of the country. Is any of this true? Should Ukrainian nationalism to be equated with the partisans of the 1940s? Have the ghosts from the OUN and UPA bunkers captured the country?

Some Ukrainians, like Serhii Kvit, formerly the Minister of Education and Science and at one time Rector of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Univer­sity in Kyiv, would have us believe that, indeed, there is a continuity with the nationalism of the 1930s—but this is, of course, untrue. Earlier in his career, Kvit wrote a flattering portrait of Dmytro Dontsov, the journalist who supported the development of a Ukrainian fascist ideology in the 1930s. Recently, the former Minister of Education stated: “The strug­gle for genuine independence resumed on the Euromaidan, and quickly adopted the ideological legacy, organizational and structural forms of twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalism, which is today performing an integrative function for society as a whole” (Kvit 2014, 34). However, it is telling that in this article Kvit does not identify which nationalism he is speaking about. Is it Dontsov’s, the OUN’s, or the democratic national­ism that always represented the majority of Ukrainian society, whether in the 1930s, 1960s, or the 1990s? Which particular nationalism is being referred to is left vague. It is not clear what time frame and which party he is describing, or what constitutes the content of his nationalism.

In today’s Ukraine, both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking citizens, along with all other language-speakers, have united against a military intervention and an attempt to dismember their country. The ideological glue binding them together is belief in a civil society, in European norms and ideals (democratic elections, incorruptible judges, respect for the law, freedoms of the press and assembly). Ironically, Putin’s war has been the primary factor in transforming Ukrainian citizens into supporters of the nation-state. It has also created a generation of Russophobes, particularly among those citizens who are Russian speakers (including those of Rus­sian background) who live in the country’s eastern oblasts. The political scientist and journalist Volodymyr Kulyk argues that this population’s previous ambivalence toward national identity changed dramatically dur­ing two years of war. The slogans, symbols, and rituals that first manifest themselves in Kyiv have now spread throughout the country. The Euro­maidan’s original impetus came from the idea of defending democracy and expressing popular outrage with President Viktor Yanukovych. This shifted in early 2014 toward the idea of defending the nation. The shift was gradual. After the violent attacks against protestors on 30 November 2013, the older generation spoke of “protecting our children.” The Euro­maidan at that point became a struggle, conducted under the national flag, against tyranny. Then, after Yanukovych’s trips to Moscow in late December 2013, came the realization that most Russians supported the policies of President Putin, which resulted in a hardening of attitudes toward the Russian regime and nation (Kulyk 2015, 3). Nonetheless, the focus has remained on becoming a “normal” European country, meaning a democratic society in which the rights of all citizens are protected by the law and adhered to by the government.

During the Euromaidan protests, Putin’s narrative of terrifying nation­alists bent on bloodthirsty repression was used to obscure this reality. Andreas Umland has argued that what the Russian president was fishing for was “a scary story of economic fiasco, ethnic division, bloody con­flict, and social chaos,” so that he could present Ukraine’s failure as the inevitable consequence of any democratic uprising and rapprochement with the West. Many commentators agree that the lesson was and still is aimed primarily at the president’s own population. Umland has posited that Putin is not concerned with a frank discussion of Russia’s national interests, but is focused on “the mundane issue of personal power and domestic control” (Umland 2014). This issue drives Russia’s promotion of armed separatism and military intervention. In short, not the interests of the Russian state and nation, “but the continuing stability of Putin’s increasingly autocratic rule and corrupt system” are Moscow’s major concern (ibid.). Ukraine’s successful Europeanization threatens the etat- ist, neo-authoritarian regime that has emerged in Russia. Therefore, Putin needs a spectacular failure of this “Europeanization” to protect himself and his regime.

The Putin narrative is contradictory and incoherent, and exploits ter­minological confusion. Here are a few examples.