Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case 9783031740763, 9783031740770

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT

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Ambicoloniality and War

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The Ukrainian-Russian Case Svitlana Biedarieva

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict Series Editors

Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Britt Baillie McDonald Institute of Archaeology University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts.

Svitlana Biedarieva

Ambicoloniality and War The Ukrainian-Russian Case

Svitlana Biedarieva Independent Scholar Mexico City/Kyiv, Mexico/Ukraine

ISSN 2634-6419      ISSN 2634-6427 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-031-74076-3 ISBN 978-3-031-74077-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Tiberiy Szilvashi, Maliarstvo [Painting]. Exhibition “Painting. Leon Tarasewicz – Tiberiy Szilvashi.” Curated by Jerzy Onuch. Center for Contemporary Art at the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,” Kyiv, 2000. Photograph by Igor Gaidai. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank everyone who supported me in writing this book. It was a long journey, and I am very grateful to the colleagues who provided advice and shared their knowledge for the completion of this monograph. I would like to thank Myroslav Shkandrij and Madina Tlostanova for their work, which has been an endless source of inspiration for my writing, and for their advice on developing this text. I am very thankful to Vitaly Chernetsky and Tamara Hundorova for their valuable comments, which gave me a powerful impulse to move forward with this research. Many thanks to the artists who kindly provided permission to use images of their excellent art for this book: Yevgenia Belorusets, Roman Grygoriv, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Kulikovska, Kateryna Lysovenko, Mykola Matsenko, Danylo Movchan, Lada Nakonechna, Jerzy Onuch, Vlada Ralko, Illia Razumeiko, Arsen Savadov, Tiberiy Szilvashi, and Oleh Tistol. I have  always highly appreciated our collaborations, and here I am particularly thankful for their trust in the interdisciplinary scope of this book, which exceeds my usual dedication to the field of art history. I would also like to thank Betty Roytburd, the Odesa National Fine Art Museum and Kateryna Kulai, as well as the David Burliuk Family Estate and Greg Givogue, for the permission to reproduce the valuable works by Oleksandr Roytburd, Arkhyp Kuindzhi, and David Burliuk. I acknowledge and appreciate the important support from the Kennan Institute at the Wilson International Center for Scholars, where I was a George F.  Kennan scholar from March to May 2023, and George Washington University, where I was a nonresident visiting fellow in v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ukrainian Studies between 2022 and 2023. This research would not have been possible without the generous fellowship support from these two institutions. I would like to thank my students at the University of Zurich, where I was a visiting lecturer in  the fall of  2023, for the valuable insights they provided through our enriching conversations on Ukrainian and Eastern European art and decoloniality. Finally, I thank my family, for all their love and support.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Ukraine—The In(di)visible Land  1 1.1 From Postcolonial to Decolonial  1 1.2 Explaining Anachronic Colonialism: The Necessity of a New Language  7 1.3 Decolonization as a Question of Ukraine’s Visibility 14 1.4 From Transitional Culture to Epistemic Detachment 17 1.5 Structure of the Book 19 Bibliography 24 2 Anti-Colonialism vs. “Self-Colonization” 27 2.1 Second-Rate Empire and Double Consciousness 27 2.2 Self-Colonization as Mimicry 32 2.3 Hybridity and Its Discontents 36 2.4 The Multifunctionality of Hybridity 42 2.5 Anachronic Anti-Colonialism 45 2.6 Syncretic Polarization as the Basis for Anti-­Colonial Struggle and Decolonial Processes 47 2.7 Case Study: Donbas; the Borderline Work of Culture 53 Bibliography 59 3 Ambicoloniality 63 3.1 Polymorphous Coloniality 63 3.2 Various Ways of Forming Coloniality: The Ambicolonial Approach 69 vii

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3.3 Synchronic and Diachronic Colonization 71 3.4 The Elements of Ambicoloniality 74 3.5 The Eurasian Polymorphous 77 3.6 Ambicoloniality as the Disrupted Connection: Russophone Spaces 82 3.7 Case Study: Ambicolonial Appropriation; Why Ukrainian Cultural Impact Is Important for Russia 88 Bibliography 94 4 (R)evolution of Identity 97 4.1 Ambivalence as a Postcolonial Burden 97 4.2 Diversity/Equality 104 4.3 Revolution as a Threat to Ambicolonial Epistemology 109 4.4 Eurocentricity as a Decolonial Option? 115 4.5 Syncretic Polarization as Epistemological Expulsion 120 4.6 Case Study: Euromaidan Practices; from the Rethinking of History to the Production of New Narratives 124 Bibliography 130 5 W  ar 5.1 Uncovering the Epistemology of Violence 5.2 Powerless Neocolonial Violence 5.3 Ambicoloniality and the Contemporary Russian War Machine 5.4 Syncretic Polarization Through Epistemological Transformation: War’s Disruptive Force 5.5 Epistemology of Violence as a New Beginning 5.6 Case Study: Documentary Turn in Ukraine Against Ambicolonial Epistemology Bibliography

135 135 139 142 146 149 154 159

6 Desire 163 6.1 The Ambicolonial Drive and the Hybrid Subject of Desire163 6.2 Affect over the Place: Ambicolonial Perspective 168 6.3 Challenging Oedipal Visions of Russia’s Colonialism 173 6.4 Desire for New Epistemology 178 6.5 Case Study: Crimea as an Affective Territory 181 Bibliography 187

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7 Ruin and Reconstruction 7.1 The Unfolding Ruin 7.2 Decolonial Release as Liberation 7.3 Syncretic Polarization: Threats and Potentialities 7.4 The Final Dissolution of Ambicoloniality? 7.5 Regeneration After the Ruin: Displacement Fostering Internal Hybridization 7.6 Internal Hybridity as Circulation of Knowledge Bibliography

191 191 194 199 203

8 Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

Svitlana Biedarieva  is an art historian, artist, and curator. She is the editor of Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (2024) and Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021 (2021), and the co-editor of At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2020). She has published texts in leading academic journals and media outlets, such as October, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Lada Nakonechna, Russian-Ukrainian War, from the War in Ukraine series, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist Arsen Savadov, from the Donbas-Chocolate series, 1997. Image courtesy of the artist Yevgenia Belorusets, from the Victories of the Defeated series, 2014–2018. Image courtesy of the artist Vlada Ralko, from the Lviv Diary series, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Zhanna Kadyrova, Palianytsia, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Arkhyp Kuindzhi, Sunset over the Sea, no date. Image courtesy of the National Odesa Art Museum David Burliuk, Man with Two Faces, 1912. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate Anna Zvyagintseva, from the Event (Gap) series, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist Hryhory Skovoroda, Unequal Equality to All, 1772. Wikimedia Commons Vlada Ralko, from the Kyiv Diary series, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist Oleksandr Roytburd, Raising the Banner, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate Danylo Movchan, Holding Back, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Alevtina Kakhidze, Bucha. Me. 47 Minutes by Car, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Yevgenia Belorusets, from the War Diary series, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

41 55 57 67 86 89 93 101 105 125 127 141 156 158 xiii

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.1

Mykola Matsenko and Oleh Tistol, Together Forever, 2013. Image courtesy of the artists Fig. 6.2 Oleh Tistol, Reunification, 1988. Image courtesy of the artist Fig. 6.3 Maria Kulikovska, Star Dust, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist Fig. 6.4 Zhanna Kadyrova, Untitled, 2014–2022. Image courtesy of the artist Fig. 7.1 Kateryna Lysovenko, Propaganda of the World of My Dreams. The Last Day of the Last Totalitarianism, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Fig. 7.2 Illia Razumeiko and Roman Grygoriv, extract from the video for Gaia-24: Opera del Mondo, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists

164 175 185 186 195 200

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Ukraine—The In(di)visible Land

1.1   From Postcolonial to Decolonial Russia’s unjustified war of aggression against Ukraine has had profound consequences for Ukrainian society. To date, it has resulted in the violent deaths of thousands of civilians and the displacement of millions. The war has had a major negative impact on the economy, caused the destruction of infrastructure, environmental ruination, and the loss of cultural heritage. Yet despite these hardships, Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion  has prompted a transformative process of breaking free from the remnants of centuries-long colonial oppression. One outcome of Ukraine’s resilience in facing the war is the growing interest from the international community in understanding Ukraine, retrieving and reexamining its overlooked history, and finding a suitable place for Ukrainian studies across academic disciplines. To date, English-­ language research on Ukraine has been scarce. However, with the increasing relevance of Ukraine’s art, culture, and society, new knowledge and recognition of the significance of Ukraine’s presence on the world’s geopolitical map are emerging. Similarly, postcolonial theory and decolonial theory have omitted Russian colonialism, particularly when applied to Ukraine, for too long. As the war unfolds, research on Ukraine sheds light on its complex situation of colonial belonging and epistemic injustices rooted in decades of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_1

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misrepresenting and belittling Ukrainian cultural heritage, the silencing of its society, and the lack of attention to what should have been said regarding Russia’s overlooked colonialism of the past and its current neocolonial actions. To dissolve the smoke curtain of contemporary Russian propaganda, it has become increasingly crucial to disentangle Ukrainian narratives from the Russian impact and Russia’s long-standing attempts to appropriate Ukraine’s culture and its territory. This book aims to provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of Ukraine’s diverse identities, numerous faces and voices, multiculturality, and internal hybridity (as opposed to postcolonial hybridity), liberated from the influence of the dominant Russian perspectives. The decolonization process received new impetus with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the slow pace of postcolonial recombination, rethinking, and reformatting of the post-Soviet legacy was conditioned by intrinsic contradictions in Ukrainian society’s self-identification and its continuous vision of Russia as the former dominant power in the region. In 2014, however, the outbreak of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the occupation of Ukrainian territory, including parts of the Donetsk and the Luhansk regions and Crimea, triggered an intensified transformation process that included the reexamination of contested history, reconsiderations of memory and identity, and the beginning of the creation of an archive of the war in Ukraine. In 2022, the atrocities of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia dissolved any remaining doubts about the necessity of reconsidering Russia’s colonial influence in Ukraine and brought about the processes of radical change and decolonization of Ukrainian culture in search of epistemic justice. This book proposes that Ukraine’s postcolonial transformation encountered several stages following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and culminated in the outset of decolonial processes after the Ukrainian heartfelt resistance to the escalation of violence and war-caused destruction in 2022 enabled the increased production of new narratives disentangled from Russian cultural impacts. Here, as in my other texts, I argue that the notions of the “postcolonial” and the “decolonial” are not interchangeable; rather, they reflect two different stages of liberation from colonial entanglement (Biedarieva 2022). While the notion of the postcolonial denotes the situation immediately following the colonial experience and anti-colonial struggle, taking on all the implications of colonialism to reinterpret them, the notion of

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the decolonial refers to the final process of dismantling the colonial narratives. Decolonial scholar Madina Tlostanova remarks on the chronological and logical discrepancies between the two approaches: “The postcolonial condition is more of an objective given, a geopolitical and geohistorical situation of many people coming from former colonies. The decolonial stance is one step further, as it involves a conscious choice of how to interpret reality and how to act upon it” (Tlostanova 2019, 165). The argumentation in this book relies on the statement that the atrocities of the anachronistic Russian war of aggression have brought Ukraine to the culmination of its decolonial stage, with the once-dominant narrative of Russian culture “enveloping” Ukrainian culture having fallen apart to the point of no return. Indeed, any further aggressive action on the part of Russia toward Ukraine will only continue to foster what is an inevitable emancipatory shift. Whereas Russia’s contemporary desires and narratives reveal an outdated and archaic colonial impulse, Ukraine has long since passed through the stage of anti-colonial struggle with Russia throughout its history. Therefore, Russia’s war in Ukraine constitutes a paradox: one country persists in its attempts at colonial expansion, while the other liberates itself from its last colonial bonds. This book explains this contradiction by proposing new terminology for describing the particular colonial relationship between Ukraine and Russia and new methods for addressing the theoretical model of this close entanglement, within the context of dismantling the post-Soviet space. Although the Ukrainian case has long been omitted in research on colonialism, several important interdisciplinary texts focusing on Ukraine’s postcolonial condition have been produced. These include books by Myroslav Shkandrij, Tamara Hundorova, Vitaly Chernetsky, Mykola Riabchuk, and Catherine Wanner (Shkandrij 2001; Hundorova 2012; Chernetsky 2003; Riabchuk 2000; Wanner 1998). These texts were published before the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent full-scale invasion in 2022, and they reflect the profoundly postcolonial dimension of Ukraine’s political and cultural situation. This essential research on Ukraine engages closely with the questions of historical memory and the overcoming of historical trauma and addresses particular cases of postcolonial hybridity and ambivalence manifested in Ukrainian culture. The wider effects of Russian colonialism on the post-­Soviet space have been explored in Madina Tlostanova’s and Ewa Thompson’s works, each addressing the topic from a different

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methodological approach:  decolonial theory and postcolonial theory, respectively (Tlostanova 2018; Thompson 2000). This book discusses the applicability of postcolonial and decolonial theories to the situation in Ukraine and proposes the elaboration of a new theoretical framework that goes beyond the focus on the postcolonial recombination of former colonial elements and the decolonial dismantling of colonial narratives as markers of belonging. This includes addressing the implications of existence in immediate geographical proximity and mutual influences filtering over the shared border, which is not a typical case covered by any of these theories. It provides an examination of imperial differences (Mignolo 2011), viewing the Russian colonial case as distinct from the empires of the world by a range of characteristics: from its mimicking of colonial methods of Western empires and its particular coloniality without colonies to the all-encompassing expansion of cultural influences and erasure of local cultures as part of a Janus-faced (Tlostanova 2019, 165) process of cultural appropriation. The difficulty of breaking away from the colonial past is conditioned by the shared border and requires revising strategies that could potentially lead to decolonial release. The new theory, therefore,  examines the weaknesses and strengths of Ukraine’s and Russia’s geographical and cultural coexistence, exemplified and encapsulated by the notion of “ambicoloniality.” The attempts to enter the sphere of interests of postcolonial and decolonial theorists and the understanding of the difference that the focus on Ukraine would bring to this study, have been articulated by several Ukrainian scholars. For example, literary scholar Tamara Hundorova points out that the necessity of moving beyond the limits of the duality between anti-colonialism and postcolonialism arises only when postcolonial theory firmly establishes itself upon the fundamentals of anti-colonial struggle (Hundorova 2012, 77–78). The borrowing of anti-colonial rhetoric by postcolonial discourse in Ukraine is the subject of research by Marko Pavlyshyn (1992); however, no studies focus on the intersections between the decolonial perspective—emerging in wartime Ukraine (although the seeds were planted by Ukraine’s 2004 and 2014 revolutions)—and the anachronistic anti-colonial expression in its wartime cultural production. Another aspect of the emerging contradiction between existing theorizations and the situation “in the field” was articulated by historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, who stated that “the postcolonial is not enough.” He pointed out that the main lack of postcolonial theory in the interpretation of the

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Russia–Ukraine relationship is that, historically, Ukraine did not fully respond to the characteristics of belonging to the colonial periphery of the Russian Empire, as it rather formed a part of its imperial core (Hrytsak 2015, 732). Hrytsak’s position suggests that postcolonial theory must be applied to the Ukrainian-Russian case with caution, considering that binary oppositions useful in interpreting other colonial regions—such as Orient/Occident, South/North, and periphery/center—are insufficient for such a profoundly complex relationship as the long-term entanglement between Ukraine and Russia. Therefore, Ukraine’s double-sided postcolonial relationship with Russia has, to a certain extent, been a subject of interest to academic researchers. However, the perplexed vision of Russian colonialism as itself being an outcentered “Other” has long camouflaged its colonialist underpinnings and neocolonial aspirations, which resulted in the unfolding of a full-scale war on Ukrainian territory. The decolonial situation in today’s wartime Ukraine refers to centuries of larger colonial ambition of Russia, which claims to be the heir to the Soviet Union’s “unification” politics and deeper imperial foundations, but the political conjuncture and the ideological argumentation for the invasion are profoundly different from the aforementioned motivation. The application of decolonial theory in the Ukrainian case presents limitations and requires a careful analysis of differences from the cases typically covered by decolonial theory, such as Latin American or Global South examples, throughout the twentieth century and earlier. First, it requires reconsidering the application of decolonial theory in its evasion of modernity. Since Russia’s war in Ukraine mimics a colonial war and simultaneously reenacts post–World War II polarizations, it is both anachronistic to modernity and rooted in it. While Russia became trapped in an imperial gap produced by its neocolonial epistemology, Ukraine has taken several steps toward decolonial release, even if this change comes at the great price of human losses and destruction caused by Russia’s war on Ukrainian territory. Second, the widespread and, to a certain extent, successful use of Cold War rhetoric by Russia addresses different global geopolitical vectors of power than those challenged by decolonial theorists: the application of existing theories requires an examination of the perspectives they currently omit. Conversely, decolonial theory from Latin America has shortcomings in explaining the particular events in the region and the ambicolonial entanglement between Russia and Ukraine. The refusal to accept that

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Russia–Ukraine’s colonial case does not fully fit the decolonial model has led several decolonial scholars to reproduce Russia-imposed misconceptions about the origins of the war. Russia still appears to them as a blind spot on the colonial map because, since the 1970s, it has occupied an ascribed place as an “anti-imperialist” entity in their world model. The unwillingness to modify this outdated and ideologically charged perspective stems from a fear that such an acknowledgment of change would subvert the theoretical consistency of the effectively bipolar model, which reflects the tensions of the Cold War, when this theory emerged. After the onset of the full-scale invasion in 2022, this blindness is particularly evident in Walter Mignolo’s writing. He proposes that “Ukraine is a point of no-­return in the re-Westernizing effort to contain de-Westernization, multipolarity in order to preserve unipolarity and the global march toward westernization” (Mignolo 2023). He then proposes that Russia (together with China) is “only disobeying” and working on the reconstitution of own needs and interests. Ukraine is denied any agency in this mindset, in which the decolonial scholar views Russia’s colonial mimicry as a true decolonial movement. One question must be asked here: How characteristic is it of a decolonial movement to shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents and invade another sovereign country’s territory? The misunderstanding of the dynamics of epistemological production and the key question of agency in the region has affected the capacity of the decolonial model to conceptualize and incorporate change. While essential decolonial terminology—such as “border thinking,” “coloniality of power,” “decolonial aesthesis,” and “geo- and body politics of knowledge”—and its wider inquiry into the epistemology of the oppressed as key to decolonial change are applicable to analyzing Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s repeated attempts at colonial domination, the overall rigidity of the model undescores Ukraine’s recent historical presence as an “absent subject” on the world map (Mignolo 2011; Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015; Sousa Santos 2018). Given the discrepancies in existing theories and the search for applicable methods, in this book, I will address the available methodological tools—from postcolonial and decolonial theory to post-structuralist thought, critical studies, and beyond—to synthesize a new theory that brings to light and accommodates the complex situation of Russian neocolonialism in Ukraine.

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1.2  Explaining Anachronic Colonialism: The Necessity of a New Language This book addresses an urgent necessity of explaining the following: (1) colonialism, which for decades remained omitted from public discussion; (2) colonialism, which currently experiences an anachronic reenactment in an age when empires of the world have fallen; (3) colonialism, which uses a variety of discursive methods to cover its oppressive intentions. This task requires a methodology selected for the analysis that would integrate the particular, complex colonial relationship. Not only is  the relationship between Ukraine and Russia unique due to its specific characteristics (coexistence along the shared border; the “profound” colonialism phase followed by its “superficial” reenactment; the ongoing condition of a neocolonial war), but it is also specific to the global timeframe in which it is set, as it presents explicit anti-colonial resistance and decolonial release in a profoundly postcolonial world. To identify these deep and significant differences in the global postcolonial landscape, it is necessary to examine the constitutive reliefs of the contemporary geopolitical terrain as a space for postcolonial relationships that still shape the political map of the world. Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder coined the term “postcolonial contemporary” to critically examine what is postcolonial in the political present surrounding us and what the ways to overcome it are. They propose that the post–Cold War shift in political relations offered several transformations, particularly in how the former colonies are reconceptualized in relation to the former metropolis (e.g., how the notion of the “Third World” transformed into the “Global South”) carrying all the underlying connotations of not only the “subaltern,” “hybridity,” “epistemic violence,” but also new focuses, such as the “trans-local solidarity” and the “postnational democracy” (Watson and Wilder 2018, 1–30). Their examination of the emergence of the Global South echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s vision of the Third World’s rise based on the postcolonial grounds across the new  North–South divide and the displacement of old colonies, where colonialism consequently shifts into neocolonialism (Spivak 1999, 2–3). This happens not least because of the global effects of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the post-Soviet space as space that for three decades was seen as a kind of utopian construct, a territory in which the underlying negative effects of former colonialism were invisible to the world’s eye. This uncontrollable and unrecognized development of the postcolonial

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legacy led to the monstrous outcome of the long-suppressed impulse of Russia’s reconquest of former colonies that we witness today. For Spivak, the displacement of colonialism is only an economic reasoning and a financial presentation (Spivak 1999, 2–3). I argue that the Russian neocolonial aggression in Ukraine shows delayed effects of such a tectonic shift from a colonial world to the threat of a neocolonial order, which has a direct applied effect of dehumanization, destruction, and wartime atrocity. Importantly, contrary to the existing models, this process goes beyond the Global South and thus raises the question of the relevance of the existing theoretical basis to the shifting situation in the entire world, marked by Russia’s violence against Ukraine and Ukraine’s rapidly emerging agency together with its stronger position on the political and cultural maps. Closely researching Ukraine’s and Russia’s colonial entanglement will help shed light on the ways and means by which colonialism, being an anachronic phenomenon, is performed and interpreted in contemporaneity. Watson and Wilder point out that in the rapidly changing globalized world filled with new technologies and new strategies and tactics of domination, the terminological apparatus proposed by postcolonial theory is no longer sufficient, and requires reconsideration that would incorporate the discontents of contemporary comprehension of the world order (Watson and Wilder 2018, 11). Russia’s war against Ukraine has triggered a paradigmatic shift in the dissolution of postcolonialism in the region, together with the entire terminological apparatus proposed by it. This book views the war in Ukraine as an example of transcending the available postcolonial inquiry into Ukraine’s (and Russia’s) situations. The apparent anachronicity of this war merges the backward-looking neocolonial aspiration, prompted and supported on a mass level by the Russian extensive propaganda, and the profound self-understanding  of Russia’s own structural weakness in the present as the reasons for the aggression. Historian Serhii Plokhy has pointed out this war’s paradoxical functioning across times and epochs: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine produced a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century tactics and twenty-first-century weaponry. Its ideological underpinnings came from the visions of territorial expansion that characterized the Russian imperial era; its strategy was borrowed by the Kremlin from WWII and post-war-era manuals of the Soviet army; and its key features were not only precision-guided missiles but also intelligence-­ gathering satellites and cyber warfare. (Plokhy 2023, 295)

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The outdated ideological foundation of the war, however, has proven to be unstable and has created a gap between the visions of the past and the situation of the present, where Russia’s colonial pedestal has begun to crumble irreversibly. It is noteworthy that we observe two different colonialisms with very different characteristics.  First, it is  Russia’s historical colonialism, referring to its imperial past, and, with this retrospective view, supporting  the current neocolonial attempts. Second, it is Russia’s new neocolonialism under Vladimir Putin carrying divergent characteristics, which exploit the instability of the changing post– Cold  War world and its “postcolonial contemporary.” Today, Russia’s neocolonial violence seeks to reconstruct historical colonialism  while expanding it with hyperbolized approaches to the destructive impulses of colonial ambition. Its  affectionate fixation on domination through violence exemplifies its weaker self-­positioning within global hierarchies of power, or what decolonial researchers call the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano 1988). Plokhy argues that Ukraine’s resistance is ending the era of Russian dominance in much of Eastern Europe and challenging Moscow’s claims to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space (Plokhy 2023, 294). Ukraine’s situation, its shift from a postcolonial condition to a decolonial release, and its impact on related transformations in the post-Soviet space are key indicators of the changing geopolitical map. The focus on Ukraine’s transformation through colonial/postcolonial/decolonial sequence is, therefore, central to a more universal perspective on rethinking the effects of colonial domination in the twenty-first century. The dismantling of the post-Soviet space is an inevitable result of such disentanglement, marking the rediscovery of Ukraine’s presence and impact and simultaneous Russia’s detachment from global political and cultural processes. Decolonial scholar Aníbal Quijano wrote that the discovery of the Americas has changed the world forever, expanding the borders of the European imaginarium (Quijano 1988, 11). Similarly, the world’s discovery of Ukraine’s presence on the global political and cultural maps has triggered a profound tectonic shift in how countries of the West and the East, the Global North and the Global South see, identify, and position themselves in relation to the restructuring of the matrix of power initiated by the war in Ukraine. Ukraine’s visibility through its tragedy and its heartfelt resistance to the last aspiring empire has established a new system of coordinates that will have a lasting impact on the world’s political organization. In contrast,

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Russia’s symbolic field has shown no expansion, but rather reduction, as the propaganda distortions continue to act. The colonial action (or rather, process) of the discovery of the Americas is, undoubtedly, the direct opposite of the decolonial rediscovery of Ukraine; however, this comparison also illustrates how the pendulum of power oscillates within the quadriad of the “colonialism–anti-colonialism–postcolonialism–decoloniality.” In this book, I aim to move beyond the terminology used by both postcolonial and decolonial theories and develop a new corpus of concepts that more accurately describe the particular Ukrainian–Russian case. I hope this book aids in further conceptualizing Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and contributes to understanding the reasons and consequences of the war through the lens of art and culture. To develop these terminological and methodological foundations, I will adopt an interdisciplinary perspective on Ukraine’s (and Russia’s) history and cultural and social processes, and examine the reasons and consequences of the currently dismantling entanglement and the fading postcolonial condition, as Ukraine sets a precedent for fully disassembling the post-Soviet space as a postcolonial conglomeration. This analysis will expand on the broader geopolitical context and the role of conceptual formations and political constructs, such as the Global North/Global South, post-Soviet space, Eastern and East-Central Europe, and Eurasia in Russia’s war on Ukraine, framing the ambicolonial relationship between Ukraine and Russia. In this discussion, I will move from geography to contested ways of seeing and conceptualizing the world, including Russia’s imperial inferiority complex as “double consciousness” (Du Bois 1903) of “a second-rate empire” (Tlostanova 2018). Spivak proposes that the boundary between global and local becomes the ground for the emergence of the new subaltern (Spivak 1999, 276). Russia’s attempts to resist becoming subaltern in this new post–Cold War globalized relationship between North and South, where the localities (and locations, in Bhabha’s sense of the word) rely on a strategy of formal adherence to the epistemologies of the South, as epistemologies of the oppressed. This oppressed knowledge,  according to decolonial scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos,  can also be found and suppressed in the North (Sousa Santos 2018). In the case of Russia, not only were subaltern epistemologies suppressed as part of Russia’s processes of internal and external colonization, but they were also manipulated and instrumentalized to mimic Russia’s presumable victim stance in regard to Western world powers.

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Consequently, it is important to be cautious when inviting a Russian perspective in the dialogue, as Spivak proposes that postcolonial studies can become an alibi and serve the production of neocolonial knowledge, commemorating the colonial past unless placed in an immediate context (Spivak 1999, 1). This is what this book aims to resist, as it seeks to look at Ukraine’s current situation and the entire body of knowledge production caused by Russia’s war of aggression as a liberation from theoretical constructions imposed by existing research on the region, which typically uses a Russo-centric lens. For instance, Alexander Etkind’s interpretation of Russia’s internal colonization (Etkind 2011) has been criticized by Ukrainian postcolonial scholars who claimed that the turning of the vector of attention from Russia’s external colonial expansion to the inner colonization process within the particular theoretical frame proposed by Etkind meant preserving the three-century-old colonial dichotomies in the seemingly postcolonial inquiry. Vitaly Chernetsky views Etkind’s perspective on internal colonization as essentially colonial. He points out that, in his argument about Russia’s internal colonization, Etkind’s frame of reference is paradoxically constituted by events and phenomena that occurred on Ukrainian and Belarusian territory. Chernetsky concludes that by this expansive theorization, “Etkind perpetuates the aspects of Russian colonialist ideology that he apparently internalized to an extent that makes them invisible to him” (Chernetsky 2003, 36). Tamara Hundorova, in turn, criticizes Etkind’s vision of Russia’s colonization of Ukrainian land as an example of an “unorthodox” type of colonization, in which an ethnically homogeneous population enters the imperial field and forms a particular identity of “other-yet-the same” (Hundorova 2012, 35). She challenges this “imaginary difference” as she sees it as yet another mechanism for justification of the colonial expansion, which is ambivalent: on the one hand, it absolutizes the “otherness” of the European imperial experience, and on the other it minimizes the role of Russia’s external colonization (Hundorova 2012, 33–34). Later in the book, I will discuss the particular polymorphism of Russia’s coloniality, which is widely conditioned by the nontraditional placement of Russian colonialism within global political, social, and cultural systems of coordinates along the West/East and North/South axes, and, in particular, its ambition to cover both dominant and subaltern epistemologies with the aim of continuously repositioning itself in the global system of geopolitical coordinates.

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Chernetsky has famously called contemporary Ukraine “postcolonial in the Second World” (Chernetsky 2003). This statement refers to a particular vision of the Cold War-time Second World as a colonial entity that subsequently was dismantled and reassembled into a post-Soviet space, marking the beginning of the postcolonial condition for Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. The contested Cold War division legacy highlights the inverted colonial matrix of power within which Russia’s Soviet colonialism unfolded on Ukrainian territory. The mid-twentieth-­ century global division of the world into the capitalist “First World,” the socialist “Second World,” and the neutral “Third World” was transformed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. Following this process, partially due to this neutrality and closer contact with the former First World in the context of its immediate opponent’s concern with the situation of inner restructuring, the former Third World entered the critical focus of postcolonial and decolonial researchers by challenging the oppressive colonial past through anti-Western-centric and anti-­Eurocentric perspectives. The perspective on the colonial legacies of the post-Soviet, post-socialist “Second World” remained outside the framework of postcolonial/decolonial inquiry. According to Bhabha, the radical experience of the Third World sets the mirror image of the nineteenth-century colonial polarity between East and West (Bhabha 1994, 19). In contemporary decolonial inquiry, this angle turns to North and South. However, there is a significant difference in its interpretation formed by the twentieth-century global political and social movements. Emerging in the times of the détente of the 1970s, decolonial theory from Latin America incorporated the anti-Western stance as the opposition to global capitalism. The socialist system, however, is widely viewed in this model as part of the oppressed rather than the oppressor. This vision has strong repercussions for the capacity of decolonial theory to conceptualize the changing global situation, as what the scholars see as an heir to the Soviet Union, the representative of the Second World, performs colonial politics. The combination of two perspectives, postcolonial and decolonial, with their “blind spots” and hermeneutic and methodological omissions, particularly within political polarities, forms an expanded perspective on Russia’s complex coloniality. A representative of decolonial thought, Santos has proposed that the coloniality of both knowledge and power is caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy (Sousa Santos 2018, 8). Similarly, many approaches within postcolonial theory address this triad.

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Spivak places capitalism at the core of the theory of oppression of the subaltern by the dominant colonial power, yet in the case of Russia many scholars fail to recognize this triad is constitutive for contemporary Russia, if we turn our retrospective gaze from its appropriated Soviet legacy. Mark von Hagen proposed that the post–World War II Soviet orientalizing of Russia and Eastern Europe contributed to the inclusion of Russia into the vision of colonial relationships, embarking on two paradigms: the Soviet Union/modernization vision and Russia/Orient duality. The dual structure of von Hagen’s model views the former as emphasizing commonalities and a certain extent of convergence with the Third World and the latter as highlighting radical alterity (Von Hagen 2004, 448–454). Hundorova also points out that a particular polarity of Russian inner orientalism existed, shaped by internal colonization (Hundorova 2012, 38). This orientalism mimicked the global colonial divisions and implemented the global logic of colonialism on a smaller scale, of Russia’s internal colonial affairs. Yet, the external vector of Russia’s colonialism which responded to the global model of colonial oppression, has been invisible. The main question emerging after the onset of Russia’s neocolonial war is: Where is Ukraine in this worldmaking model? This discussion is further developed by Timothy Snyder, who calls the Soviet version of colonization “durable,” noting that the expansion of the European Union failed to overcome the dividing line set in 1917 (Snyder 2015, 702). The fact that no country that belonged to the prewar Soviet Union now lies within the EU is indicative of the particularly strong linking of these territories to the former colonial domain. At the same time, the territory of contemporary Ukraine includes lands that belonged to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Russia before 1939 (Plokhy 2015, 284). In the context of this complex historical landscape, the question of Ukraine’s position within the shifting postcolonial/decolonial model gains further significance. Hundorova’s exploration of Russian inner orientalism and von Hagen’s analysis of post–World War II orientalization shed light on the factors that shaped Ukraine’s intricate relationship with both Russian colonialism and the broader colonial frameworks. However, as Ukraine’s borders encompass lands once held by various powers, the echoes of former colonial dominion intertwine with the ongoing quest for identity, resistance, and independent knowledge production.

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1.3   Decolonization as a Question of Ukraine’s Visibility Frantz Fanon proposed that decolonization is a historical process that aims to change the order of the world, yet it cannot be understood or become comprehensible, except to the extent that we can discern the movements that give it historical form and content. He adds that decolonization is always a violent phenomenon when the former subaltern must fight for their liberties from the dominant culture with weapons in their hands (Fanon 1963 [1961], 35–36). The violence of decolonization in Ukrainian culture, however, paradoxically comes as an anti-colonial struggle against the direct aggression of the former and aspiring oppressor. Ukraine’s decolonization is, therefore, irregular, and it is rooted in three underlying aspects: (1) the initial nonviolent onset of the decolonization processes as a sequence of civic protests aimed at fostering postcolonial transformation over the last three decades; (2) the active civil and military resistance to the neocolonial aggression; (3) the shift from decolonization as “slow” postcolonial transformation as recombination of historically entangled narratives to “swift” decolonial change as full breaking with the colonial entanglement of the contested history and the related narratives and their substitution with new epistemological production as the result of Ukraine’s resistance to the full-scale invasion by Russia. This new, increased speed and intensity of decolonization, which overflows the “location of culture” to the point of impacting the international cultural dynamics, gives visibility to previously overlooked Ukrainian cultural processes and individual elements. Such an incidental spotlight on Ukraine’s struggle and its decolonization from Russian cultural impacts brought forward the understanding of the insufficiency of tools and methodologies for registering and analyzing the ongoing decolonial processes as the conclusion of postcolonialism in Ukraine. At the root of this discrepancy lies an even wider conceptual, hermeneutic, and historiographic gap. Prewar attempts to include Ukraine in the postcolonial paradigm were not always successful, as opposed to Russia’s domination in regional area studies. Vitaly Chernetsky pointed out the particular invisibility of the subaltern position of the “non-­Russian” post-Soviet studies. According to him, when the representatives of these studies asserted the need to look at the Soviet world through a postcolonial lens—such as the research of Ukrainian scholar Marko Pavlyshyn as early as 1992—they were largely “ignored and ridiculed” by their Western

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colleagues from the field of Russian studies (Spivak et  al. 2006, 834). Pavlyshyn himself proposed that by the early 1990s, Ukrainian culture was already fully postcolonial in terms of its creativity, relativity, and pragmatism—developing a useful binary opposition with the preceding affective anti-colonial struggle, which Pavlyshyn saw as a “mirror image” of colonialism, and, therefore, could be viewed within broader global postcolonial movements (Pavlyshyn 1992). Ukraine has entered the field of “decentered postcolonialisms,” as Hundorova calls them, which are characterized by double displacement of symbolic and political power, both entrenched in the West/Global North paradigm (especially in their modernity aspect) and forming part of resistance discourse comparable to the epistemology produced in the Global South (Hundorova 2023). This discrepancy outlined by Chernetsky, however, was not covered despite the isolated academic attempts at changing the perspective, and this led to a larger problem of invisibility of Ukraine’s struggle to delimit Russia’s cultural influences and cultural appropriation. It also led to Ukraine’s weaker position on the global cultural and political maps. If we look at two famous international museums in the West, the Tate Gallery and the Modern Art Museum in New York, we find out that both of them, as of 2022 when the full-scale invasion began, held works only by one Ukrainian contemporary artist each: Kharkiv photographer Boris Mikhailov and Odesa painter Oleksandr Roytburd, respectively. Such a state of affairs is indicative of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “absent subjects.” According to him, subjects experiencing colonial oppression are absent because of their epistemic insignificance, imposed on them by the colonial power. Their weaker position is defined by their residing beyond what he calls the “abyssal line,” the limit of comprehension and the ability to legitimate epistemological production, which works as a divide between the colonizing metropolitan powerholder and the colonized subject (Sousa Santos 2018, 19). This situation also echoes the problem Spivak addressed in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” where she discusses how colonization deprives its subjects of voices. Moreover, what prevents them from being heard—or seen—is the condition of being “irretrievably heterogeneous” (Spivak 1999, 26). Internal differences of the subaltern and their discrepancies: epistemological gaps, fragmentation, and disunity, without ontological—or practical—tools for overcoming them, are the results of colonial epistemic violence and its effects on the distortion of the culture of the oppressed. Similarly, Ukraine’s voice is weak because of its

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centuries-­long subaltern status, which lays the groundwork for Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian culture, on the one hand, and the particular post-Soviet disaccord in civic society, on the other. This situation began dramatically changing with Ukrainian society’s attempts to oppose Russia’s aggressive neocolonial politics: from Euromaidan’s opposition to the proRussian government of Viktor Yanukovych to all-Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s war. The understanding of Ukraine’s geopolitical role as the outpost of the active anti-imperialist struggle brought it political importance and strengthened not only its capacity for expression but also the international capacity for comprehension. The new series “Ukrainian Voices” by the independent German publishing house ibidem Press, at which I have the honor to be on the editorial board, is exemplary of such refusal of being absent subjects, although the very notion of the “voices” hints at the isolated effect of such striving to visibility. What does it take us to turn these voices into a choir? In the second half of this book, I propose that internal hybridity (which comes as a result of the decolonial release and fills the voids when postcolonial hybridity is dissolved) is the solution for regaining soundness and dimensionality. The visibility of Ukraine’s centuries of experiencing colonialism and three decades of immersion in postcoloniality can only be achieved through the visibility of a national culture that envelops this position and absorbs the difference and ambivalence pursued by the postcolonial condition. Here, I refer to a society, which relies on ethnic diversity, internal hybridity, and multiculturalism. After 2022, Ukrainian culture has radically turned to disentangling from imperial narratives and producing new constitutive narratives. These narratives are rooted in the immediate experiences of the war that produce new epistemology. The new decolonial history of Ukraine is emerging from the flames of the war. Anthropologist Ewa Domańska has proposed a concept of affirmative humanities as a theoretical framework that overcomes trauma and focuses on the modes of employing the negative impacts of the past and historical traumas constructively (Domańska 2018, 9). My study intersects with her proposal in its intention of a decolonial vision that overcomes the postcolonial entanglement in the past and trauma of the present, and it shows how the emerging new epistemologies in Ukraine produce new narratives and form new discourses of emancipation. In this book, I will further explore what constructive blocks of theory can be used for constituting

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Ukraine’s visibility and its presence on the world map and for undermining Russia’s aggression by giving it a rational explanation, and by these two actions minimizing the destructive effects of the war plundered by Russia on Ukraine’s territory.

1.4   From Transitional Culture to Epistemic Detachment Tamara Hundorova speaks about Ukraine’s culture after 1991 as a “transitional culture,” which she describes as a postcolonial phenomenon of the post-totalitarian culture of memory (Hundorova 2012, 10). Transitional culture, for her, signifies a hermeneutical framework in which epistemological ambition is always connected to incompleteness (Hundorova 2012, 13). I propose that this “incompleteness,” as an inability to fully reach the objective of knowing and acting  upon  acquired knowledge, in other words, being in a state of permanent transformation, connotes an entire spectrum of phenomena related to the past and the present of such a state of transition: from historical gaps linked to erased and suppressed memories of the past to the lack of perspective on how to construct the present. The view of postcolonial decolonization as a recombination of the narratives of the past to fill the gaps of the present is a slow, time-consuming process, which implies the identification of voids and the existence of a certain consensus in society regarding which elements are acceptable for such a postcolonial reconstruction of knowledge. Contrary to Fanon’s view of decolonization as a “program of complete disorder” (Fanon 1963 [1961], 36), postcolonial decolonization, if applied  to the post-Soviet space, is an orderly process of comprehension, restructuring, and acceptance. It is also a relatively slow process that requires permanent realignment and readjustment, predominantly viewed as the reidentification of society. The most visible “peaks” of this in Ukraine took the form of mass protests: the Revolution on Granite in 1990, the Orange Revolution of 2004, and Euromaidan of 2013–2014. Hundorova points out that the beginning of the end of transitory culture in Ukraine is marked by the birth of a new generation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the conclusion of the transition between socialism and post-socialism (Hundorova 2012, 11). In response to Hundorova, I propose that the change between the postcolonial transitory condition and the decolonial situation that occurred between 2014

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and 2022 was fostered not only by Russia’s war on Ukraine but also by the natural cycle of generational changes, bringing a new, more radical generation that is more inclined to break with entangled narratives imposed by the former colony rather than rereading them. The postcolonial recombination process falls outside the scope of interests of this generation, which managed to overcome “transitoriness.” This perspective prompts us to consider that the reason for Russia’s aggression, apart from its weakening political regime, lies in Russia’s intention to resist the inevitable process of exiting transitoriness and postcoloniality—that is, to resist the flow of time, due to a natural cycle guiding political order. The question of what will happen to Russia beyond transitoriness provokes anxiety in Russian official circles, as its current ideology, political culture, and social and cultural policy are deeply rooted in this state of permanent incompleteness. The decolonial turn in Ukraine is not only a turn toward complete disentanglement from Russia’s cultural sphere but also a shift to a more profound connection to contemporaneity, such as living in the present and creating this present, where Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian war of aggression plays a key role. The war and its escalation in 2022 marked a new zero-point counting for Ukraine and the world, replacing the narratives created after World War II. Historian Olena Stiazhkina’s reference to “zero-point Ukraine,”  as a metaphor, highlights the emergence of the post–World War II ambivalence in the Soviet colonial vision of Ukraine, veiled by the myth of Russia’s “Great Patriotic War,” the mythology of which she sees as dissolved after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2014 (Stiazhkina 2021, 11). The decolonial theory uses the notion of “zero-point epistemology” to define “the ultimate grounding of knowledge”  as a privileged and detached  colonizer’s position that rejects  the memory  and epistemology of the oppressed. It is a source of knowledge from which the epistemic colonial differences are extracted (Mignolo 2011, 80). While this forensic logic is true for the settler colonialism model, when nations are conquered by colonial intruders coming from far lands and implanting their  own knowledge in a process of syncretic hybridization, the colonizing process for Ukraine was hardly the same. The existence on the borderline with the colonizer produced a particular situation of filtering mutual influences and a resulting stronger level of hybridization, which is reflected in the nonhierarchical structure of the epistemic body. Searching for “zero-point knowledge,” whether detached or neutral, becomes a nearly impossible task, as

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the narratives have been mutually modified over the centuries of Russian domination in Ukraine. Moreover, the very epistemological basis of Russian culture was largely crafted from narratives relocated from Kyivan Rus during the early to high Middle Ages. The premise of this book is that Ukraine’s own “zero-point” counting, voided of aspirations to domination with regard to Russian culture, began when the war either subverted or fully erased the historical assumptions of the past and the Soviet and post-Soviet mythologies alike. The production of new narratives rooted in the resistance to the war as the main formational event for Ukrainian society is the emancipated, detached epistemological process that unfolds in front of global witnesses in real time. Turning away from historical topics and linking instead to contemporary narratives, Ukrainian society manifests its turn to non-oppressive, non-hierarchized, liberated epistemology, detached, yet not ignorant as the “zero-point” stance, which is created as history takes its course, and which requires further study and classification, the first attempts at which are made by this book. The decolonial processes in Ukraine rely on the production of new narratives that disentangle from Russian colonial influences and lose postcolonial ambivalence. The production of knowledge is expansive, as it is aimed both inward and outward, overflowing Ukraine’s cultural sphere and working as its location marker on the world’s political and cultural maps. The action of anti-colonial resistance, as well as the move toward decolonial release, fosters the widespread understanding that the notion of postcolonial hybridity is based in the past, and therefore, to dissolve it, we must act and comprehend the events in the present while looking into the future.

1.5  Structure of the Book The book’s structure relies on the discussion of the axis that can be drawn between the active anti-colonial resistance—and the resulting radical discourse of anti-colonialism—and the ongoing decolonial disentanglement as emancipation from colonial narratives and independent epistemological production observed in wartime Ukraine. The main premise of this text is that Ukraine’s postcolonial condition and its  entry into the decolonial situation have a particular ambicolonial aspect, which guides the logic of Russia’s neocolonial war and defines the dynamics of the decolonization processes. The book is organized to show how these transformations have conceptually unfolded over time within a wider constitutive landscape of

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ambicoloniality as the foundation of Ukraine–Russia’s historical relationship. This book aims to develop a theory that bridges existing gaps in the decolonial and postcolonial approaches and outline a model that would effectively describe the dynamics of power in the “Ukraine–Russia” relationship. Chapter 2, Anti-Colonialism vs. “Self-Colonization”, examines how the ongoing Ukrainian disentanglement from its past provokes the Russian obsession not only with Ukraine’s territory but also the minds and souls of the Ukrainian people. In this Russian pursuit of the unachievable, the war represents a notorious case of “self-colonization,” in which Russia has emotionally aligned itself with a cultural and geographical space to which it has no right. The term was explored by literary scholar Alexander Kiossev and originally described a power hierarchy in which one country follows another by means of symbolic domination of the latter, and not as a consequence of actual conquest. Russia’s obsession with Ukraine is an example of such self-subjugation to the imaginary power of the neighboring country and pursuing self-destructive actions through military escalation. In the case of Ukraine, the anachronistic necessity of anti-colonial resistance emerged as a reactive response to the Russian attempts at the neocolonial revival based on misinterpretations and propaganda-led manipulations of the common imperial past. The cultural production in Ukraine reflected this shift in decolonial dynamics with more direct and radical works of art and literature aimed at opposing the intentions of cultural domination by Russia. This self-colonization is a logical consequence of Russia’s imperial “double consciousness,” pointed out by Madina Tlostanova: when Russia, as a “second-rate empire,” was historically forced to look at both more powerful Western empires and its subordinated territories. The culmination of this process came three decades after the dismantling of the political mechanisms that supported this subordination in the Soviet Union and remained in a purely symbolic field—which Russia intended and ultimately failed to actualize through its unfolding military action. This resulted in Russia’s notorious self-colonization through the “Ukrainian question.” This chapter discusses the core notions of “anti-colonial resistance” and “self-colonization” through selected examples from literature, contemporary art, and mass media. Chapter 3, Ambicoloniality, introduces the notion of “ambicoloniality,” describing Russia’s actions as simultaneously aimed at colonizing Ukraine and engaging in self-colonization through affection. Ruled by the

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revival of the past through propaganda, the colonizer destroys its own state to conquer another country and, in so doing, subjects its power to the power of the formerly oppressed. The full-scale invasion, seen by Russia as a struggle for power, is considered in this chapter as part of a wider process of ambicolonial thinking, in which the invader becomes subject to its colonialist behavior and propaganda and loses control over reality. The ambicolonial processes intensified with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia and Ukraine’s physical necessity of anti-colonial defense. Ambicoloniality as the filtering of mutually important influences over the shared border draws on the postcolonial notions of “hybridity” and “ambivalence,” yet it presents significant differences in its formative mechanisms. It focuses not as much on shared characteristics and implicit syncretism but on mutual influences, both symbolic and political, that are rooted in the impact performed through media, propaganda, and direct contact in the context of trauma. The idea of ambicoloniality subverts the notion of the coloniality of power because it does not consider colonialism a product of the inequality of economic and political positions and the initial difference in ethnic- and nation-based rigid hierarchies of power, including subject– object relationships. Rather, it sees power as a symbolic exchange rooted in the semiotic strength of the parties involved. This theory helps explain the particular model of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine across the shared border, as it focuses on the filtering of power influences rather than on a particular vector of impact. This chapter considers literary, audiovisual, and visual reflections on Ukraine’s growing influence on the Russian cultural field, including Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian cultural legacies, and traces a unique theoretical model that suits the situation where decolonial epistemological borders overlap with geographical ones. Chapter 4, The (R)evolution of Identity, focuses on the initial turn from the ambiguous notion of ethnic identity to the notion of political identity, and its subsequent subversion by the notion of agency, which forms the basis for both resilience and the decolonial spirit in current-day Ukraine. This chapter focuses on culture to interpret the relationship between protests and identity construction. Here, I explore the role of previous protest movements in both Ukraine and Russia through the lens of the transition from the postcolonial condition to the decolonial situation.

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The revolution of political identity and its evolution into agency in Ukraine have passed two important stages following its independence in 1991: the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014. Art activism played an important role in the formation of participatory democracy and reflected the creation of new horizontal relations in civic society. The chapter takes an in-depth look at how Euromaidan constituted the role of Ukrainian culture and society not only as a center of new, liberated epistemic production—but as its epicenter. It also proposes that while the ambicoloniality faced its dissolution with the Euromaidan Revolution, as a profound impulse for detachment from affective ties  with Russia and the subversion of the formative power of ambivalence behind it, Russia, upon suppressing any potentiality for its own revolution, remained trapped in postcolonial ambivalence. The chapter includes an analysis of works that highlight the decolonial reinterpretation of belonging and identity, turning instead to the notion of “agency.” It also traces the underlying change in the understanding of the notions of solidarity and consolidation, and discusses how art and activism reflected postcolonial and eventually decolonial developments in postrevolutionary Ukrainian society. I discuss how a decolonial turn brings in syncretic polarization that makes profound changes to the hybridity of colonial expression, as well as aims at dismantling postcolonial ambivalence. Chapter 5, War, 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

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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. Chapter 6, Desire, discusses how the Russian public imagination is overwhelmed by propaganda claiming Ukraine as part of its symbolic territory, while Russia’s desire is currently directed toward Ukraine. At the same time, in Ukraine, while the country is forced into resistance, the cultural and social conditions already point to the existence of a strong, independent culture that resists this colonial situation, marking the final decolonial stage. This chapter discusses Ukraine as Russia’s main subject of desire, drawing on both post-constructivist theories and decolonial thinking. Searching for an imaginary jouissance (Lacan) of reunification, Russia’s neocolonial aspiration transgresses, splits, and eventually destroys the object of longing—which is, nevertheless, a utopian object—and loses its own integrity in chasing this fantasy of the past. The fatal desire creates a new order of things where the object of desire is unattainable—and this impossibility creates a new power hierarchy that disrupts mutuality of exchange. In this chapter, I examine how the concept of ambicoloniality functions under these conditions of rupture. I concurrently explore how the war and its transgression of limits forced a reconsideration of the concept of the borderline. If traditional decolonial theory looks at a border as a possibility for observing and reshaping cultural and social processes of emancipation as if from an exterior perspective, the violence driven by the uncontrollable and irrational desire of Russia to invade Ukraine, in its attempt to dismantle the very notion of border, led to an opposite result: the reinforcement of territorial belonging through active resistance and a shift of attention to the previously marginalized Ukrainian frontier. Chapter 7, Ruin and Reconstruction, sees ruin as an outcome of any war. Ukraine is presently immersed in physical destruction, incurring major economic losses; however, the cultural, political, and economic consequences may be far more dangerous for Russia due to its current global

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isolation. The period of ruin in Ukraine, after the war ends, will be decisive in determining the direction of decolonial processes, including linguistic policies and the decentralization of culture. Meanwhile, in Russia, questions surrounding the construction of a new political order will be of primary importance. This chapter explores possibilities and strategies for rebuilding identities and institutions, as well as for dissolving ambicoloniality. Reconstruction from ruin and regeneration are aspects that follow the ultimate decolonial aim: the erasure of the necessity for dismantling colonial elements due to the full transformation of epistemology and the dissolution of ambicoloniality. This chapter examines the consequences of ruination for ambicoloniality in both countries and its impact on their previous entanglement. Ruin is an essential concept for understanding the epistemological changes occurring in Ukraine—and more slowly, in Russia. The theory concluded in this chapter also contributes to a new vision rooted not in the dichotomy of imperial/decolonial,  as Latin American sources propose, but in a dynamic model that considers a wider panorama of mutual influences, shifting borders, and actions that manifest changing symbolic power positions, fostering ambicolonial exchange. In the case of Ukraine and Russia, ambicoloniality led to a misconception of the power pyramid and the implosion of the remnants of the symbolic empire with the explosion of violence. The regeneration processes rely on what I call “internal hybridity,” as opposed to “postcolonial hybridity,” and I outline this systemic shift from one model to another and their contribution to the reconstruction and revival within this chapter.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge: London and New York. Biedarieva, Svitlana (2022). “Decolonization and Disentanglement in Ukrainian Art.” post at MoMA. 2 June. Available online at: https://post.moma.org/ decolonization-­and-­disentanglement-­in-­ukrainian-­art/. Chernetsky Vitaly (2007). Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal. Chernetsky, Vitaly (2003). “Postcolonialism, Russia, and Ukraine.” Ulbandus Review. Vol. 7, 32–62. Domańska, Ewa (2018). “Affirmative Humanities.” History-Theory-Criticism. No.1, 9–26.

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Du Bois, W.  E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. A.  C. McClurg & Co: Chicago, IL. Etkind, Alexander (2011). Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Polity Press: Cambridge. Fanon, Frantz (1963 [1961]). The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. Grove Press: New York. Hrytsak, Yaroslav (2015). “Postcolonial Is Not Enough?” Slavic Review. Vol. 74, No. 4, 732–737. Hundorova, Tamara (2012). Tranzytna kul’tura. Symptomy postkolonial’noi travmy: esei [Transit Culture: Symptoms of Postcolonial Trauma]. Grani-T: Kyiv. Hundorova, Tamara (2023). “How Peripheries Talk Amongst Themselves—Or Ukraine, Eurocentrism and Decolonization.” Krytyka. Available online at: https://krytyka.com/en/articles/how-­peripheries-­talk-­amongst-­themselves-­ or-­ukraine-­eurocentrism-­and-­decolonization. Mignolo, Walter D. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. Mignolo, Walter D. (2023). “It Is a Change of Era, No Longer the Era of Changes.” Postcolonial Politics. 29 January. Available online at: https://postcolonialpolitics.org/it-­is-­a-­change-­of-­era-­no-­longer-­the-­era-­of-­changes/. Mignolo, Walter D., and Madina Tlostanova (2006). “Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo and Body-Politics of Knowledge.” European Journal of Social Theory. Vol. 9, No. 2, 205–221. Pavlyshyn, Marko (1992). “Post-Colonial Features in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture.” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies. Vol. 6, No. 2, 41–55. Plokhy, Serhii (2015). The Gates of Europe. A History of Ukraine. Basic Books: New York. Plokhy, Serhii (2023). The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. W. W. Norton & Company: New York. Quijano, Aníbal (1988). Modernidad, identidad y utopía en América Latina [Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America]. Sociedad y Política Ediciones: Lima. Riabchuk, Mykola (2000). Vid Malorosii do Ukrainy: Paradoksy zapizniloho natsiietvorennia [From Little Russia to Ukraine: Paradoxes of the Belated Nation-­ Making]. Krytyka: Kyiv and Cambridge, MA. Shkandrij, Myroslav (2001). Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times. McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal. Snyder, Timothy (2015). “Integration and Disintegration: Europe, Ukraine, and the World.” Slavic Review. Vol. 74, No. 4, 695–707. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de (2018). The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press: Durham, NC.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri, Harsha Ram, Nancy Condee, and Vitaly Chernetsky (2006). “Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space.” PMLA. Vol. 121, No. 3, 828–836. Stiazhkina, Olena (2021). Zero Point Ukraine. Four Essays on World War II. Ibidem Press: Stuttgart. Thompson, Ewa (2000). Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. Greenwood Press: Westport, CT. Tlostanova, Madina (2018). What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. Tlostanova, Madina (2019). “The Postcolonial Condition, the Decolonial Option and the Post-Socialist Intervention.” In Postcolonialism Cross-Examined: Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the New Colonial Present. Edited by Monika Albrecht, 165–178. Routledge: London and New York. Vázquez, Rolando, and Miriam Barrera Contreras (2015). “Aesthesis decolonial y los tiempos relacionales. Entrevista a Rolando Vázquez” [Decolonial Aesthesis and Relational Times. Interview with Rolando Vázquez]. Calle14. Vol. 11, No. 18, 76–94. Von Hagen, Mark (2004). “Empires, Borderlands, and Diasporas: Eurasia as Anti-­ Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era.” American Historical Review. No. 109.2, 445–468. Wanner, Catherine (1998). Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Penn State University Press: State College, PA. Watson, Jini Kim, and Gary Wilder, eds. (2018). The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries from the Global Present. Fordham University Press: New York.

CHAPTER 2

Anti-Colonialism vs. “Self-Colonization”

2.1   Second-Rate Empire and Double Consciousness According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the habits of thought about Russia’s historical domination—as “occupation” in the northwestern sector of the former “Soviet empire” and “colonialism” in its southwestern sector—suggest that the Soviet case is an important crossroads for postcolonialist debates, “a site where familiar terms encounter each other anew” (Spivak et al. 2006, 830). This also prompts looking into a particular duality of Russia’s claim as a colonizer: while the non-Slavic territories are seen in this model as oppressed by the colonial expansion, the Slavic states belonging to the post-Soviet space (and Western frontiers of it, such as the Baltics) are viewed from a perspective which seemingly gives them more agency. Namely, the underlying temporary nature of the “occupation” which never fully permeates the social structure is juxtaposed with that of becoming a colony, which presupposes not only a higher degree of social and cultural hybridity with the oppressor and fuller integration of institutions on the colonized territory but also a relatively higher degree of agency. The word “occupation” prompts hope for an eventual release from foreign domination, as it already incorporates a claim for illegitimacy of such a situation. Nevertheless, this hope for release is simultaneously subverted, as such a perspective has a negative effect—that of veiling the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_2

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true nature and dangers of colonialism in the areas that are commonly seen as “European” (and in many cases, “white”), and leaving their anti-­ colonial struggle, postcolonial transformation, and decolonial processes largely invisible to the world. This is the same problematic etymology that we find in the case of Russia’s invasion of the eastern and southern Ukrainian  territories after 2014. The widespread use of the word “occupation” (or “annexation,” in the case of Crimea) by both media and researchers addressing Russia’s military activity and the related geopolitical process aimed at establishing the intruder’s political power through violence helped to camouflage— albeit largely unintentionally—Russia’s profound aspiration for colonial domination in Ukraine up until the onset of the full-scale invasion brought it to light in 2022. This profound orientalist distinction between “colony” and “occupied territory” that is in use in the former post-Soviet space responds to the global perspective on the West–East colonial relationality. Monica Albrecht has pointed out the necessity to challenge this establishment of postcolonial and decolonial studies within the West–East (or North–South) vector of domination and proposed substituting the unidirectional discursive framework of talking about colonialism and its effects with a multidirectional model. Albrecht has proposed that while with the spread of the postcolonial approach, the injustices and monstrosity of colonialism are undeniable, the unidirectional optics of it are usually limited to Western Europe and its former colonies as examples of the subaltern “others” (Albrecht 2019, 181). She proposes that within a wider transhistorical panorama of colonial relations in the world, unidirectional constructions serve only as a specific historical instance but fail to describe a more complex model of exchanges of knowledge and power (Albrecht 2019, 185). This is the problem that we find in the Ukraine–Russia relationship if we place it within conventional postcolonial and decolonial binary models, of both internal and external colonization, which omit the multivectoral essence of mutual influences, whether speaking about “colony” or “occupation.” The multivectoral model, therefore, is beneficial for the understanding of the unique characteristics of Ukrainian-Russian colonial entanglement projected on the current situation of the war. As I will show further, it also reflects on the actual dynamics of power in the neocolonial situation. Apart from an obvious simplification, Albrecht notices another negative effect of the unidirectional approach: the absence of consideration of the

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reverse “othering” of the colonizer, as an example of which she uses the colonial position of the Baltics within the Soviet Union. She proposes that the people in the Baltic countries, in the Occidental margins of the Soviet state, viewed themselves as “more cultured” than Russian settlers (Albrecht 2019, 184). This is confirmed by Epp Annus, who proposes that “shared” Soviet modernity can be described as motivated by both colonial and subaltern impulses. In its colonial aspect, it disseminated its ideological discourses within vast territories through settler colonialism. As a subaltern form, it carried a suppressed sense of secondariness in comparison to the more developed West, with which the Soviet westbound periphery of the Baltics shared some of the cultural characteristics (Annus 2018, 131). This reverse othering is also true for the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Serhii Plokhy discusses the Soviet myth of Ukraine’s economic power as a breadbasket of the entire Soviet Union. He points out that this myth brought the first president of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, to power. Kravchuk, in the struggle for presidency following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, did not bid on ethnocultural nationalism, like his competitor Viacheslav Chornovil, but on the statements of the economic and productive strengths of Ukraine (Plokhy 2014, 285). This characteristic of outlining dependency of both post-Soviet and European territories on Ukraine’s productive potential is an example of similar reverse othering of Russia as a colonizer, where the pendulum of symbolic power moves between the dominant and the subaltern points. Another type of duality undermining the symbolic impact of the colonial power has been described by Madina Tlostanova as “double consciousness” (after Du Bois 1903), in which an empire is, to a large degree, regarded as a colony—both internally and by its rivals. Due to its underlying economic and social weaknesses and cultural disintegration, the colonial state begins to act aggressively and irrationally to compensate for this status, by competing not only with its more powerful imperial opponents but with its former colonies. Du Bois spoke of the double consciousness of the colonized as their profound dependency on the judgment of the oppressive environment, as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 1997 [1903], 38). As I further show in this book, the discourse of Russia’s self-victimization in its propagandist anti-imperialist claims demonstrates a similar disparity in self-evaluation, marked by a necessity to distinguish itself from its former

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colonies, to underline its dominating and not subaltern status, and to compensate for its backwardness with violence as the last measure available to the weak. In Tlostanova’s classification, Russia is defined as a former second-rate empire, which, since the sixteenth century, together with the Ottoman Sultanate, relied on religions, languages, economic models, and ethnic classifications different from the core European norms (Tlostanova 2018, 2). She interprets this situation using Walter Mignolo’s decolonial notion of “imperial difference,” which describes intrinsic inequalities in the positions of empires in the global power hierarchies. These positions reflect internal and external differences—while the internal differences refer to Russia’s less important position within the Eurocentric conglomeration of more powerful world empires, the external difference marks its belonging to the domain of the imperial “others,” persisting in catching up dynamics. Russian imperial difference, for Tlostanova, is external; it is situated in the domain outside Western Europe, which is the location for the “first league” of empires of the past, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium. Some former empires within this geographical area, such as Spain and Portugal, according to Tlostanova, also carry an imperial difference—an internal one—due to their weaker socioeconomic situation, which places them lower in the hierarchy in the colonial matrix of power (Tlostanova 2018, 2). She views the discourse undertaken by Russia as a sign of its imperial difference mimicking colonial difference. Russia, as a second-rate empire, brings in the inferiority complex, expressing it by turning to the rhetoric of Cold War threats and making claims that resemble anti-colonial arguments of struggle against the collective West. These claims are only seemingly decolonial, as they are used to camouflage Russia’s own invasive attempts (Tlostanova 2018, 2–3). Fyodor Dostoevsky described this double consciousness as “looking through the eyes of the others.” He wrote, “Meanwhile, we cannot reject Europe. Europe is our second Motherland. […] Europe is almost as dear to us as Russia; every Japheth’s tribe is in it, and our idea is the unity of these tribes; and even further – until Shem and Ham”1 (Dostoevsky 1983 1  А между тем нам от Европы никак нельзя отказаться. Европа нам второе отечество […]. Европа нам почти так же всем дорога, как Россия; в ней все Афетово племя, а наша идея объединение всех наций этого племени, и даже дальше, гораздо дальше, до Сима и Хама. Translation from Russian is mine.

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[1877], 23). In contemporary Russia, this desire for “unity” creates a pretext for invasion under the false claim of liberation. Dostoevsky addresses the imperial inferiority complex, calling upon his readers “to become Russian” and to stop “despising [their] own people” in order to gain external respect: “As soon as a European sees that we began to respect our people and our nationality, he immediately will respect us too”2 (Dostoevsky 1983 [1877], 23). This Eurocentric projection (which in Russian political thought developed into a more general Occidentalism throughout the twentieth century) has informed the contemporary colonialist view of the purposes and aims of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Russia’s ideological justification of the aggression. As an example, in 2023, Russian historian Yuri Slezkin referred to Dostoevsky’s idea of Russia’s externalization of responsibility and power to its Western counterpart, which it historically looked up to, only to conclude that “the second Motherland is at war with the first” (Slezkin and Abarinov 2023), in this way reversing Russian colonialist stance to simulated self-victimization, prompted by Russian state propaganda. This ambition to overcome second-ratedness goes further than colonial mimicry in the narratives produced by the Russian propaganda machine. The active phase of violence carried out by Russia’s war in Ukraine is, therefore, also ambiguous. While externally it possesses characteristics of a colonial war, for Russian citizens supporting the war it has an articulated anti-colonial outlook, which relies on the double consciousness of violent action per se: here, I recall again Fanon, who considered armed violence to be an indispensable characteristic of an anti-colonial fight arising from an initially weaker position (Fanon 1963[1961], 35–36). In the case of Russia’s colonialism in Ukraine, the present study makes a break not only with unidirectional Eurocentrism and Occidentalism as the focus of decolonial studies but also with the West-East relationality as the vector of postcolonial studies. The multidirectional perspective in this particular case of Ukraine–Russia’s entanglement unfolds fully and undertakes a very particular form of exchange of influences, and traces the implications of increased beyond-the-border hybridity for the historical colonial entanglement and active warfare between Russia and Ukraine.

 И как только европеец увидит, что мы начали уважать народ наш и национальность нашу, так тотчас же начнет и он нас самих уважать. Translation from Russian is mine. 2

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2.2   Self-Colonization as Mimicry As Tlostanova noted, Russia is trying to jump out of its catching-up model proposed four centuries ago during the rule of Peter I and to make the world stop viewing the imperial difference as simultaneously the colonial difference (Tlostanova 2018, 11). Nevertheless, as I mentioned above, Russia turns this position to its benefit: by mimicking a victim’s position, placing under question whether it is the “world” that views Russia within the framework of colonial difference, or  whether it is Russia’s self-­ colonization and self-victimization that creates this framework. Tlostanova’s take on this double consciousness is closely linked to the alignment with the cultural impact of more powerful states, holding a stronger position within the colonial matrix of power: namely, it triggers a process of self-colonizing. As I will show further, Russia also subverts this matrix of power through its violent actions. In the Ukrainian context, the need for anti-colonial resistance emerges as a necessary response to Russia’s contemporary attempts at reviving a neocolonial agenda, based on distorted interpretations and propaganda-­ driven manipulations of their shared imperial history. This shift in decolonial dynamics is reflected in Ukrainian cultural production as a means of resistance, which now showcases more explicit and radical artistic and literary creativity aimed at countering Russia’s ambitions for cultural dominance. The beginning of the process of Ukraine’s decolonial release as the full disentangling from the colonial context, which was manifested in such identity-shaping (and simultaneously, identity-dismantling) events as Euromaidan in 2014, in turn, has triggered Russia’s obsession with domination not only of Ukrainian space but also of the souls and thoughts of the Ukrainian people. Within this relentless Russian pursuit of domination, as compensation for internal shortcomings, the war emerges as a prominent instance of “self-colonization,” wherein Russia emotionally associates itself with a cultural and geographic domain to which it presently has no legitimate entitlement—while  at the same time, viewing Ukraine as part of a larger “Western” more powerful political and cultural formation. Developed by literary scholar Alexander Kiossev, the term “self-colonization” originally described a power dynamic wherein one nation exercises symbolic dominance over another, devoid of actual conquest of territory. Russia’s profound preoccupation with Ukraine and its colonial desire of appropriating—but also belonging without being conquered—epitomizes such self-subjugation to influences by its neighboring

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nation, driving Russia to undertake violent, self-destructive actions such as the current escalation to the full-scale invasion. Throughout its history as a “double-conscious,” “second-rate” empire, Russia has been compelled to symbolically adhere to the cultural domination of more potent Western empires and simultaneously impose colonial rule on its subordinate regions. The culmination of this process transpires three decades after the disassembling of the political mechanisms that enforced a colonial structure of subordination within the Soviet Union. These mechanisms, however, in the present conditions, persist only as a redundant, traumatic reminiscence of the past, an extension of less powerful coloniality into the present day, pushed by Russia’s profound desire for power-as-belonging from predominantly symbolic aspects of political and cultural realms to the core of military action. Consequently, Russia becomes entangled in a pattern of self-colonization, revolving around the “Ukrainian question.” Kiossev speaks about the process of self-colonizing as the creation of an “extracolonial periphery,” where this periphery aims to recognize self-­ evidently foreign cultural hegemony and voluntarily absorb the basic values and categories of the powerful center. The foundation of such self-aligning to imported notions is social imagination. He defines it as a background of intuitive knowledge and a body of shared stereotypes (Kiossev 2011 [1995]). I propose that this forms the basis for self-­ colonizing epistemologies. In such an adhering self-colonizing gesture, we can observe the emergence of the epistemology of powerlessness and self-doubt—which in the case of Russia takes one step further by turning into the epistemology of violence, projected onto Ukrainian territory. Here, I refer to the famous Hannah Arendt’s axiom that “Rule by sheer violence come into play when the power is being lost” (Arendt 1970, 53). Arendt viewed violence as an instrumental product of a profoundly powerless position, as she considered the downfall of Stalin’s regime a historical precedent of when the government’s power shrinks and terror as a powerful position declines into sweeping and indiscriminate violence (Arendt 1970, 55). Vladimir Putin’s obsolete, decaying dictatorship pushes his government to reenact a similar historical situation of the loss of power— and what they see as an immediate remedy against it constitutes a further  decline in the power hierarchies, which in externalized projection means advancing to a peripheral position in the colonial matrix of power. Self-colonization is an intrinsic part of this structural change.

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Self-colonization encourages society to imagine participation in processes beyond the limited horizon of their immediate experiences (Kiossev 2011 [1995]). In the case of Russia, such an expansion of epistemology of powerlessness born out of self-colonizing conditions tends to adhere to the imperialist society as an unfathomable, mythologized society of the past. Ukraine is the cornerstone of such an imaginary community, historically having been part of the Western frontier or Russia’s colonial aspirations. In the popular imagination of Russians, historical Ukraine is the main imperial marker of the past and Russia’s imaginary present; moreover, contemporary Ukraine is seen as representative of the West, to which Russia’s victimization and the attempts to overcome the colonial difference emerging from it are directed. As Russia remains a carrier of imperial knowledge and colonial narratives that have impacted Ukraine until recently, Ukraine is a similar reservoir of colonial epistemology for Russia. Due to the lack of power that supports its formal structure and the resulting outburst of violence, Russia’s decline from a second-rate empire, described by Tlostanova, to a self-colonizing state has been imminent. In the context of Russia’s violent war, Ukraine reemerges as a “zero-point” in the colonizer’s value system, which for former colonizers (and aspiring neocolonizers) connotes not a pre-colonization position but a return and reenactment of the colonial past. Without this, Russia’s decrepit self-­ understanding as an empire is incomplete and loses its relevance. Simultaneously, Ukraine’s  decolonial epistemology is grounded in the current war and resistance to it, as the source of new disentangled production of narratives and a result of the decolonial release as the creation of new history. Vitaly Chernetsky has considered Russia a self-colonizing state, viewing the rule of Peter I as a starting point for such a process of self-alignment with Western influences, comparable to Tlostanova’s observation that Russia’s imperial difference manifested at the same time (Chernetsky 2003; Tlostanova 2018). In his argument, Chernetsky refers to Boris Groys, who proposed that after Peter I’s foundation of Saint Petersburg and the cultural change triggered by the establishment of this new center, Russian people pretended to be Europeans, while simultaneously seeing themselves as colonial “others,” as they attempted to suppress everything Russian and impose everything modernized and “Western.” Groys, therefore, viewed Saint Petersburg as “a quotation that always tried to defend the original, with the expectation of historical triumph and the fear of a historical catastrophe” (Groys 1993). I believe that it is possible to

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substitute the words “Saint Petersburg” with “Russia” in this statement, and we find the moving force behind Russia’s centuries-long colonial ambition which has fully unfolded in Russia’s occupation and war of aggression in Ukraine: striving for Russia’s historical triumph while at the same time revealing its catastrophic Janus face—its attempt to prove its equal value within the profoundly Eurocentric (and more generally, Occidentalist) model of the world. The notion of self-colonization was expanded by Kiossev to “hegemony without domination,” as a symbolic alignment of a country to the identities of another state. The violent—and economically unjustified— Russian occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory which (mis)uses the notion of “brotherhood” exemplifies such an alignment, manifested through similarities where colonial affect and desire are expressed in attempts at physical possession as a way of belonging. Self-colonization with Ukraine’s symbolic field is caused not only by its “Westernness” but also, paradoxically, by its presumable “sameness.” This similarity-based imperialist discourse is exemplified in the work of an important Soviet dissident, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. He articulated this vision of the indivisibility of Ukrainian and Russian peoples by denying any kind of political or cultural agency to Ukrainians: Our people were divided into three branches only because of the severe disasters of the Mongol invasion and the Polish colonization. This is all the recently invented falsification that nearly from the ninth century there have been special Ukrainian people with their special non-Russian language.3 (Solzhenitsyn 1990, 1)

While the figures of the “others” are defined as both non-Slavic and Slavic people who established their own independent states and exercised their colonial ambitions long ago, sameness here is defined through two axes: the real likenesses among Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian cultures and the intentional omissions of differences and independent characteristics of historical development in favor of the all-unifying argumentation. Solzhenitsyn’s quotation also proves that being a dissident in Russia does not  preclude having  colonial ambitions (as contemporary examples also 3  Да народ наш и разделялся на три ветви лишь по грозной беде монгольского нашествия да польской колонизации. Это всё—придуманная невдавне фальшь, что чуть не с IX века существовал особый украинский народ с особым не-русским языком. Translation from Russian is mine.

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show). It is noteworthy that the “rival” colonizers here represent the twofold vector of division between the East (Mongols) and the West (Poland), reflecting on Russia’s self-positioning as existing between Europe and Asia, thus carrying hybrid features and an incorporated difference from less-ambivalent “others” at the same time. Plokhy discusses the political impact of such thinking, highlighting Solzhenitsyn’s role in coining the idea of the Slavic Union after the fall of the USSR. Solzhenitsyn saw it as a unity of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the northern part of Kazakhstan, which he considered “South Siberia,” referring to Slavic domination in the region. The proposal of Solzhenitsyn, with marked neocolonial coloring, has developed into the political structure of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)  with an initial treaty signed by Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in 1991 (Plokhy 2014, 298). The chauvinist underpinnings of such a unity of the “similar” (as opposed to the non-Slavic “others”) were justified by the economic benefits of such a union; further, however, the union expanded and incorporated former Soviet Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics and Moldova. Ukraine left the Commonwealth of Independent States only in 2018, following Russia’s occupation of the Donbas and Crimea. The case of Solzhenitsyn shows that self-colonization is a process that affects Russian officials and dissidents alike, eliminating the critical line between official and unofficial cultures and undermining society’s functioning as a site of epistemological production. When the external and internal hierarchies of the oppressive state are distorted, the related epistemologies also exhibit an inverted logic. Drawing on the historical entanglement of the Russian and Soviet empires, Russia’s self-colonization should be seen as a durable, long-standing process. At the same time, the anti-colonial resistance from the side of Ukraine presents a flickering logic, of periods when pointed attempts at opposing Russia’s colonialism were on their rise in critical moments of history. This resistance stabilizes by turning to the postcolonial condition and a subsequent exit toward the decolonial situation.

2.3   Hybridity and Its Discontents Colonial entanglement constructs and replicates itself through hybridity, which is further maintained in the postcolonial condition. Homi Bhabha views postcolonial hybridity as a sign of the productivity of colonial power and its shifting forces. In Bhabha’s interpretation, hybridity works as a

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strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal, such as the creation of discriminatory identities that secure the “authentic” identity. Hybridity for him is a constant and permanent reevaluation of the dominant culture’s discriminatory effects through replicating them, as it unsettles the mimetic and narcissistic demands of the colonial power through strategies of subversion that reverse the discriminatory approach upon the “eye of power” (Bhabha 1994, 112). Hybridity, therefore, is an inevitable outcome of any colonizing process, which also plays a significant role in the postcolonial recombination, because it incorporates contradictory impulses of simultaneous assertion of the colonial power and its subversion. Hybridity is the key to balancing contested power and avoiding direct conflict when the oppressed rise against the oppressor, ensuring colonial domination but also hidden liberties, or breaches, in the colonial impact. It is, therefore, both an adversity and an opportunity proposed by the domain of postcoloniality, which no longer plays a crucial role in the domain of decoloniality and is deemed to be dismantled by decolonial processes. Anthropologist Néstor García Canclini gives more agency than Bhabha to the subaltern part of the hybridity construction when he defines hybridization as “sociocultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, previously existing in a separate form, are combined to generate new structures, objects, and practices” (García  Canclini 1995, xxv). García Canclini further points out, “We can choose to live in a state of war or a state of hybridization” (Ibid.). This statement applies literally to the particular decolonial processes ongoing in Ukraine—when the delinking from “compatible” Russian narratives intensified after the outbreak of Russia’s violence on the territory of Ukraine. Hybridization and anti-­ colonial resistance follow opposite aims, as the latter relies on extracting syncretic elements from the cultural field and challenging and subverting the former. Decolonial processes in wartime Ukraine draw on anti-­colonial radicalism, yet they aim to establish a constructive basis for new epistemological production and further dissolve the hybridity to the point of no return. It would, however, be naïve to consider that any kind of nonhybrid identity exists. Further in this book, I examine how the dissolution of postcolonial hybridity enhances the reproduction of internal exchange and contests cultural regionalism as a form of (post)colonial segregation. Bhabha endows cultural hybridity with both translational and transnational qualities (Bhabha 1994, 5). As the polarized situation in Ukraine shows, in a time of the neocolonial war and the outset of the decolonial

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processes, both of these characteristics lose their function: there is no space for translation where arms speak and where atrocities of the invaders subvert any possibility for bilateral communication. The transnational aspect of hybridity as a pluralist stance also comes under attack when the in-between postcolonial space as a reservoir of mutual influences of multiculturalism undergoes dramatic changes in the ways of signification and knowledge production. García Canclini distinguishes between three types of hybridization: syncretism, métissage (or mestizaje), and creolization. He challenges the individual applicability of each of these terms to the conditions of modernity. For this research, I find it particularly useful to regard his interpretation of the notion of syncretism, which García Canclini defines as a profoundly contradictory process of “mixing what is compatible and securing what is incompatible” and as the “simultaneous adherence to different systems of belief” (García Canclini 1995, xxxiii). Similarly, Serge Gruzinski describes syncretism as a combination of mutually exclusive but at the same time mutually attracted elements, which through identification with each other produce a “coherent system of ideas and practices” (Gruzinski 2013 [1988], 21). These definitions help reframe syncretism in the particular context of the colonial domination of Russia in Ukraine, when the numerous similarities in cultural and linguistic codes, ways of everyday living, and traditions create more opportunities for mixing rather than maintaining incompatibility, thus undermining the syncretic aspect of hybridity as opposed to the cases when we speak about hybridization through conquest, as in García Canclini’s analysis of the Mexican postcolonial condition. Fostered both by the extensive migrations between the two states and the cultural exchange, albeit with the marked historical tendency of Russia to appropriate Ukraine’s cultural achievements, the hybridization in Ukrainian culture has not shown a large proportion of syncretism. This presents a problem of identifying what was incompatible when the urgency of the anti-colonial resistance becomes imminent, and the extraction of the mixed cultural elements signaled the necessity of the decolonization process as the defense against active neocolonial attempts. The division in the systems and forms of popular beliefs manifested by the Russian war in Ukraine, however, gives way to a division of beliefs in a process I call “syncretic polarization,” in which the desire for disentanglement deems the elements that were previously accepted as compatible as no longer compatible.

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For two examples of syncretism, I draw on political and religious expression in Mexico and Ukraine. The antique sixteenth-century Cuautinchán convent in the State of Puebla in Mexico preserved murals commissioned by the Catholic friars from the indigenous artists in the first decades after the Spanish Conquista. One of the murals depicts a scene of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. The angel and the Virgin Mary share pronounced syncretic features connoted by animal figures referring to the pre-Hispanic iconography. While an angel has similar wings to the eagle painted beside him, the cape of the Virgin Mary carries the same ornament as the skin of a jaguar beside her. The syncretic features were justified by the necessity of reciprocal cultural translation, from one system of veneration of the supernatural canon, to which the figures of an eagle and a jaguar were central, to a Christian system brought by Spanish colonialism. Another example is one of the icons of Pokrova (the Intercession of the Mother of God) from Pereiaslav cited by Plokhy in his book The Tsars and the Cossacks: A Study in Iconography (Plokhy 2002, 2). The central figures of the Virgin Mary, Romanos the Melodist, and Orthodox saints, are framed by the depictions of clergy, Cossack commissioners of the icon, and the portraits of Peter I and his wife Catherine I. With the inclusion of the political figures of the Russian Tsar and Tsarina, remarkably, syncretism is created not as a hybridization of two different belief systems but between religious and political discourses. The entire scene remains comprehensible to Ukrainian and Russian viewers without translation, through a previously appropriated Byzantine canon. While the systems of beliefs coincide, the syncretic process presupposes including the figures of imperial power as an act of colonial obedience and the erasure of meaningful anti-colonial figures (such as the Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who appeared in preceding versions of the Pokrova icon but following his defeat in the Battle of Poltava was banished and all his depictions were prohibited by the imperial order). Russian colonialism over centuries was perpetuated in Ukraine through this replacing and substituting of meaningful elements in a generally shared image of the world. The further discussion on syncretic polarization in this book aims to examine what happens if such a combination becomes dysfunctional when Russia’s colonial case, distorted by its self-deceptive propaganda, loses coherence while escalating in scale of violence, and the hybrid system falls apart from both sides of the border dividing Ukraine and Russia.

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The main marker of the turn from Ukraine’s postcolonial condition to the decolonial situation is, therefore, the loss of postcolonial hybridity and ambivalence with Russia’s unequivocal aggression against Ukrainian territories. Postcolonial “ambivalence” is interpreted by Bhabha as occurring when the oppressor and the oppressed share similar features, and the dominant culture infects its colonial domain with its own cultural identity (Bhabha 1984, 129). The postcolonial ambivalence in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine as reflected in language is discussed in War in Ukraine (2015), an art project by Lada Nakonechna (Fig. 2.1). The artist produced a series of typed texts in which she explores how language structures are conditioned by particular political positions and modes of thinking. Small details, such as the order of words or the use of prepositions, can change the meaning of a phrase. In every example, the artist uses three related phrasal structures, where the meaning has been profoundly transformed to reveal how linguistic clichés reflect underlying paradigms—such as “Civil [crossed out] war on [crossed out] in Ukraine,” “Armed conflict in the east of Ukraine,” and “Russian-Ukrainian war.” The ways in which these phrases are constructed make clear the points of view from which they are generated: how they distinguish between the subject and object of the aggression and expose particular ideas either promoted by Russian propaganda or conventionally accepted by the Ukrainian mass media. These phrases are not related to the specific use of the Ukrainian or Russian language; rather, the syntax and vocabulary form the intended meaning. Though made in 2015, the work remains relevant beyond the Ukrainian media sphere, as Russian propaganda and the Western media alike often describe the war as a “conflict,” in effect belittling its importance and blurring the reality of the actual situation. As the situation following the 2022 full-scale invasion has shown, Russia’s strategy has relied on a similar type of understanding of the situation—that is, Russia’s hope that Ukrainian society possesses this intrinsic postcolonial hybridity, intact and functioning, and that Russian propaganda would lead to Ukrainian support of Russian aggression within Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian resistance against the invaders, however, confirms that the politically manipulated reality is different from the real status of things. The Ukrainian people’s heartfelt struggle against the Russian war is a testament to the fact that ambivalence is characteristic of Ukrainian society to a much lesser extent, and any cultural hybridity with the colonizer is dissolving, marking not only the end of the debate around postcolonial ambivalence but also the birth of a decolonial culture.

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Fig. 2.1  Lada Nakonechna, Russian-Ukrainian War, from the War in Ukraine series, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist

The void left by the dissolving postcolonial hybridity is filled by internal hybridity. This new hybridity marks the diversity of localized culture (as opposed to the postcolonial aspect of hybridization) through uniting regional characteristics and heterogeneous elements into a coherent narrative, yet giving equal consideration to each single element. This seems to be a sustainable way of decolonial production.

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Internal hybridity, unlike postcolonial hybridity, does not carry the embedded characteristics of colonial domination. As Fanon emphasizes, by its very structure, colonialism is regionalist because it does not simply state the existence of divided social groups; it also reinforces and separates them in a process of tribalizing (Fanon 1963 [1961], 37–38). In the condition when the territorial integrity is at risk because of external influences fostering separatist movements, as in the case of the Donbas in 2014, this colonialist behavior draws on deepening regional differences and is characteristic of the artificial increase in the “incompatible” elements of internal hybridity, alongside the growth in similar, “compatible” elements in what constitutes colonial and postcolonial hybridity. In other words, in a time of active colonization, while the divisions between the groups of the subaltern status are encouraged, unity and homogeneity as essential values are expected within the duality of colonizer and colonized. The main principle of decolonial processes is the substitution of postcolonial hybridity with internal hybridity, which helps to overcome regionalism and consolidate the space where the processes of disentanglement and new knowledge production take place. The decolonial processes, therefore, rely on three factors: the overcoming of cultural regionalism, while preserving diversity, the dissolution of postcolonial hybridity, and the fostering of internal hybridity through internal exchange. The latter carries a significant risk of homogenization through the production of nonambivalent signs, yet the ambivalence is preserved within the maintenance of local characteristics.

2.4  The Multifunctionality of Hybridity My premise is that in the postcolonial condition, hybridity is always multivectoral in its impact, as it relies on differing strategies of acknowledgment of the colonial power and its subversion. The case of Ukrainian writer Mykola Hohol is an example of how this incorporated duality of signification can be used for both colonial discourses and the discourse of anti-colonial resistance on the frontlines, transgressing geographical and cultural boundaries. Hundorova proposes that Hohol’s vision of colonial hybridity was introduced through kitsch aesthetics in his literary works. She points out that colonial exoticization as othering, procreated by Hohol with the help of excessive signs and repetition, colonizes the subaltern not as much by

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force but by imagination as it constructs an imitated reality where the “other” is embedded (Hundorova 2012, 22). Hohol uses the burlesque tradition already existing in Ukrainian literature (particularly that already marked by colonial expectation: what Hundorova calls “little Russian literature”). She adds to this account a particular method of travesty and inversion as a profoundly hybrid expression, which Hohol used to elaborate the style of “little Russian exoticism,” romanticizing the stories set in Ukrainian provinces (“Christmas Eve,” “Viy,” “The Fair at Sorochyntsi,” etc.) through stylistic elements proper for Russian romantic literature. Importantly, she points out the double-sidedness of such a process of hybridization, as the work by Hohol was seen concurrently as a tool of domination by the intelligentsia in the colonial metropolis, but as a source of anti-colonial moods in the Ukrainian subaltern periphery. The figure of Hohol and his work have been used by both sides of the abyssal line to justify colonial claims, postcolonial recombination, and decolonial disentanglement. For example, in the book The Total Art of Stalinism by Boris Groys published in English as early as 1992, the author compares Kazimir Malevich to a “typical hero of nineteenth-century Russian philanthropic literature,” depicting the vision of Malevich by the artist Ilya Kabakov as “Akakii Akakevich, striving for absolute white and perishing in the undertaking much as Hohol’s hero yearned for the expensive overcoat unbefitting his rank” (Groys 1992, 85). Here, the framing of the entire discourse goes through a presumably Russian cultural lens, attributing the figures of both an artist and a lyrical hero to Russian classical literature; however, it completely omits the fact that Mykola (Nikolai) Hohol (Gogol) was born in—and wrote a large part of his works about— the Ukrainian Poltava governorate; Ilya Kabakov is a native of Dnipropetrovsk (now, Dnipro) in central-eastern Ukraine; and finally, Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich, whose work and legacy are divided between current-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, is hardly fitting to be representative of Russian nineteenth-century literature. This appropriation of Ukrainian cultural legacy that forms a one-sided perspective on the shared heritage has been challenged by Ukrainian initiatives in academic and museum environments but still remains dominant in English language art history and cultural studies. In the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, such distortions receive new significance, where epistemic violence goes hand in hand with physical atrocity. I would like to continue the example of Hohol, to show how the same, an

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undoubtedly hybrid, cultural figure can manifest a dissent in the ways it is employed by Russia’s (neo)colonialist appropriative rhetoric and the decolonial cultural resistance against invasion. The Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev’s account of atrocity, torture, and rape, which he either witnessed or experienced at the illegal prison of Izolyatsia in Donetsk and which he describes in his book, draws attention due to its apparent reference to the cultural legacy contested between Russia and Ukraine: he describes how the militants tortured one of the captives with electricity and then enclosed him alive in a coffin, which they sealed with nails and covered with gravel. They called it the “Hohol effect,” because of the popular myth that Mykola Hohol was buried alive due to a cataleptic health condition. It is an example of how the cultural legacy in the wrong hands can become a colonizing tool, an instrument of crime. Aseyev further mentions that fortunately that person survived. He describes other events that occurred at Izolyatsia in the following way: Isolation Prison, at 3 Paradise Street: all of us are here on the premises of what was formerly an insulation factory. Now it’s a military base and, at the same time, one of the cruelest prisons of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. This place defies categorization: officially, it doesn’t exist; unofficially, it houses dozens of prisoners in various basements and cells. (Aseyev 2023, 4)

Giving a detailed account of his own suffering as an inmate at this illegal prison camp, he defines that the main ruling force dominating his captivity was an entire spectrum of fear, from mortal, paralyzing dread to general overwhelming anxiety as a response to torture, witnessing crimes and numerous explicit violations of human rights (Aseyev 2023, 36). Conversely, returning to the figure of Mykola Hohol as the dividing point and his legacy contested between Ukraine and Russia, I would like to mention an example that challenges the once-established postcolonial status quo of Hohol’s figure. Gogolfest is a large-scale cultural event that was held by Vladislav Troitsky in Kyiv from 2007, but in 2021, it was presented in Mariupol for the first time, responding to what was seen then as the cultural renaissance of the city, where decentralized contemporary art initiatives were emerging to challenge the regional post-Soviet condition and the persistence in the gray zone in direct proximity to occupied territories and the Russian border. Yet Gogolfest was one of the first large-scale initiatives aimed at the revitalization of the borderline region. The festival

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included an ambitious program of concerts, exhibitions, panel discussions, and an opera staged in a dock at Mariupol’s port. The organization of Gogolfest is an example of decolonial border thinking, as defined by such theorists as Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova, who speak of it as an “epistemology of exteriority” where the once-oppressed knowledge is produced outside of the power centers (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2012, 60). The example of Mariupol was that of the periphery which was for decades lying on the margins of habitual centralized zones of knowledge production, both former colonial Russian and current Ukrainian territory. This periphery transformed into a center under the necessity of anti-­ colonial struggle when it found itself at the forefront of cultural resistance to the neocolonial invasion. In this example, the use of the figure of Hohol is a metaphor for how a contested legacy can serve as a tool of both aggression and resistance, working toward either the creation of (neo)colonial or decolonial narratives. As these three examples show, the appropriated legacy can be used as both a colonial and a decolonizing tool. In speaking about the figure of Hohol in this context, we face the intrinsic hybrid quality of the postcolonial situation. This question of hybridity and the division of shared legacy is the key to the wartime disentanglement of Ukraine from Russia when the divided cultural legacy provides a foundation for the further independent production of decolonial epistemologies. Here, the main question is: When postcolonial hybridity dissolves, what remains? The figure of Hohol is exemplary for this inquiry because, when marking two opposing perspectives, it connotes polarized cultural and linguistic realities until the point of full decolonial divergence of these realities, when the ambivalence is fully lost. In decolonial conditions, the merging of the positions of the oppressor and the oppressed through postcolonial ambivalence is no longer a viable option; however, their segregation does not always follow a clear-cut trajectory.

2.5  Anachronic Anti-Colonialism In 2014, with the beginning of Russia’s war, Ukraine found itself in an ambiguous situation. On the one hand, the capacity for the recombination of postcolonial narratives reached the brink of exhaustion with the outbreak of the war, triggering decolonial processes; on the other hand, the direct necessity of anti-colonial resistance as the only way to oppose violence provoked related anti-colonial expressions in culture. This situation

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of existing between the anti-colonialist stance and the decolonial situation appears to be anachronic within the regular logic of the development of former subaltern states following emancipation from colonialism. The characteristics of Ukraine’s postcolonial development vis-à-vis its anti-colonial struggle during the late years of the Soviet Union were noted by Marko Pavlyshyn as early as 1992. Pavlyshyn pointed out that the structures of anti-colonialism in culture are the repercussions of their colonial predecessors, as they form counterparts to colonial ambition. Postcolonial condition, in turn, is the consequence of the deconstruction of colonialism, its dismantling, and reusing (Pavlyshyn 1992). In the regular peaceful process of stage-by-stage decolonization, postcolonialism dismantles colonialism as well as anti-colonialism—viewing it as an extreme expression and a mirror reflection of colonialist processes. In the extreme situation of the war, however, it is not possible to rely on the slow pace of decolonization, as the processes of disentanglement are catalyzed by the unfolding of new historical events and the profound transformation through the creation and acceptance of new epistemologies. Hundorova proposes that the causal logic of postcolonialism’s thematic and conceptual indebtedness to anti-colonialism is irreversible. In anti-­ colonialism, most of the arguments, allegories, and oppositions that fuel postcolonialism are born. They are then replayed by the postcolonial critique (Hundorova 2012, 78). Consequently, this raises the question of how to deal with the anachronic reemergence of neocolonialist discourses in Russia and anti-colonial discourses in Ukraine, after postcolonialism itself has faded and is no longer useful as a hermeneutic tool. How should these processes be regarded in conditions when the postcolonial ambivalence is erased, and a rupture has emerged between the Janus-faced duality of anti-colonialism and colonialism as hermeneutic frameworks and the liberation from both proposed by the decolonial release? Bhabha asks a question: “Can the aim of freedom of knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, center and periphery, negative image and positive image?” (Bhabha 1994, 19). The reply to this question is an example of the discrepancy between the anti-colonial goals as a short-term achievement of domination through if not the inversion of power hierarchy, then of its full erasure, and the postcolonial goals as a long-term transformation and a specific kind of adjustment of aims of particular relationships following the colonial domination. The anti-colonialism appears as a “mirror” phenomenon (Pavlyshyn

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1992), and postcolonialism as an entangled situation, while the decolonial situation requires full disentanglement of discourse and narratives. The ultimate objective of decoloniality is complete liberation from any resentment or affect toward the colonial past; in other words, decoloniality fully unfolds through indifference and the erasure of affect as its necessary condition. Contrary to this, coloniality—as the case of Russia effectively represents—manifests itself through affective dynamics. Moreover, the tension between the anti-colonial dynamics and the decolonial processes in wartime Ukraine is important to the operational quality of knowledge that is emerging in the struggle. The all-involving characteristics of the decolonial production of new narratives include the idea of the full epistemological disentanglement through the production of new knowledge and new history alike. Countries that share borders are more prone to the emergence of recurrent colonialism (or what Snyder calls “recolonization”) than the countries that developed their colonial relationship at a distance. This explains the particular recurrence of anti-colonial discourse in Ukrainian culture and this proposes particular characteristics of Ukrainian coloniality as repeatedly postcolonial; the necessity to reconsider perspectives on Ukraine’s traumatic history is recurrent and, therefore, constant. However, if we can only speculate whether the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine presents the final frontier marking the last reemergence of Ukraine’s anti-­ colonial resistance, it is possible and timely to discuss what has changed in comparison with preceding escalations. These and other questions will be addressed further in this book.

2.6   Syncretic Polarization as the Basis for Anti-­Colonial Struggle and Decolonial Processes The uniqueness of the Russia–Ukraine colonial relationship is not only geographical, such as adjacent borders between the two countries, but it also resides in cultural proximity and longstanding historical entanglements. In contrast to the colonial politics of Latin America and Asia, syncretism, as a struggle between two sets of conflicting elements that permeate culture and social relations, is not as visible in the hybrid situation between Russia and Ukraine.

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This low visibility poses particular difficulty for decolonial disentanglement, as the binary opposition that leads the decolonial process in many countries where religious/cultural syncretism is present in the postcolonial condition cannot be created. The centuries-long work of cultural proximity has created a particular type of hybridity with stable, profoundly interconnected elements that appear as likenesses of each other. In an attempt to overlook the difference, Russia’s ideology pushes the idea of erasing syncretic elements to the extreme, because Russia proposes that the cultural space encompassing Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia is homogeneous. Due to the cultural proximity issue and the recolonization threat posed by it, the decolonization attempts of Ukraine require the construction of syncretic opposition, in order to remove the colonial elements from the field of signification in both the private and public spheres. Cultural proximity is widely disseminated through language. I call this process syncretic polarization, which occurs when two elements, previously considered likenesses of each other, are split across a newly constructed line that marks their differences. Processes and phenomena, which were seen as variance before, with the syncretic polarization, change their orientation from “neutral” to “plus” or to “minus” in a binary opposition. Due to syncretic polarization, Ukraine’s decolonial processes resemble characteristics of anti-colonial resistance. This process is similar to a chemical reaction ignited by fire: in order to divide two elements, they need to be heated. The selection of elements that enter into syncretic struggle is sometimes aleatory and based on resemblances and reminiscences. This, in turn, requires the consolidation of the common space of signification that was undermined, according to historian Andrii Portnov, during the times of President Leonid Kuchma, who pursued regionalization of symbolic historical celebrations—such as simultaneously celebrating the birthdays of the Soviet functionary Volodymyr  Shcherbytsky in Dnipro and the leader of the Ukrainian dissident movement Viacheslav Chornovil in Lviv, manipulating the idea of pluralism to “deprive history of its mobilizing course” (Portnov 2013, 239). I distinguish two stages of syncretic polarization: radical (anti-colonial) and stabilizing (decolonial). While the first, radical stage, relies on direct opposition to the colonial impact, the stabilizing stage relies on the production of new narratives, new languages, and new discourses that fill the cultural emptiness and do not leave space for colonial products of signification. Here, I draw on the premise that colonial impact always relies on the void of signification in subaltern spaces, which it fills with oppressive discourses; and this void is artificially produced by the colonizer’s force as

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a sequence of structural transformations that enable the power holder to close access to the distribution of knowledge for the oppressed. The opposite, decolonial process would be an open field of exchange and circulation, with no void, but rather the overflow of production, which naturally does not leave space for colonially forced epistemologies that become untranslatable. The “manual,” artificial dismantling of syncretisms through the protective work of culture, carried out in the different layers of Ukrainian society, is a direct reflection of the forced process of colonial hybridization. Such a mirror quality of the disentanglement process, as in the case of syncretic polarization, is closely related to the anti-colonial resistance (and its mirroring of colonial ambition) and is made possible by its violent force. Decolonial  processes, in their turn, require the polarization of the hybrid fusions to turn imaginary difference, as othering by the will of the colonizer, to the real difference, as not only the othering of the colonizer by the former subaltern but a complete expulsion of the colonizer from the fields of cultural production and social signification. Syncretic polarization, therefore, forms an important part of both the anti-colonial movement (borrowing from its mirror quality) and the decolonial situation (borrowing from its tendency to expulsion of the figure of the oppressor from the field of signification). This inquiry, however, can provide a useful mechanism for addressing the ongoing syncretic polarization prompted by the war. Its main aim is segregation and distinction between likenesses by highlighting and emphasizing differences while leaving similarities in the blind spot. Although syncretic polarization takes place in the nonlinguistic domain of signification, the linguistic aspect provides a key to deciphering its mechanism because language is important as both a tool for constituting knowledge and a channel for circulating it, making way for relevant ideological influences. The linguistic discrepancy within Ukrainian bilingualism has been challenged by such early post-Soviet works as The Three-Letter Box (1994), an installation and performance by Fast Reaction Group. The artists Sergei Bratkov and Boris Mikhailov created a “Pandora’s box” containing the three letters ї, і, and є, which highlight the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages, and used it to make a political statement emphasizing linguistic divergence as a postcolonial process. As was characteristic of the first two decades of Ukrainian independence, embracing such binary opposition was key to the self-identification process of the Ukrainian political nation during that period. The three Ukrainian letters, clear markers of belonging during a time when the nation-state structure

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was still unstable and social anxiety about post-socialist cultural resistance ran high, were crucial to Ukrainian identity formation. The work was created in the period of transition when post-Soviet transformations encouraged the use of the Ukrainian language, a return to which was considered an important element of cultural identity—while still leaving existential space for the use of Russian in various Ukrainian regions. Syncretic polarization in the aftermath of anti-colonial processes associated with the dismantling of the Soviet Union referred to disparate identities—ethnic and political in definition—aligned with the postcolonial vision of the nation-­ state as a unity based on homogenization and adherence through similarity and incorporation of language. The three Ukrainian letters, as well as the four Russian letters ы, ъ, ё, and э, which are not present in the Ukrainian alphabet, could work as a metaphor for the individual polarities as marked differences found in the syncretic polarization. After the onset of the full-scale invasion, the “self-decolonization” of Ukrainians through switching to the Ukrainian language from the Russian language has become common. This process can be seen as the intention of Ukrainian Russophone speakers to detach from postcolonial hybridity. The dissolution of hybridity, however, demonstrates chronological durability, and it has occurred through a sequence of steps. In 2014, the main pretext for Russia’s occupation was the presumable “defense” of Russian speakers on Ukrainian territory. Their oppressed position was the main argument constructed by Russian propaganda, which aimed to replay the decrepit discourse of regionalism—which by that moment had failed together with the government of Viktor Yanukovych (as I will further discuss in Chap. 4). This inverted logic was opposed to the fact that Russian speakers were an intrinsic part of Ukrainian cultural space and took an important role in social processes, including the Euromaidan Revolution. As Yaroslav Hrytsak proposed, “In a piece on the 2014 fighting around the Donetsk airport, Los Angeles Times correspondent Sergei Loiko noted that inside the airport, Ukrainian military forces used exclusively Russian as their operative language and Ukrainian was nowhere to be heard. What struck him the most was how pure, cultured, and almost literary their Russian was” (Hrytsak 2015, 737). Hrytsak concluded from this incident that the postcolonial condition in Ukraine—if this is indeed the right paradigm to describe the situation—could not be reduced to cultural dominance through language. It is undeniable, however, that the Ukrainian language has been overshadowed by the Russification processes ongoing in the Russian empire and

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the Soviet Union for decades. In the early 2000s, Andrukhovych defined the Ukrainian language as “hidden from the world” as a result of its postcolonial status (Andrukhovych 2018 [2002], 104). Conversely, he considered it to be an advantage to Ukrainian literature, when “the state of being hidden can lead to an accumulation of quality, including literary quality. That quality, with its exploding inevitability, will emerge the moment we move out of the shadow” (Andrukhovych 2018 [2002], 105). This moment has come with Ukraine’s regaining of agency as the result of the Euromaidan Revolution and the Ukrainian heartfelt resistance to Russia’s war. This decolonial release of the language and texts written in Ukrainian, bringing it from the cultural depth under a spotlight, is proof that the language’s channeling of knowledge makes it a powerful tool of syncretic polarization. The novel Mondegreen: Songs of Love and Death (2019) by Volodymyr Rafeyenko became one of such testaments of the transformative decolonial power of language. In his novel, we see how the language transforms memory, becoming the vessel for affection. As Mark Andryczyk proposes in his foreword to the English edition, the Russophone main protagonist’s decision to learn the Ukrainian language disassembles his life. The new language changes his relations and challenges him to see the world through the ambivalence of any naming, using the notion of “mondegreen”— when what is heard does not respond to the original meaning and creates a gap of comprehension. To express this duality, Rafeyenko addresses multiple meanings of words, as in Ukrainian and Russian, due to cultural proximity, the same word can have two different meanings, while two different words can have the same meaning (Andryczyk 2022, xvi). Rafeyenko highlights the ways language and its semantics challenge and transform knowledge by imitating the reproduction of memory: “Memories, as places where some sort of archival documents are stored on shelves, do not exist. Our whole life is entirely just the flickering of the heart and is completely based on fantasies and transformations. On language, to be more precise. That is why the past, as you recall it, is always hastily assembled” (Rafeyenko 2022 [2019], 40). In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion and the anti-colonial logic of the war prompted a reduction in the use of the Russian language in the public sphere. The pragmatic necessity to detach from the language as a channel for Russian disinformation and propaganda in a time of violent invasion and the physical presence of Russian saboteurs inside the society was followed by a symbolic necessity to disassociate from it as a channel of colonial influences. The syncretic polarization has spread to the Russian-speaking

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community, primarily through self-decolonization as the main mechanism for emphasizing difference in this case but also through a collective drive for the homogenization of the informational sphere as part of the intensive anti-colonial process. Language has become the main vehicle for syncretic polarization, yet its transformative force is aimed at the entire epistemological structure that is to split into nonhybrid entities by means of either extraction of old and nonfunctional discourses or by creation of new knowledge, indifferent to the traumas of the past. As Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets polemically puts it: “That gray zone of ambivalence can be easily captured by an ideological dogmatism that stigmatizes one or another kind of linguistic activity” (Belorusets and Ostashevsky 2023). The anti-colonial resistance presupposes dogmatism, as it is a mirroring process of colonialism. The decolonial processes, however, require the dissolution of ambivalence with a simultaneous establishment of a new plurality. The production of new narratives is one side of such processes, while another is the creation of the plurality of channels that can convey them. The Russophone channel is the least protected from becoming weaponized through wartime Russia’s propaganda. Belorusets also points out the risks of such weaponization: “Ukraine’s own unique Russian-language culture is being annihilated by Russia first and foremost because the invaders are destroying the territory where this language and culture predominate. At the same time, one common reaction to Russian aggression has been the rejection of [Russian language] as “the language of the invader” (Belorusets and Ostashevsky 2023). The elimination of the Russian language from the Ukrainian informational field in the war conditions firstly means the detachment of the channel of propaganda for the sake of defense. The syncretic polarization as an anti-colonial creation and an instrument of “swift” decolonization, however, presents a threat to heterogeneity and diversity. As a decolonial tool, conversely, it gives space to diversification by creating classifications and prioritizing one phenomenon that carries likeness over another. For example, the divergence of the development of Ukraine’s Russian language from Russia’s cultural impact, in the long run, could form a detached cultural sphere as the basis for the disentangled decolonial epistemology, based not on the repercussions of a historical trauma but on the references to the production of new narratives, marking a profoundly detached self-­ identification of the Ukrainians. The threat of the return of the colonial impacts through the return of weaponization of the shared (or imposed) language, which for centuries

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worked as a vessel for hybridity, is prominent under the conditions of immediate proximity and filtering of influences. Only a significant change in the positions of Russia and Ukraine in the colonial matrix of power could eliminate this threat of recolonization through language. The current solution to this controversy, therefore, is multifaceted and complex. The mechanism that is at work in syncretic polarization is reminiscent of Derrida’s différance. As in his linguistic concept, addressing both the difference and the deferral (postponement) of meaning (Derrida 1976 [1967]), the agency of signification in a disentangled narrative, which comes as a result of syncretic polarization, is defined by its intrinsic otherness—when the newly emerging meaning is defined by what it is not, or what it does not belong to, taking Russian cultural field as the departing point. The expulsion of colonial influences is, therefore, a process of painstaking analysis of where the merging points in the culture are located, and where the particular filter that allows translation has become nonfunctional. In other words, where the translational quality of culture is disrupted due to open neocolonial violence, the splitting of hybridity through syncretic polarization occurs. Syncretic polarization is particularly effective on the borderline with the colonial impacts, as the location where such translation and filtering processes are obstructed by Russia’s war.

2.7  Case Study: Donbas; the Borderline Work of Culture Homi Bhabha proposes that, following the logic of colonialism the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with “newness,” where the newly acquired elements are seen as results of cultural translation. According to Bhabha, such a collision has a particular way of working with memory and the contested past, as it renews history instead of recalling it and refigures the contested historical space as an “in-between” space (Bhabha 1994, 7). This idea echoes the semiotical thought of Yuri Lotman, who talked about “the explosion on the borderline,” rich in senses and expressions that define the merging of two cultures through an act of translation (Lotman 1992). In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the meaning of such an encounter obtains another important dimension: the perspective of direct resistance to the Russian occupation attempts, when the peaceful increased exchange (and the related higher level of hybridity) turns to the clash of narratives, yet with a marked transitional quality. The decolonial functioning of the culture in the borderline in a time of armed

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conflict proposes a model with incorporated controversy—between what is considered “own” and “foreign” elements, belonging to the “Self” and the “Other.” These elements are regarded in diverging ways from both sides of the border until a selection and filtration of the elements is eventually done and the controversy is resolved. The borderline regions of Ukraine, particularly, the Donetsk and the Luhansk regions (the so-called Donbas), experienced the implications of meeting Russian aggression at the forefront, when in April 2014 they were occupied by pro-Russian forces. Since 2014, the “gray zone” adjacent to the frontline from the Ukrainian side has become the key space for cultural resistance against occupation. The wartime cultural processes, however, reflected the deeper underlying processes of cultural segregation and filtering as processes of self-identification in regard to the colonizing narratives. The position of the “double periphery” of the Donbas was another factor that defined its absorption and reworking of the narratives from both sides, thus becoming the “in-between” space, as a container for the resistance potential and the translation capacity. This translation capacity, as double-sided filtering of cultural influences, is essential as a constitutive element for the theory of ambicoloniality, which I present further in Chap. 3. The war disrupted the translation while giving way to resistance. However, as an in-between space, the dissolution of hybridity in the Donbas has become a more prolonged process. Here, I will speak about how both the externalized Ukrainian visions of the Donbas and the postcolonial descriptions of the region by its artists and writers changed throughout the period of independence. In her work dedicated to the borderland, decolonial scholar Gloria Anzaldúa spoke of her displaced identity as a mestiza (Chicana, U.S.-born Mexican), including linguistic, cultural, and social violent fusion, where she saw no possibility for maintaining rigid boundaries, keeping an “enemy within,” as she defines the ambivalent Other. She sees the breaking down of subject– object duality and the stance against rigidity as the only way for release that “could bring the end of the rape, of violence, of war” (Anzaldúa 1987, 79–80). Donbas is such a “mestiza” of Ukrainian culture, and this explains its historical “in-betweenness” which has been often taken for indecisiveness or even for Russia’s colonialist stance. As with any filter, it needs to be permeable, yet flexible and resilient enough to transform and absorb external impacts. Kateryna Zarembo speaks about the Donbas myth as a “tabula rasa” that historically emerged only because of the Soviet industrialization

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processes; she criticizes such a homogenous view of the synthetic construct marked by the very notion of the “Donbas”—Donetsk Coal Basin— and emphasizes the cultural, ethnic, and political diversity proper to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that are habitually united under its umbrella. She sees this labeling as a result of the historical “othering” of the region, speaking about its “loneliness” and “isolation,” as a result of its inner orientalization as a Ukrainian “Far East,” the complex agency and identity of which were long misunderstood even by Ukrainian intellectuals (Zarembo 2022, 12; 23–24). The photographic series Donbas-Chocolate (1997) by Arsen Savadov presents the issues of marginality, exoticization, and otherness that the region faced after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Fig. 2.2). The figures of coal miners dressed in ballet tutus, covered in coal dust, talk to the

Fig. 2.2  Arsen Savadov, from the Donbas-Chocolate series, 1997. Image courtesy of the artist

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viewers through their obvious out-of-placeness, provocation, and clash of homoeroticism with patriarchal bodily normativity. The inability of the protagonists to find a nonconflicting identity, which the artist views as grotesque, is the key to the description of the regional situation as seen from the capital. The borderline existence of Donbas culture, its in-betweenness, is presented from a political point of view of regionalist differences fostered in the 1990s by President Kuchma’s regime, at the time when Savadov shot this series. The filtering function of the border was not yet performed as divisive, but rather as contributing to the intensified exchange, which nevertheless had nothing to offer to the region but its marginal interpretation. The colonial exoticization unfolds in full in Savadov’s photography, as in the discussed works of Hohol, as a type of hybridity of the “middle culture” that Hundorova proposed to view through the lens of kitsch as a marking of the inferiority of the colonized. Savadov’s vision was informed by the Soviet colonial extractivist politics of the recent past and criticized the distance imposed for the marginalization of the border-adjacent territories, as their double othering, by Ukrainian and Russian states. Postcoloniality in this photographic series is also still uneven: the ways of recombining narratives are informed by the recent political crises. These are reflected in the references to the Swan Lake ballet not only as a symbol of the recent calamity and decomposition of the Soviet state—but also by the mere fact that Savadov’s take on reality is radically monochrome. In the staged photographs, black coal dust is a powerful marking of hard, underpaid labor, while the white ballet costumes mark persistence in the “embellished” crisis of self-identification, proper to the entire post-Soviet space but leaving its particular trace on borderline territories. Savadov’s photographs depict subjects of postcolonial ambivalence, secluded in the in-between space. This postcolonial hybridity has been weaponized by Russia in the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The photographic series Victories of the Defeated (2014–2018) by Yevgenia Belorusets shows a very different Donbas, still suffering from its peripheral status, yet existing in the fully fledged postcolonial stage within the struggle against Russian occupation (Fig. 2.3). In her documentary photography, Belorusets explored the harsh reality behind the everyday routine of working-class people in the Donetsk Region in the towns of Debaltseve, Lysychansk, Vuhlehirsk, and Popasna, among others. The artist aimed to break the silence about the living conditions of these people and the reasons for their marginalization in the context of the threat of Russian occupation of these towns. While having a general interest in the everyday lives of local miners in the proximity of war, the artist focused on

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Fig. 2.3  Yevgenia Belorusets, from the Victories of the Defeated series, 2014–2018. Image courtesy of the artist

the social roles of the women who worked at the mines. With an unrestricted insight into their personal spaces, Belorusets depicted an unembellished, raw reality of the conditions of poverty and hopelessness surrounding these women. The descriptive, uninvolved approach she assumes in documenting people in their living conditions intersects with a seeming disinterest in the technical side of the documentary process: the artist does not filter out the photographs’ noise, blurriness, and slightly unbalanced perspectives, pushing it closer to reportage photography. The ambivalence represented by the series refers to the postcolonial condition of existence in the disputed space and the necessity to justify breaking with this space by looking at the actual faces of the protagonists of the series and challenging the central-peripheral relation by drawing the focus of attention to them. The decolonial approach emerges as it dismantles the hierarchy, shifting the places and bringing more visibility to the subaltern. However, as the front line shifts, particularly with the escalation of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the prospects of decoloniality in the region largely turn to the risks of new neocolonial oppression and the actualized necessity of anti-colonial resistance, with the destruction of cities, incessant shelling, atrocities, and murders. However, the capacity to see the

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faces of the victims turns them from “absent” to “present” subjects, and their visibility offers agency. Returning to the “mestiza” sensibility of the Donbas, another line of division goes through the linguistic situation of the region, which resonates with Belorusets’s discussion mentioned previously. Zarembo points out that the Russian language spoken in the area was never similar to its version spoken in Russia, and the Ukrainian language, under the influence of its Russian counterpart, was modified too, turning into its local version (Zarembo 2022, 35). The translational filter formed a distinct cultural identity expressed in language, which, being a borderland version of self, was excluded from both zones of influence. Not accidentally, Zarembo brings up the notion of “isolation” in the region as a metaphor—it is also a symbol of employing syncretic polarization through the contraposition of the meanings and activities potentially present in the same place, depending on the authority it belongs to. One of Ukraine’s most successful cultural centers, Izolyatsia, created on the site of a former insulation plant, functioned as a contemporary art center between 2010 and 2014 before turning into a notorious illegal prison described by Aseyev, as I discussed previously in this chapter. In its functioning as the first international art center in the Donbas, Izolyatsia was dedicated to integrating contemporary art practices with the local, industrial context in order to revitalize local culture through international collaboration. It was the first project of its kind in Eastern Ukraine. In 2014, however, the center was seized and looted by Russia-backed militants of the self-proclaimed, unrecognized “Donetsk People’s Republic.” The site-specific installations by international artists, such as Pascale Marthine Tayou, Daniel Buren, and Leandro Erlich, were destroyed. The site of the cultural center, which was intended to foster sustainable development of the Donetsk region through cultural activity and artistic collaboration, began serving the opposite aim with its occupation by pro-Russian militants, now immersing the area into the chaos of domination through violence and the power hierarchies based on force and fear. As I speak about the prospects of the decolonial situation in the ruined Donbas, an important question arises regarding the mechanism of implementing syncretic polarization and radical disentanglement in the condition of the in-between “third” space as a container for cultural translation. The translational quality of space, physically damaged by the violence of the invasion, however, is reduced, as is the possibility of breaking away from the subject–object rigid duality enhanced by the war.

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CHAPTER 3

Ambicoloniality

3.1   Polymorphous Coloniality To challenge the intrinsic binarism of colonial formations, Sheldon Pollock has introduced the notion of the morphology of domination, which relies on a multidirectional network of impacts found within a colonizer/colonized relationship (Pollock 1993, 76–78). Such a morphology has been present in the Russian imperial structure and, subsequently, in the Soviet system, incorporating primary and secondary vectors of power and peripheral relationships. The wider panorama of the morphology of domination as a fluid structure, as opposed to the rigid formation of the colonial matrix of power, lays the groundwork for Russia’s polymorphous colonial behavior, indebted, not least, to Russia’s geographical extension and its numerous shared borders. This pluriformity is capable of engaging various contradictory discourses about Russia’s geopolitical intentions and veiling its colonial aspirations by mimicking various positions within the colonial morphology of domination. In the case of the Russian-Ukrainian colonial relationship, the mutual impact changed the intensity, form, types of hybridity, and modes of ambicolonial affection employed over time. Polymorphous coloniality in this model changes according to the fluctuating geopolitical situation and the decisions of power holders. A polymorphous colonizer can mimic the

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position of the colonized, adopt certain cultural practices, or assume the position of victimhood to gain sympathy or support. This can be seen in situations where colonial powers have claimed to be victims of oppression while simultaneously engaging in oppressive and exploitative practices against the colonized. Polymorphous coloniality represents the idea that colonialism can take various forms and adapt to different geopolitical positions and power structures. It is a flexible and dynamic system that changes and morphs depending on the needs and desires of the power holders. Russia’s polymorphous coloniality is fully realized through its double consciousness. Both manipulated historical narratives and discourses of Russia’s contemporary society, as a society looking at both the East and West, come into interplay. Russia’s centuries-long dissatisfaction with its place in world power hierarchies led to the creation of a mimicry mechanism that worked in two ways. First, borrowing from the narratives of the Cold War as an anti-­ imperialist resilience, Russia imitates anti-colonial resistance in its war-­ fueling propaganda, exercising its invented victimhood as a geopolitical “other.” The strand of anti-Western expression that has become popular in Russia builds upon this position. It is noteworthy that in this model Ukraine is affiliated with the global political West and is simultaneously viewed as Russia’s imaginary West. This gives Ukraine particular significance in Russia’s picture of the world as a representation of the binary divisions present before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The second strand of Russia’s polymorphous coloniality refers to the complex affective relationship between Russia and Ukraine, formed by centuries of struggle and domination. Ukraine, in this colonial optic, is viewed through the lens of similarity as a “brotherhood nation”—another, yet “the same,” Slavic nation. The colonizer’s blindness to intrinsic differences, overshadowed by colonial belonging,  is the key to projecting the situation of the oppressed and their unique characteristics onto the oppressor, resulting in particular “self-othering.” The misuse of history in Russia’s polymorphous discourse and its attempts to manipulate the colonial politics of memory have triggered further decolonial processes in its former colonies. The disentanglement from memory issues and historical discourse in the case of Ukraine are largely conditioned by the contamination of the contested memory space by Russian propaganda. The active neocolonial invasion and its superficial manipulation of history condition Ukraine’s resistance to these attempts.

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While the 2014–2021 “hybrid” war prompted the reexamination of history as a means of combating propaganda, the escalation of violence across Ukraine’s entire territory demanded a full break with the contested history, turning instead to the harsh reality of anti-colonial resistance in the present and the decolonial production of new, unequivocal, and unambiguous public history. Russia’s polymorphous coloniality extends beyond its atrocious actions in Ukraine. In Russia’s eyes, it is a tool of universal domination; in practice, it becomes an illusion-producing machine that will lead to its downfall as soon as the smoke dissolves. Peter Pomerantsev analyzes Russia’s capacity for multifaceted propaganda as a force sustaining the state. He shows how the Russian government amends narratives and switches discourses to its advantage, resulting in “European right-wing nationalists being seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. The result is an array of voices working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT [Russia Today]” (Pomerantsev 2014, 73). This ability to mimic the audience’s expectations forms the cornerstone of Russia’s discursive transformation in its neocolonial attempts. In this respect, Russia appears as a classical Freudian “polymorphous perverse” capable of engaging with any entity to satisfy its primordial drives and colonial desire (Freud 1953). A mask of the oppressed, worn by the oppressor, enters into a dialogue with the notion of mimicry in postcolonial studies, in which the colonized is expected to imitate the appearance of the colonizer. The inverted logic of colonial mimicry in the case of Russia is more akin to that of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Russia masterfully uses the claim of descent from the Soviet model by camouflaging its own oppressive and capitalist nature, just as the Soviet Union concealed its imperialist nature by claiming its “anti-imperialist” orientation. This position at the crossroads of ambiguity has helped veil Russia’s colonialist essence for decades. The existing models to date rely on Eurocentric and Western-centric perspectives on colonialism, further reinforced by the Cold War-era binary divisions. The proposed postcolonial/decolonial examination of the former post-Soviet space subverts this habitual dichotomy and brings polymorphism into the spotlight. Genocidal actions can

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be camouflaged by such unevenness in discourse; the worst war crimes can be presented as illusory. The increasingly flickering logic of Russia’s coloniality revealed itself through steps where Russia appeared as a victim, a savior, a judge, and an oppressed truth-sayer—until the full-scale invasion shed light on Russia’s profoundly oppressive essence and its colonialist ambition. The epistemology of violence incorporated into Russian society has been fully revealed only now with the breach of Ukraine’s state border by Russian military actions. Yet, in the groundbreaking novel The Moscoviad (1993), published shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych depicted Russia’s post-1991 development as a failed attempt to maintain and conceal its imperial and colonial underpinnings within a superficial postcolonial transformation. The empire was changing its snakeskin, was reconsidering the habitual totalitarian assumptions; it discussed, imitated a change of laws and of the rules of daily life; it improvised on the topic of the hierarchy of values. The empire toyed with freedom, thinking that this way it could preserve itself through renewal. But it wasn’t worth changing the skin. This was the only skin it had. Now, having crawled out of its skin, the old bitch is in the throes of agony. (Andrukhovych 2008 [1993], 28)1

Similarly, in the work of Ukrainian painter Vlada Ralko, from her Lviv Diary series (2022–ongoing), the ever-changing face of the empire is portrayed through the anti-colonial struggle against it (Fig. 3.1). It is incorporated in this work through the interplay of power positions that the sides repeatedly exchange as the military situation changes. The fusion of erotic and violent imagery creates a visceral and emotive response in the viewer, highlighting the intensity and complexity of the trauma experienced by those caught up in the war situation. The drawings are excessive and grotesque in their manner, as the artist fills nearly the entire paper with sketches of male and female, and, in some cases, cupid-like figures, who represent different stages of a struggle with a two-headed pigeon-like eagle. At times, it is only the decapitated head of the monster that appears 1  Імперія міняла свою зміїну шкіру, переглядала звичні тоталітарні уявлення, дискутувала, імітувала зміну законів та життєвого укладу, імпровізувала на тему ієрархії вартостей. Імперія загравала зі свободою, гадаючи, що таким чином збереже оновленою саму себе. Але міняти шкіру було не варто. Вона виявилася єдиною. Тепер, вилізши зі звичайної шкіри, стара курва в муках конає. Translated from Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky.

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Fig. 3.1  Vlada Ralko, from the Lviv Diary series, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

in the drawings; at other times, we witness an epic fight as part of the heroic narrative. Informed by religious iconography and pornographic imagery, this series draws on the figurative and bodily reinterpretation of colonial entanglement between Russia and Ukraine and Russia’s particular colonial morphism. The Soviet symbols that occasionally reemerge in the drawings imply the consideration of this fight as a final and irreversible

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battle that will dismantle not only the falsified pseudo-­imperial narrative used by Russia but also the entire post-Soviet space, or, at least, Ukraine’s belonging to it. The underlying development of Russian colonialism under the veil of the 1990s democratic evolution, in its ambition of both othering and self-­ othering through suppression echoes Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics” as a dark side of a postcolonial system that mimics colonial rule in its aims and methods (Mbembe 2019). Mbembe points out the particular rhetorical inversion of such politics aimed at mortifying through othering: “Through a strange transmutation, victims are now summoned to bear, in addition to the prejudice suffered, the guilt that their executioners ought to feel” (Mbembe 2019, 39). In Mbembe’s model, where the blame is put on the victims, they replicate violence by returning it to the perpetrators through a never-ending cycle. The creation of such a vicious circle is beneficial for the colonial ambition of Russia, yet Ukraine’s only option to cease the war violence is contributing to the unveiling of Russia’s discursive polymorphism and establishing a decolonial status quo of the victim and the aggressor. The decolonial processes in Ukraine strive for the dissolution of ambivalence and hybridity for an additional reason: ambiguous regard for the “other” is at the core of Russia’s propaganda machinery. Russia’s actions, driven by both the colonization of Ukraine and a form of self-colonization through emotional attachment, are characterized by the manipulation of historical narratives fueled by propaganda. In this process, the colonizing entity undermines itself in pursuit of dominating another nation. Paradoxically, in doing so, it inadvertently subjects its power to the influence of those once oppressed. The ongoing invasion, perceived by Russia as a quest for supremacy, is explored in this chapter as “ambicolonial thinking.” Within this framework, the invader becomes ensnared in their colonialist actions and propaganda, consequently losing their grasp of reality. Ambicoloniality, defined as the interplay of vital influences across a shared border, distinguishes itself notably from postcolonial concepts such as “hybridity,” “hybridization,” and “ambivalence,” as articulated by scholars like Bhabha and García Canclini. It centers not only on common attributes and underlying syncretism but also on bidirectional and multidirectional influences—both symbolic and political—rooted in the trauma-­ contextualized impact mediated through propaganda and direct interactions. Contrary to conventional coloniality, the concept of

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ambicoloniality challenges the notion of colonialism solely as a result of economic and political inequality or the initial disparities in ethno-national hierarchies of power, encompassing subject–object dynamics. Instead, it envisions power as a symbolic exchange anchored in the cultural potency of the involved parties. This theoretical approach aids in unraveling the distinct developmental dynamics of Russia and Ukraine across their shared borders. Rather than focusing on the specific direction of the impact, it highlights the intricate filtration of power influences.

3.2   Various Ways of Forming Coloniality: The Ambicolonial Approach The current intensification of ambicolonial processes is closely tied to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia’s war in Ukraine presents a paradoxical situation: the colonizer destroys their own state to conquer another country and, in doing so, subjects their power to the symbolic power of the formerly oppressed. To understand this contradiction, one needs to look at the ways this interdependency is manifested in the (neo)colonialist behavior and resistance to it and to examine how the loss of control over reality due to the incessant work of the invader’s propaganda machine becomes the subject of what I call “ambicolonial thinking.” The prefix “ambi-” refers to the symmetrical, mirroring processes of entanglement ongoing in the colonized state and its colonizer. The production of hybrid narratives is central to this mutuality which expands its coverage from political and cultural terms to the symbolic domain, carrying the incorporated subversion of power hierarchies. Ambicoloniality is a concept that builds on the notion of “coloniality,” originally coined by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1988). Quijano has proposed that coloniality refers to the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the present, including how colonial power structures and hierarchies (which he calls “the colonial matrix of power”) continue to shape social relations and cultural practices (Quijano 2000). This concept formed the foundation for decolonial studies, particularly the work of the Modernity/Coloniality group, which looks at the way the colonial relationship is reenacted in the countries of Latin America, preserving in modernity the power relations shaped by the colonialism of the past. Ambicoloniality emerges as an alternative to the coloniality/decoloniality dichotomy, which I propose to apply to the particular conditions of the

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Ukrainian-Russian relationship  and which can be expanded to further sets of relationships in former Russian colonies, particularly in the postSoviet space. One of the differences between the decolonial option and the model developed in this book is that the formation of modernity in Ukraine and Russia has not had an immediate impact on colonialist relationships and the forming of ambicoloniality. Walter Mignolo, in an attempt to bring together Latin American and Eastern European ways of forming coloniality, proposed that the modernity in the Russian Empire and its colonies could be counted from the expulsion of the Golden Horde from Muscovy in the late fifteenth century (Mignolo 2011, 4). This proposal presents two visible logical discrepancies. First, the long-term weakening of the Golden Horde challenges the premise that their expulsion instantly marked the turn to Eurocentric modernity. Second, the idea of turning from an East-looking nomadic invasion to a double consciousness of the self-colonizing Russian empire seemingly oversimplifies the complex cultural and geopolitical dynamics of this binary transition. The arrival of “modernity” in Latin America as a result of the sixteenth-­ century conquest has been conditioned by a clash of worlds, which led to the profound and rapid development of syncretisms in religion and culture. When sedimented over several centuries, these fusions have created a particular type of hybridity—that of mestizo form, which, for example, in Mexico gave way to the development of the concept of the “fifth race” as part of twentieth-century revolutionary mestizo ideology, examined in detail and elevated to a Mexican postrevolutionary national idea by José Vasconcelos (1925). In the case of Ukraine—and other now-independent countries of Eastern Europe, such as Belarus, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, or Georgia, among others, the condition of side-by-side coexistence with the more powerful neighbor resulted in a slow hybridization of mutual impacts. This slow fusion formed a much stronger bond between the colonizer and the colonized, including the impossibility of drawing a divisive line within some of the syncretic formations and the related inability of identifying one side’s agency in the production of these hybrid constructions of culture. In contrast to the idea of self-colonization, developed by Alexander Kiossev, where the self-colonized population adopts the customs and values of the more powerful “other” and internalizes their own oppression (Kiossev 2011 [1995]), ambicoloniality involves a more complex interplay of agency between the two parties. While the power structure is twofold,

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as it is formed through political ambitions and symbolism at play, the agency is divided between both the colonizer and the colonized. Ukraine, in this case, takes an important role in epistemological production that has a historical impact on Russia’s development. Subsequently, coloniality unfolds in two directions: that of the immediate suppressive and appropriative impact of the colonizer on Ukraine’s territory and the returning symbolic and power repercussions on the colonizer’s cultural domain. This filtering of mutual impacts forms a strong engagement over centuries and proposes an interdependent, two-sided model, as opposed to the one-­ sided work of coloniality in the colonial matrix of power. Due to the strength of impact, in an ambicolonial relationship, there is a fascination of the colonizer with the symbolic field of the subaltern country and a desire for its appropriation. This is expressed in a more affective way than in traditional forms of colonization, as the desire for cultural, political, and social adherence to another state’s customs and traditions is driven by a deep emotional attachment. The neocolonial war of Russia against Ukraine shows the profound connection between ambicolonial affection and Lacanian jouissance (Lacan 1992 [1959–1960]), where the desire receives destructive and deadly effects, both on its colonial subject and object.

3.3  Synchronic and Diachronic Colonization Different types of coloniality are linked to different types of colonization, and Russia’s case is no exception. Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a classification of synchronic and diachronic processes as otherwise static one-­ time changes and evolutionary transformations spread in time, respectively (Saussure 1959 [1916]). I propose using this typology to describe processes of colonization through their logic of unfolding over time. Synchronic colonization refers to the colonization of a space through a series of events that occur within a relatively short time frame, rather than over an extended period. This may involve the rapid exploitation of resources or the imposition of political and economic control on a particular region or population. The war of Russia against Ukraine is an attempt at such synchronic colonization. The two phases of the war, an aggressively imposed hybrid war in 2014 and the full-scale violent invasion in 2022, are exemplary of different strategies through which such synchronicity can be achieved. The former relies on an aggressive disinformation campaign with the aim of invading limited territories through either

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fostering colonial expressions of separatism or fabricating evidence of popular support through imitation of legal action (the so-called 2014 referendums in Donbas and Crimea). The latter draws on unexpected, rapid, and extremely violent action to establish colonial domination through military violence. Another example would be the first years of the conquest of the Americas, when violently imposed syncretism had only several decades to develop fully. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla has proposed that, contrary to the modern mestizo ideology of Mexico shaped by Vasconcelos and despite his claims of civilizational unification, from day one the Spanish Conquista relied on violence and destruction far more than on the fusion of European and indigenous cultures, while hybridity, which began emerging in the aftermath of these actions, per Batalla, has never been truly completed (Bonfil Batalla 1996 [1987], 103). We can find proof of this statement in the violent destruction of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1521 and the resurgent interest in its recovery as an archaeological site only in the mid-­ twentieth century. In contrast, diachronic colonization presents a more gradual or long-­ term process of colonization, in which power and control are slowly consolidated over time. This might involve the gradual imposition of colonial policies and practices, the infiltration of colonial culture and values, creolization and the production of syncretic narratives, slow epistemological transformation, and the suppression of local cultures and languages over an extended period. The colonization of Ukraine by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union is an example of such centuries-long approaches. Ambicoloniality is directly impacted by the process of diachronic colonization when the colonizer’s cultural influences are established over centuries of domination. The cultural influences of the colonized people projected onto the imperial center also form an important point of reference as they are incorporated into the process of appropriation by the dominant culture. However, the extent of such appropriation differs in comparison with the classic colonial model that presupposes geographical proximity, because ambicolonial cultural influences do not always produce the effect of exoticization—moreover, within a short time, they stop being distinguished as borrowings and begin to directly impact the colonizer’s cultural sphere from the inside. Both synchronic and diachronic modes of colonization combined throughout history to ensure the dominance of the power holder in the

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region. However, the particular neocolonialist stance of Russia in support of exclusively synchronic colonization is a unique mark of contemporary times, when lightning-fast development receives priority over slow transformation. This one-sided approach has shown its numerous weaknesses and failed as a strategy for Russia’s neocolonial aspirations. The neocolonialism of Russia’s war in Ukraine is synchronic, and in this way Russia is attempting to break with the centuries-old model of diachronic colonization, addressing Ukraine as a “Western” territory, employing methods similar to those used in the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 or the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but amplifying their colonialist scope and destructive ambition. This process also manifests a particular transformation in the perception of Ukraine in Russia: its profound conceptual externalization, which marks for Russia the necessity of Ukraine’s reconquest, not only political but also symbolic, and the creation of new syncretisms to substitute the dissolving colonial symbolic field created by the past processes of diachronic colonization. Affective ambicoloniality can be constituted only by the process of diachronic colonization, which gives it shape and volume; however, the consequences of such an entanglement are manifested in the jouissance of synchronic colonization. The aim of Russia’s military action is ambiguous, as it is aimed at the reconsideration and renewal of the patterns of colonial domination—and at the same time presupposes the dissolution of ambicoloniality that draws on centuries-old syncretisms, which proved to be dysfunctional as elements of Russia’s domination in Ukraine’s postcolonial condition. In response to the synchronic neocolonial attempts, the decolonization process can be only “swift,” induced by decolonial processes that resemble the radicalism of the anti-colonial struggle (in parallel with the actual armed resistance to Russia’s violent invasion). This decolonization process is opposed to decolonization through “slow” postcolonial transformation when the narratives and discourses of power and oppression are continuously reexamined, reconsidered, and reassembled to constitute new interpretations of contested history. This swift decolonization, which at times takes the form of anti-colonial resistance, is effective in a profoundly ambicolonial situation formed by diachronic colonization, in a situation enhanced by the ongoing synchronic colonization. It evokes processes of syncretic polarization that address the main paradox incorporated by both subaltern and dominant cultural productions.

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3.4  The Elements of Ambicoloniality This book proposes that ambicoloniality is constituted by four interconnected yet autonomous processes: filtering, appropriation, affection, and transgression. In the conditions of ambicoloniality, the filtering of mutual influences occurs through the borderline, which is uneven and permeable, allowing an exchange of cultural elements, visions  and expressions of power. The shared border between Ukraine and Russia presents such a filter that works twofold and shapes epistemologies adjacent to this divisive (and merging) line. Boaventura de Sousa Santos introduces a notion of the abyssal line, which divides the space of power and action of the colonizer from the subaltern space of the colonial oppressed. This line creates not only the hierarchy of power but also the hierarchy of knowledge, which restricts access to knowledge production mechanisms to the subaltern (Sousa Santos 2018, 20). The borderline (and with the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the frontline) resembles this abyssal line between dominant and oppressed knowledge and discourses of the colonizer and the colonized; however, it has a divergence in one important characteristic: that of reciprocal filtering of influences and ways and modes of forming knowledge. The ambicoloniality of Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine manifested in the visual culture and literature of both countries. On the one hand, it is manifested through hybridity and syncretic expression; on the other hand, it has a permanently incorporated potential for struggle. The appropriation of the cultural legacy of the colonized country is not unusual for any type of colonial relationship. However, when we speak about Russia’s appropriation of the Ukrainian cultural legacy, we face the very process of ambicolonial impact. Ukrainian intellectuals, artists, and writers have been oppressed for centuries—to mention but a few: the closure of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 1819, Taras Shevchenko’s exile, and the closure of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius which envisioned Ukrainian autonomy in 1847; the Valuev Circular (1863) and the Ems Ukaz (1876), aimed at the suppression of the Ukrainian language; the 1930s “Executed Renaissance” and the Stalinist killing of the nearly  entire Mykhailo Boichuk’s artistic circle—followed by the subsequent destruction of their works; the arrests of the “sixtiers” intellectual generation (including Alla Horska’s murder in 1970 and Sergei Parajanov’s arrest in 1973); and, finally, the imprisonment and death of the poet Vasyl Stus in 1985. However, Russia has always looked at Ukraine through a

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cultural and intellectual lens, appropriating the achievements of what remained from Ukrainian cultural production following the oppression. The ambicolonial drive, emerging from the colonial necessity to further appropriate cultural elements, marks the affect leading not only to a symbolic transgression of the abyssal line of knowledge but also to the eventual physical transgression of the state border through Russia’s war actions. Russian imperial affect towards Ukraine is demonstrated in the poem by Russian poet Joseph Brodsky “On the Independence of Ukraine” (1993), which is strongly criticized by Ukrainian intellectuals as an example of Soviet Russian dissidents’ imperialist thinking: Farewell, khokhly!2 We’ve lived together, that’s enough. Shall we spit into the Dnipro: perhaps it will flow backward, Disdainfully proud of us, like a speedy train, overcrowded with Leather corners and age-old grievances. Farewell! Your sky, your bread, are not needed by us. —We’d rather suffocate with gruel and ceiling— There’s no need to spoil blood, tear clothes on the chest. Love seems to have ended if it ever existed.3 (Brodsky 1993, cited in Bertelsen 2015, 286)

This poem presents a manifesto of Russia’s colonial affect, a feeling shared between the lyrical hero of the verse and the writer’s own imperial aspiration. Contrary to the general sarcastic and intimidating tone of the poem, the loss of Ukraine is defined through its natural richness. The Dnipro River is depicted as an inaccessible and monumental element of the landscape; the other defining elements are sky and bread, symbolizing freedom and fertility—and the inability to possess them, which is traumatic for the poet—while Russia’s domain is limited to pomace and ceiling, presenting it from a powerless lens. Olga Bertelsen, while viewing Brodsky’s poem as exemplary of cultural imperialism, has pointed out that it also represented  Despective form for “Ukrainians.”  Прощевайте, хохлы! Пожили вместе, хватит. / Плюнуть, что ли, в Днипро: может, он вспять покатит,  /  брезгуя гордо нами, как скорый, битком набитый  /  кожаными [отвернутыми]  углами и вековой обидой.  / Не поминайте лихом! Вашего неба, хлеба / нам—подавись мы жмыхом и потолком—не треба. / Нечего портить кровь, рвать на груди одежду.  /  Кончилась, знать, любовь, коли была промежду. Translation from Russian is mine. 2 3

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the historical “Communists’ perception of Ukraine as a place of resistance, a place of pride and dignity” (Bertelsen 2015, 277). Imperial double-consciousness unfolds fully in Brodsky’s poem, expressed both in the usage of the discriminatory term “khokhly,” denoting Ukrainians in a diminishing way; the idea “to spit into the Dnipro” from helpless fury; and the mention of Ukraine’s productive richness as the point of affection. The declaration of the “end of love” indicates the affective entanglement, presumably in the past, but the expressive language of the poem is far from indifference. The poem is also indicative of how the ambicolonial affection carries an incorporated subversion of the power hierarchy within the colonial matrix of power, turning the hierarchical system into a multivectoral morphology of domination and mixing up the signals of power and accountability, as discussed further in this chapter. Ambicoloniality has colonial drives as its underlying cause. The Russian imperialist vision of Ukraine is an ultimate expression of ambicoloniality, as interpreted by Brodsky in his poem. This case is also exemplary of how the affective double consciousness of the colonialist system procreates in the personalities who have been previously rejected by this system, with subsequent attempts at putting them behind the abyssal line. The former victims of the oppression, such as Soviet dissidents, become the advocates of colonial violence when they refer to the morphology of power as a system of imperial values. Ambicoloniality is, therefore, a condition that involves a complex interplay of agency and affective desire, and it reflects the ongoing Russian aspiration for neocolonialism in the present. Within the logic of its functioning, the ambicolonial transgression occurs when the colonial epistemology fosters a stronger entanglement to the object of colonial aspiration, reversing the vector of impact to the former subaltern. While the poem by Brodsky is exemplary of the verbal transgression of social norms and values by imperialism, the physical transgression occurs when such imperial thinking is put into action. The popular support for the war in Russia4 forms an indicator of the justification of neocolonial violence incorporated within the ambicolonial drive. This ambicolonial transgression, however, is self-subversive and in the context of physical conflict, self-destructive, as 4  The article by Sviatoslav Hnizdovskyi in Atlantic Council indicates a recurrent value of between 55% and 75%, according to different polls held in 2022–2023. Available online at: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-strong-is-russian-public-support-for-the-invasion-of-ukraine/.

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it breaches the dividing line between the (former or potential) colonized and (former or aspiring) colonizer and releases the destructive impact of violent actions both ways, impacting the entire morphology of power. In the shift from the postcolonial condition to a decolonial situation, this ambicolonial transgression occurs as an attempt to violate the borderline, to prevent it from its concretion over time and the inevitable loss of filtering function with the decline in hybridity. The dependency on the double-sided relationship is crucial for the imaginary balance where two countries stand as two geopolitical pillars. Once the oppressed is emancipated, the oppressor falls under the weight of the demolishing structure of power. This failure represents the ultimate loss of not only territories but also the predatory and manipulative cultural system supporting such an entanglement. The aggressive war of Russia aims to maintain this imaginary balance, substituting power sustaining the ambicolonial system with violence; however, what escapes their attention is that the opposite pillar became decrepit long ago. Ukraine has undergone several “rites of passage” in constituting a separate identity: from three Maidan revolutions in 1990, 2004, and 2014, to the proven ability of active resistance through the military frontline and the decolonization of the cultural field.

3.5  The Eurasian Polymorphous In pragmatic terms, one of the constitutive drives behind Russian polymorphous colonialism lies in its vast geographical spread that manifests Russia’s belonging to East and West simultaneously, thus subverting the usual East/West (or North/South) oppositions. Russia’s position at the intersection of East and West, as a borderline region that merges the Eurocentric perspective with the Orientalist one, forms a synthetic notion of “Eurasia” that is currently debated through the ways of contemporary “world-making,” particularly in academic discourse. The umbrella notion of “Eurasia” became popular in the mid-nineteenth century as a geological and geographical term that, in Russia quickly acquired political anti-­ Eurocentric coloring. Russian historian Vladimir Lamanskii wrote: “Properly speaking, Europe is a peninsula of Asia” (Lamanskii 1892). The notion was then reconsidered within a Russian imperialist framework by the Eurasianist movement and, subsequently, in the twenty-first century, appropriated by Russian ultraright neo-Eurasianist ideologists who transformed it into official wartime propaganda.

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The poem from the Apotheosis of Militianer cycle (1978) by Russian poet Dmitry Prigov ironically grasps the grandeur delusion produced as a result of Russia’s alleged mediation through power and control between the East and the West: When here, on duty, Militianer stands, All the space opens to him in Vnukovo Militianer looks to the West and to the East, And the emptiness opens behind them.5 (Prigov 1991 [1978])

The central position of Militianer as a representative of power, connoting both domination and violence, marks the intersection of cultural influences and political hierarchies, a central space in the colonial matrix of power, connecting East with West, Asia with Europe. Vnukovo, a suburb of Moscow that contains an international airport, contests the relationship between the local and the global perspectives. The authority here receives an almost religious interpretation, as an “all-seeing eye” watching the territories beyond the border. And there is nothing beyond the East and the West in this simplified image of the world—only a polarized dichotomy, an eternal struggle enveloped in a vacuum. This interpretation reflects on the ways Russia has positioned itself throughout centuries—from the “inner colonization” of the people within its territory to external military campaigns, aimed at expanding the Russian empire. The Soviet situation not only left this colonial ambition to control the two cardinal directions unresolved but also preserved and deepened it through political tensions and the nuclear race of the Cold War. Ukraine historically occupied the particular position “to the West” of this self-contained dichotomy. However, it is also too close to be considered as a separate West by Russia (as opposed to Russia’s own Occident), unlike, for example, the Baltic states, which historically had a special place in the colonial center–periphery relationship, being  seen as more “civilized” to the extent of being closer to the actual West than “the second-­ rate empire.” The ambicoloniality as filtering of mutual influences over the shared border in these conditions takes on new significance: that of a 5  Когда здесь на посту стоит Милицанер / Ему до Внуково простор весь открывается / На Запад и Восток глядит Милицанер  / И пустота за ними открывается. Translation from Russian is mine.

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double filter between “real” and “Russian” Wests. This inner hierarchy, based not on actual political power but on geographic position, played a significant role in forming ambivalence in Russia’s vision of Ukraine” as “not anymore” Eastern but “not yet” Western, however more Western than Eastern (despite close historical links to another “second-rate empire,” as proposed by Tlostanova—that is, the Ottoman Empire, as well as the “first-rate” Habsburg Empire), with all relevant colonial implications that can be derived from this hybrid perspective. The inner split of Russia across the East–West axis formed by the Ural Mountains and its spread of 11 time zones presents a geographical discrepancy that has historically challenged Russia’s internal colonial expansion and territorial integrity. It is, however, the same extensive distance and vast, sparsely populated spaces that keep Russia’s homogenization policies of extreme centralization and control  in check. The concept of Eurasia plays a central role in the application of oppressive policies through the settler colonial model; being an indiscrete, overly unifying notion with no defined boundaries, it also engages with external territories in a similarly colonialist fashion. This colonialist connotation of “Eurasia” was further developed by pseudo-philosophical narratives imbued with fantasies of domination in this utopian region, the most notorious of which is the ultra-right  theorizing of Alexander Dugin that  provided a conceptual background for the violent propaganda justifying Russia’s ongoing aggressive invasion of Ukraine. The notion of Eurasia was once viewed by Western scholars as an acceptable synthetic alternative to the description of Russia’s domination by focusing on the centralized European part of Russia. The use of the concept in Western thought following the post-1989 world restructuring dwelled on the synthesis of Oriental and Occidental constructions proposed under the umbrella of “Eurasia” and rather naively hoped for internal decolonizing impulses that could be, if not fostered, then at least subtly outlined by such a perspective. Before Russia’s war on Ukraine turned the page of the global textbook on history, in 2006, Gayatri Spivak asked a question: “Must the post-Soviet world be thought of as a new Eurasia for the postcolonial viewpoint to stick?” (Spivak et al. 2006, 828). By asking this question, she emphasized the necessity of regarding the cultural complexity and geographical diversity of post-Soviet space and the displacement of old structures of colonial power. She referred to Mark von Hagen’s view of Eurasia as an “anti-paradigm” for the post-Soviet epoch, which relied on decentering the narratives of history and moving them

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away from the rigid hierarchy of former power centers, such as imperial Russian or Soviet Russian capitals (Spivak et  al. 2006, 829, 838). Von Hagen also pointed out the dark side of such a concept as marked by a strong totalizing impulse, a desire for spatial unity, an irrational belief in self-sufficiency, and an “exceptional path” supported by the closed and nontransparent system of interrelationships (Spivak et al. 2006, 838). Von Hagen spoke of the particular indetermination of the term, noting both a disrupted history of its use and a problematic institutional integration, which caused it to remain “decentered” and “ill-defined” even after the downfall of the Soviet Union renewed interest in the notion (Von Hagen 2004, 446). These weaknesses enable contemporary Russian propaganda-­ oriented philosophy to hijack, appropriate, and eventually weaponize the term—not in its postcolonial view, as von Hagen’s liberatory anti-paradigm, but in its most dogmatic, freedom-suppressive form of imperial reconstruction,  highlighting the unity between the Russian Orient and the Russian Occident and projecting its colonizing aspirations beyond the border. The obscure and vaguely defined use of the notion of Eurasia turns it into an empty signifier that serves as a basis for ambivalence, a vessel for ambiguity in the poorly defined relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. This ambiguity tolerates colonialist manipulation of meaning, favoring the most threatening and manipulative interpretations, which also create the conditions for Russia’s aforementioned colonial polymorphism. The Eurasian self-positioning of Russia as an essential element of the morphology of domination underwent further metamorphosis with the development of the active phase of the war in Ukraine, which was unexpected for Russian strategists. As Plokhy points out, however, instead of the multipolar world that Russia hoped for, the war fostered a return to the bipolar world of the Cold War, now centered not on Washington, D.C., and Moscow but on Washington, D.C., and Beijing (Plokhy 2023, 299). In this modified colonial matrix of power, Russia appears at the crossroads of power vectors, and in relation to each of those, it finds itself in a weaker position. The notion of Eurasia, therefore, instead of representing a consolidation of power, represents its dispersion; in this context, Russia appears as a “centered periphery” situated between two world powers. The centered periphery marks the overlap between two models: the exclusive and centralized colonial matrix of power and the fluctuating, uneven morphology of domination while allowing Russia to camouflage its colonialist ambitions under subaltern claims.

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This fluctuating duality of Orient/Occident is the subject of Russian postmodernist writer Victor Pelevin’s novel S.N.U.F.F. (2011), which extends Russia’s violent colonialist desire and double consciousness to the point of absurdity (Pelevin 2011). In this anti-utopia, the name of Ukraine is appropriated by Russia and altered from “Ukraina” to “Urkaina,” with an etymology reminiscent of the designation of convicted criminals in Russian prison jargon. This naming is absorbed by an imaginary representation of Russia, whose political structure is a khaganate (khanate) with a capital in Siberia. The population of this hypothetical country calls themselves “urks” or “orks”—as the actual colloquial naming for Russian soldiers engaged in the war in Ukraine—who speak the unofficial Upper Russian language, while the language of official bureaucracy is Upper Siberian. The main geopolitical opponent of this authoritarian formation is a democracy located in an artificial celestial island of Byzantium, an allusion to the United States and the West. This anti-utopia, which became a bestseller in Russia, interprets the contamination of Russia’s informational field with contradictory imperialist visions and colonial resentments. Pelevin follows the paradoxical work of Russian propaganda to create a distortion where the colonizer is cross-­ fertilized with the traits of the colonized. To illustrate this double consciousness of the empire, he uses references to Russia’s orientalism through the lens of marginalization and peripheral discourses and recalls the traumas of Russian internal colonization and anti-colonial struggle (such as the nineteenth-century ineffective attempts at the constitution of the Siberian sovereignty). The impact of Ukraine occupies a central place in such modeling, where the linguistic discrepancy appears as a particular case of double consciousness when (over)interpreted by Russian propaganda, which operates under the false expectation that the use of the Ukrainian language is nothing more than the officially imposed language of bureaucracy, as opposed to the colloquial use of the Russian language in private spaces. In Ukraine, however, the discussion on belonging to East or West unfolds differently through the adherence to the notions of Eastern Europe or East-Central Europe. The question of belonging to the Eurasian entity has been resolved negatively with the popular protest against Viktor Yanukovych’s intention to sign a treaty with the so-called Eurasian Union, which resulted in the 2013–2014 Euromaidan revolution marking the initial stage in Ukraine’s decolonial disentanglement. The model of

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ambicoloniality between Ukraine and Russia helps effectively dissolve the Eurasian model as an “all-seeing eye” of colonial power that experienced a metamorphosis from an imperial statement into a mere tool of manipulation.

3.6  Ambicoloniality as the Disrupted Connection: Russophone Spaces The discussion on Mykola Hohol and the multiple functions of hybridity in the previous chapter prompted another aspect of the production of narratives: the use of language as a transmission channel, which, in the context of expanding colonial aspirations, can be used to manipulate the knowledge production within a hybridized space. Weaponizing language as a channel of colonial domination can be exemplified by weaponizing texts written in this language as markers of such domination. The main question posited by the anti-colonial approach (and essential for the decolonial disentanglement) is how to disarm this discourse. Language, while playing an important role in supporting (post)colonial hybridity, is, not, however, a constitutive element of this hybridity; it also plays an external role in the process of syncretic polarization. However, it can channel elements connoting colonial belonging, postcolonial transformation, or decolonial release. In other words, language is a vessel that can be filled with any meaning and signification; it is an empty signifier, a neutral sign, which can be reduced to the speech of hatred and discrimination and lead to atrocity and war crimes,  or become an instrument for resilience, peace, and recovery. This is true for both natural languages and visual languages. It is noteworthy that the use of language for colonial domination is a double-sided process, and, in the case of Ukraine and Russia, this entanglement is profoundly rooted in ambicoloniality. If we use Wilbur Schramm’s cyclical communication model (Schramm 1954) as a metaphor for interactions in a colonial space, such a system relies on the exchange of signals: one side of the chain ensures control and suppression, while the other enforces subordination and accountability. As the abyssal line separating these two sides of communication chain slowly dissolves in the postcolonial condition, and ambicolonial filtering is in progress, both types of signals can intermittently mix with elements from the opposite side. The more one signal disrupts its opposite, the more the life cycle of coloniality

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is affected, leading to the gradual dismantling of the ontological colonial space and its fragmentation into non-interconnected elements that once constituted the system of power. The power hierarchy is replaced by incoming previously suppressed signals, which eventually form a meaningful structure subverting the status quo. As this ambicolonial reciprocal impact occurs primarily through culture, the more perplexed the exchange of cultural elements, the greater the probability of an ambicolonial situation emerging. The existence of a shared border, rather than a distant colonial relationship model such as colonialism through conquest, significantly increases the chances of this Brownian movement. As noted by Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse based on the sociological survey conducted during Euromaidan, “the ‘lingua franca’ of the average Maidan participant was Russian, or Surzhyk [a hybrid fusion of Ukrainian and Russian languages, expressively enhanced with slang words]” (Onuch and Sasse 2016, 14). The hybridity of language points not to a dichotomy of Russian–Ukrainian, and nor even to a triad of Russian–Russophone–Ukrainian space of linguistic enunciation, but to a fourfold relationship: Ukrainian  language, Russian language as used in Russia, Russian language spoken in Ukraine (see Zarembo’s comments on the many “Russian languages” spoken in Donbas), and Surzhyk as an example of higher degree of fusion (Zarembo 2022, 35).6  Milena Khomchenko addresses Surzhyk as a “transparent double mask” when she reinterprets Fanon’s statement of the use of colonial French in Martinique as a “white mask,” an instrument for colonial mimicry (Khomchenko 2024). The cultural proximity of Ukraine and Russia, along with the partial overlap in vocabularies of the two Slavic languages, prompts a more “seamless” and less visible merging of them in the mind of the Surzhyk speaker. Such fusions are particularly strong, and they create their own field of enunciation, which is not even the third “in-between” space taken by the Ukrainian Russian language but a more open uncharted space, where the rules are more flexible, more elements (such as Polish, Romanian, Yiddish, Belarusian, Greek, Hungarian, and Roma) borrowings are frequently incorporated, and the abyssal line produced by othering is virtually dissolved. 6  Ukraine has a polyphony of local languages, which is fully acknowledged and supported by the author, but not addressed in this model due to the particular focus of this section on linguistic entanglement between Ukrainian and Russian languages as channels for ambicoloniality.

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While ambicoloniality relies on linguistic channels to make colonial intentions operative, language per se cannot be included among the tools of colonial domination. For example, Russia has viewed the Russophone population in Ukraine as a constitutive element for maintaining the borderline’s colonial status, preserving its function as an abyssal line with the adjacent peripheral space. When the abyssal line of colonial domination began dissolving as a result of the inevitable postcolonial transformation following 30 years of Ukrainian independence, Russia’s physical transgression of the borderline sought to reinstate the abyssal line’s invisible presence. In other words, through its war of aggression, Russia paradoxically  aims to reconstitute the filtering function of borderline, characteristic of the ambicolonial condition, and exit ambicoloniality by reinforcing the dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, bringing its colonialist ambition to light through explicit violence. At the same time, it seeks to disentangle itself from the multivectoral situation by transforming it into unilateral domination through violence. This involved disrupting the communication channel that enabled the gradual process of peaceful postcolonial decolonization by physically eliminating the Ukrainian speakers of the Russian language in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russia’s ambicoloniality relies on the slow substitution of elements of control and suppression with corresponding elements of subordination and accountability, marking its weakening position in the system of colonial intermittence, which I discussed before, and its capacity to produce a clear, readable signal. While the mixing of the communication elements in this model fosters hybridity, narratives of domination become increasingly obscured by their direct opposites, subverting the communication system and ultimately rendering it dysfunctional and the channel of information unusable. Russia’s war of aggression further disrupted this connection by attacking language as the primary channel for ambicoloniality, ultimately yielding an outcome opposite to expansion due to Ukrainian society’s resistance. Russia’s “defense” of Russian speakers on Ukrainian territory, used as a propaganda-fueled pretext for the war, incorporates an oxymoron as a subversion of meaning: the deliberate use of “defending” instead of “attacking,” based on the erroneous assumption that political identity is determined by language. Similarly, Russia’s repeated attempts to forcibly impose the Russian language on occupied territories led to a practical decline in its use in both public and private spaces. As Serhii Plokhy noted, post-2014 Russian aggression sought to divide Ukraine across linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. However, most of Ukrainian society was united by the idea of being a multilingual and

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multicultural nation, unified in administrative and political terms (Plokhy 2015, 345). This process, as applied to Russophone Ukrainians, was discussed by Taras Kamennoy in his performance Force Me to Speak Ukrainian (2019). The artist explored how the imperative to use Ukrainian as the official language could or could not be incorporated into the public sphere of Russian-speaking Kharkiv. The project, according to the artist, was provoked by one of his Russian relatives affected by propaganda, who questioned whether Kamennoy was being forced by the “nationalist” government to speak Ukrainian. To challenge this colonialist perspective, the artist  staged a performance on the streets of Kharkiv,  approaching people with a banner that asked them to “force” him to speak Ukrainian. He then documented the responses, which ranged from surprise to affirmation—that it would be good for him to switch to Ukrainian as the official state language; however, he failed to obtain the imperative that he sought. This work challenged Russia’s view of Ukraine as a controlling environment akin to its own authoritarian system. Kamennoy emphasized the freedom of choice and expression on which Ukrainian solidarity relied heavily. This solidarity, together with pluralism, defined Ukrainian resilience in the protests of the Maidan revolution in 2013 and the subsequent war with Russia in the Donbas—making Ukraine very different from its neighbor. Yet the impulse what is viewed in Ukraine as “self-decolonization” through changing linguistic codes was already present in Ukrainian society already after 2014, not in the last turn as a response to Russian propaganda’s extensive usagage of the Russophone informational channels, and the necessity to resist misinformation by detaching from its possible vessels. This process was also documented in both visual art and in literature. For example, Olena Stiazhkina’s book Cecil the Lion Had to Die (2024 [2021]) is dedicated to the radical transformation of Ukrainian society during the war after 2014. Every protagonist in the book, set in wartime Donbas, experiences a profound change, from the change of profession, identity, and beliefs to the change of language. Beginning in the Russian, the book’s storyline, narrated by each of its protagonists, gradually transforms into Ukrainian. Ukrainian language, in Stiazhkina’s interpretation, represents a major improvement—a restoration of epistemic justice profoundly linked to collective choices and individual reidentification. The language change in the book is portrayed as a progression, as a detachment from a colonized identity. In Stiazhkina’s book, personal space becomes a political terrain where the struggle for reidentification unfolds (Stiazhkina 2024 [2021]).

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Oleksandr Mykhed, in his detailed account of the first months of the full-scale invasion, explains the further reduction of the linguistic field as a practical necessity for defense against military saboteurs operating extensively in Ukrainian towns, particularly, in the Kyiv region, in areas where Russian troops lacked direct access: “But some of them [saboteurs] are quite easy to identify—they aren’t familiar with the town they’re in, they do not understand Ukrainian and won’t pass a simple pronunciation test of specific Ukrainian words” (Mykhed 2024 [2023], 12). This process of narrowing the channel as a means of anti-colonial resistance was discussed by the sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova in her installation Palianytsia (2022) (Fig. 3.2). This work reversed the vision of food as a source of life and, in particular, of bread as a symbol of hospitality, turning it into a means of resistance. The word “palianytsia” refers to a type of Ukrainian bread, and according to anecdotal evidence, this word has been used to reveal suspected Russian saboteurs who were unable to pronounce it correctly. Moreover, due to some differences in Ukrainian and Russian phonetics, it

Fig. 3.2  Zhanna Kadyrova, Palianytsia, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

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has proven difficult for monolingual Russian speakers (but not Russophone Ukrainians) to pronounce the word in its conventional form. In western Ukraine, where Kadyrova was in evacuation, she set a table, imitating bread with sliced river stones—as unbitable and inedible as Ukrainian phonetics and Ukrainian territory were to the Russian army. The widespread return of visibility to the Ukrainian language and its extended use has been conditioned by the necessity of resistance, as both protection against physical threat and as a defense against misinformation spread by Russian media channels. As the linguistic context is being reconsidered in light of Russia’s neocolonial invasion, Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance, and simultaneous decolonial disentanglement, the system channeling ambicolonial impact is closing. Here, I observe the paradox that the more interdependence and perplexion are manifested in the ambicolonial model, the more (and not less) are colonial attempts to subvert this hybridity and polarize the situation by reciprocally fusing the signals of colonial domination. The syncretic polarization of the ambivalent situation and its dismantling is the goal of Ukrainian decolonial processes; Russia’s violent politics, in essence, also aims dissolving the ambicolonial situation, using different means to achieve the complete colonial fusion of the channel of domination with its “lost” elements from the opposite channel  (of subordination). In their turn, Russia’s powerless actions of violence in Ukraine, unfolding through atrocity and war crime, contributed to disentanglement because they dismantled the system that handles the postcolonial condition as a container for hybridity and intermittent colonial signals. Oksana Kovatska views the prewar space of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, as colonized based on what she calls the Russophone “linguistic markers” (Kovatska 2022, 33). She proposes that such a colonized perspective was formed by Soviet stereotypes depicting “non-imperial” nations (Kovatska 2022, 36). Here, an important question that also engages the discussion on the dissolution of ambicoloniality through decolonial processes is: Does “linguistic marking,” that is, the division into the language of a colonizer and the language of the colonized, reflect a similar Soviet-time stereotype that continued to propagate in the post-Soviet situation? This perspective appears profoundly postcolonial, aiming to look backward at the status quo of Russian coloniality and engage with the abyssal line within dominant epistemology. If we accept that Russophone channels are routes for ambicoloniality, then their usage can also reveal Russia’s weakness within its ambicolonial morphology of power and, therefore,

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contribute to the decolonial release as overcoming the centuries-long use of Russian as the language of colonial domination.

3.7   Case Study: Ambicolonial Appropriation; Why Ukrainian Cultural Impact Is Important for Russia Ukraine’s resistance to the ongoing Russian war on its territory has drawn attention to the low visibility of Ukrainian art and culture on a global level. If Ukrainian art, as well as that of other former Soviet nations, appears in art historical texts at all, it is mentioned on the margins of the main narrative. Second, the lack of contemporary English language texts on Ukrainian art highlights literature that focuses on Ukrainian art as enveloped by Russian culture, often attributing artists and entire art movements that were active in the territory of contemporary Ukraine to the Russian art scene. This misattribution is a direct consequence of cultural proximity and the continuous exchange of influences between Ukraine and Russia across their shared border. Ambicoloniality created the conditions for the symbolic appropriation of Ukrainian art by Russia. This appropriation occurred as Russia historically assumed a dominant position within the colonial power structure, claiming exclusive rights over cultural production within Ukraine. These processes, often accentuated through discourse that portrayed Ukraine as both Russia’s colonial “other” and a subaltern “brotherhood nation,” however, have had a reverse effect, creating a void in the identity of what could properly be called “Russian culture,” if the disputed elements were removed from its hybrid definition as a result of syncretic polarization. In addition to a disproportionately strong focus on Russian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that is visible in Eastern European and Slavic art history studies, the emphasis on what is seen as “Russian art” is often distorted in an appropriative form. This results in flattening the complex narrative of local art historiographies into one that manifests belonging to the domain of Russian culture. I could call such an approach metonymical, which focuses on one set of formal characteristics (artists working in the territory of the Russian Empire and, subsequently, the USSR) while intentionally omitting others that link them to local contexts. Postcolonial theory uses the term “metonymic gap” rather differently, defining it as a cultural discrepancy formed when appropriations of a colonial language insert allusions and references from a first language, unknown to readers. In this case, these allusions, visible in the works of

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artists of Ukrainian origin, are equally accessible yet invisible to readers educated within the colonial framework of thinking, whether external or internal to the colonizer. One of the prominent cases of Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian art is the work of the painter Arkhyp Kuindzhi, who is regarded as a prominent representative of nineteenth-century realism (Fig.  3.3). Born in Mariupol, Kuindzhi studied art in Saint Petersburg, yet he never fully aligned with the then-dominant in the metropolis realist movement, the perdvizhniki (Wanderers), among whom was Ilya Repin, also of Ukrainian origin, born in the Kharkiv region. However, the idea of using social topics in his paintings was completely foreign to Kuindzhi, and he preferred to focus his work on the aesthetic aspects of landscapes, largely inspired by Ukrainian nature. Such are his paintings Moonlit Night on the Dnipro River (1880), which at the time was a success as a unique case of a one-­ painting exhibition at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the

Fig. 3.3  Arkhyp Kuindzhi, Sunset over the Sea, no date. Image courtesy of the National Odesa Art Museum

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Arts, and Ukrainian Night (1876), which, according to his student Arkadii Rylov, initiated a renewed interest in Ukrainian themes among the artists and audiences of the imperial capital (Rylov 1940). When the Arkhyp Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol was initially founded in 1973 as a branch of the local history museum, the collection included only three paintings by Kuindhzi: one sketch, Red Sunset over the Dnipro, for a larger homonymous painting now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New  York, and two studies, Elbrus and Autumn in Crimea. These works were reportedly looted by Russian soldiers before the museum was destroyed by Russian shelling in March 2022. The paintings were further transported to occupied Donetsk. This case shows how, in times of ongoing war, appropriation takes on a more pragmatic dimension, as the Russian army engages in the direct looting of Ukrainian cultural artifacts, which are subsequently transported to territories under Russian control. It also points to the necessity of drawing a classification of appropriation types that emerge in the neocolonial state’s exercising of its ambicolonial desire: those of physical and symbolic appropriation. The legacy of Kuindzhi has been subject to Russia’s long-standing appropriation throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where at least 16 Kuindzhi’s works are held, positioned him as an exclusively Russian landscape artist during the 2018 retrospective exhibition, which included more than 120 works. The curator of the exhibition, Olga Atroshchenko, repeats this statement throughout her article for the Tretyakov Gallery magazine, though she acknowledges the artist’s origins in a rather confusing way at one point, “Arkhip [the Russian form of Arkhyp] Ivanovich Kuindzhi was born into the family of a Russianized Greek, Ivan Khristoforovich Emendzhi, a shoemaker and grower of grain, in Karasevka, a Tatar neighborhood on the outskirts of Mariupol”7 (Atroshchenko 2018). The cultural diversity of the artist’s background, which he constantly referred to, according to the testimonies of his contemporaries, has been reduced here to the label 7  Архип Иванович Куинджи родился в семье сапожника и хлебопашца, обрусевшего грека Ивана Христофоровича Еменджи в татарском предместье Мариуполя Карасевке. Translation from Russian is mine. When I first accessed this article online in September 2023, this sentence ended as “Mariupol, in present-day Ukraine”; however, as of June 10, 2024, the phrase had been amended to omit the mention of Ukraine.

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of “Russianized” as a colonial marker. Perhaps, the most important aspect of appropriation is the physical possession of the majority of his works by Russian public and private collections. The paintings of Kuindzhi nurtured Russian imperial interest—for example, his first version of the work Moonlit Night on the Dnipro River was purchased from the artist’s studio, before it was even finished, by Prince Konstantine of Russia’s royal family. The profoundly Ukraine-­ centered focus of Kuindzhi’s art, however, has been subject to a particular colonial view. This is how a contemporary of the artist describes his work Chumaki (Salt Traders) Track near Mariupol (1875): “Impassable mud, a wet road, wet oxen, and even wetter khokhly [diminishing word for Ukrainians, the same as used by Brodsky in his aforementioned poem], a wet dog howling sadly by the roadside in bad weather. It somehow makes the heart ache.” This work is closer to Peredvizhiniki’s social focus than any other work by Kuindzhi and also represents the artist’s perspective on the subaltern position of the depicted characters. Ukrainian research and writing on the artist’s legacy is scarce, and this is explained by the long-­standing vision of it as profoundly Russo-centric, due to the extensive appropriation of his work by Russia. Only the loss of his museum and the works in Mariupol sparked attention to his belonging to the Ukrainian cultural field. Another example of appropriation is the Ukrainian avant-garde. Art historian Dmytro Horbachov, who developed this notion throughout his work in the late 1990s, outlined a detailed historiography of the birth of the Ukrainian avant-garde as a recognized movement, the acknowledgment of which he witnessed and contributed to. Initially, in Europe, in the 1960s, discussions focused solely on the Russian avant-garde. However, in 1973, art historian Andréi Nakov organized an exhibition of avant-garde artists in London, under the title “Tatlin’s Dream” (Horbachov 2020, 5–6). At this exhibition, the works of Oleksandr Bohomazov and Vasyl Yermilov were first presented. Thanks to Bohomazov and Yermilov, Nakov himself also drew attention to the fact that among the presumably Russian avant-garde artists, many were originally from Ukraine. This gave him reason to speculate about the existence of a Ukrainian avant-garde as well. Subsequently, historians Valentina and Jean-Claude Marcadé also became interested in the Ukrainian avant-garde. Born in Odesa, Valentina Marcadé was the first to use the term “Ukrainian avant-garde” in an English language article titled “Vasyl Yermilov and the Ukrainian Avant-Garde,” for the collection The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910–1930: New Perspectives. The turning point came with the sensational exhibition “Avant-Garde and

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Ukraine” in 1993  in Munich, which prompted writing about Kazimir Malevich and Oleksandra Exter as Ukrainian painters, exploring the Ukrainian cultural context (Horbachov 2020, 5–6). Among the names that are commonly attributed to Russian avant-garde are Maria Syniakova and Nathan Altman. Myroslav Shkandrij has pointed out a set of distinctive characteristics of the Ukrainian movement: The Ukrainian avant-garde’s distinctiveness was therefore preconditioned by its emergence from a specific milieu (the Kyiv Art School, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, the Kultur-Lige, the Kyiv Art Institute, and the national movement). Among its dominant traits were a passion for color; a romance with primitivism and kinetic energy; a focus on the local and national elements that were often rooted in the ancient past; a fascination with natural processes; and a concern with inner harmony and personal lyricism. (Shkandrij 2019, 22)

The iconic case of the avant-garde art appropriated by Russia is the work of David Burliuk. Born in Semyrotivka village of the Sumy region of eastern Ukraine, Burliuk always emphasized his profound connection to his place of origin and the impact this environment had on his art. In his book of memoirs, “Fragments from the Memories of a Futurist,” the artist wrote: While I’m currently writing in Russian, I might switch to my native Ukrainian later. Because I was born in Ukraine, which has now become free and unbelievably beautiful under the storm of the great Revolution. Ukraine, fraternally connected to the great Union of Soviet Republics of Lenin, has been and remains my homeland. There lie the bones of my ancestors. Free Cossacks who fought for the glory of strength and freedom.8 (Burliuk 1994 [1929])

While making parallels between the 1917 revolution and Ukraine’s Cossack resistance, the artist points out the particular duality, an ambiguity of his position vis-à-vis his Ukrainian descent and his attempted work 8  Пока пишу по-русски, а потом, может быть, и на родной украинский язык перейду. Ибо родился на Украине, ныне под бурей великой Революции ставшей свободной и неозримо прекрасной. Украина, братски связанная с великим союзом Советских Республик Ленина, была и остается моей родиной. Там лежат кости моих предков. Вольных казаков, рубившихся во славу силы и свободы. Translation from Russian is mine.

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against the background of Soviet Russia’s art scene (although the artist had already emigrated to New  York by that time). The ambiguity of Burliuk’s situation was particularly visible in his 1912 “Ukrainian” series, untied by formal style and conceptual references to Ukrainian “popular” visual culture—including such works as The Ukrainians (1912) and Cossack Mamai (1912). One of these works, Man with Two Faces (1912), brings the metaphor of duality into life, as it portrays a Janus-faced man in peasant attire (Fig. 3.4). The bearded man within a village landscape, with

Fig. 3.4  David Burliuk, Man with Two Faces, 1912. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate

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two faces looking in two different directions, is a perfect visualization of the artist’s position as a carrier of the ambivalence of two cultures, which at times manifest not a peaceful fusion but connote a long history of struggle. The provincial environs trivialize this double-faced figure, depriving him of mythologized powers and emphasizing his abnormality. In this portrayal, ambicoloniality unfolds in full, with the marked desire to mutually incorporate cultures, epistemologies, and systemic dysfunctionalities of both the colonizer and the colonized.

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CHAPTER 4

(R)evolution of Identity

4.1   Ambivalence as a Postcolonial Burden Postcolonial ambivalence haunted Ukrainian and Russian societies after the 1991 Soviet collapse. It was reflected in the cultural production of both Russia and Ukraine, manifesting as a durable and notable presence of colonial discourse in the public sphere and its further reworkings. Andrii Portnov proposes that the formation of a new national narrative in Ukraine in the early years of its independence presupposed a teleological approach to the nation-state, seen as the highest goal and endpoint of the historical process. This utilitarian view of the concept was accompanied by a victimhood complex in which Ukrainians were portrayed as a peaceful, autochthonous, and homogeneous population constantly persisting under attack by their enemies. This vision essentialized Ukrainians as a monolithic group, delineating political and ethical boundaries. These components of the national narrative were twofold, as they helped to create a sense of Ukrainian identity in the early years of independence, but they also reinforced exclusionary tendencies. Alternatively, a mythological and nostalgic narrative about the lost Soviet legacy was considered acceptable (Portnov 2013, 238). These radical drawbacks of exclusion and nostalgia, according to Portnov, were exploited by President Leonid Kuchma’s regime for symbolic regionalization, with ambivalence as its defining trait. The 2004 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_4

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Orange Revolution acted upon the split between “two Ukraines”: the accepted politicized cliché portrayed Western Ukraine as a carrier of a national, “cultured” Ukrainophone identity and Eastern Ukraine as a “creole” post-Soviet Russophone formation (Portnov 2013, 242). Portnov remarks that after coming to power as a result of the 2004 Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko attempted to reverse the exceptionalist rhetoric and took the course of reconciliation by finding shared tragedies in the historical memory. The narrative of the Holodomor gained particular importance in his strategy as a tragic event that profoundly affected the east and south of the country, demonstrating that the supposedly Russophone parts were also subject to identity-related repressions, perceived by Ukraine as ethnic genocide. The cliché of “two Ukraines” opposed by Portnov was also critically reinterpreted by Mykola Riabchuk, who spoke of the “creolization” of Ukraine’s subaltern status, illustrating the concept with a reference to the Russian language speakers of Eastern Ukraine. Riabchuk’s early text appeared reactive to the postcolonial condition of in-betweenness preceding 2004. He drew a continuity between the Russian imperial myth of the unity of brotherly nations, the presence of both nations as “native” in Ukrainian territory, and what he called “Hohol’s myth” of Ukraine as an “exotic civilization” facing its downfall (Riabchuk 2000, 227). The “othering” terminology used by the author, as well as his clear anti-colonial “mirroring” rhetoric, needs to be viewed retrospectively as documenting the misconceptions of the mentioned defensive position and exceptionalism of the time, reflecting on the particular ambivalence present in Ukrainian society. Conversely, Riabchuk contested the “creole” notion he coined, proposing that at its postcolonial stage, Ukrainian society was split along more than one line, fragmented or even atomized, not fitting the paradigm of the “Ukrainian-nationalist West” and “Russian-communist East” (Riabchuk 2000, 185). This double speech is also a sign of the all-­ encompassing immersion into the ambivalence, even by its apt critics. In his 2024 lecture, Riabchuk has pointed out that “nothing has remained of “two Ukraines” as a political project that completely compromised itself”1 (Riabchuk 2024, 00:36:40–00:38:00). Both Ukraine’s Maidan revolutions—of 2004 and of 2014—represented different stages of creating new knowledge about self-identification in Ukrainian society, step by step dismantling the ambivalence. As a 1  Нічого не залишилося від «двох Україн», цей проєкт себе повінстю скомпроментував. Translation from Ukrainian is mine.

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meeting place—the etymology of the word “Maidan”—they served as the reunification point for representatives of different regions of the country and their acknowledgment of each other’s existence. However, while the famous slogan of the 2004 revolution was “East and West together,” the motto of the 2014 protests was “Ukraine is not Russia.” Euromaidan’s main contribution was in finding reunification strategies and ways of overcoming regionalism, not through shared historical trauma but through collective action in the reenactment of participatory democracy and popular solidarity, overcoming political boundaries. This closer acquaintance, beyond both regional borders and social stratification, in the “melting pot” of Euromaidan, laid the foundation for new epistemologies. People were exposed to new ideas and perspectives that challenged their existing beliefs and assumptions, and this new knowledge continued to shape the country’s political and social landscape beyond the immediate time frame of the events. This chapter will closely examine  the following questions: How do identities and agency evolve in a time of crisis? What stages of evolution can we observe when speaking about the groundbreaking shifts, such as the new discursive, expressive, and eventually political instruments elaborated by Euromaidan? What are the implications of the split from the central system of decision-making and the leap from postcolonial hybridity to collective freedom? What modifications do such processes demand in the collective agency? And, most importantly, what metamorphoses do they require from an ambivalent self? Achille Mbembe points out the extreme heterogeneity of the postcolonial condition. For him, the postcolonial state “encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelop one another” (Mbembe 2000, 14). As the chapter will show, Euromaidan marked the conclusion of one such durée, which transitioned into a new stage with the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea. This last stage evolved into a decolonial situation in 2022 with the Ukrainian resistance to the full-scale invasion. Yet, the transitional postcolonial impulse of collective action sparked by the Maidan reemerged and unfolded in the decolonial processes after the invasion began. Mychailo Wynnyckyj interprets the Euromaidan Revolution as “three revolutions in one”: all-national, social liberal, and personal, rooted in conceptual change (Wynnyckyj 2021, 20). This shift of concepts was the starting point for building new, disentangled epistemologies.

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In analyzing the underpinnings of transformation produced by the Euromaidan protests, I find it useful to refer to Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s examination of how the hegemonic takeover occurs in any field that was once filled by structural determination and later refilled by “undecidables,” a term which the theorists borrow from Jacques Derrida (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, xi). In such an ambiguous terrain of undecidability, where postcolonial ambivalence is a formative force acting on the rift between East/West—or Ukraine/Russia—undertaking decisions means challenging the undecidable terrain. I propose that syncretic polarization is the basis for such implanting of a collective decision on the resistant terrain permeated by vagueness and lack of authority. The powerlessness of a violent state—either represented by the profoundly colonized and corrupted government of Viktor Yanukovych or the neocolonial regime of Vladimir Putin, as discussed further in this book—marks the necessity of refilling the void of signification, which is simultaneously a void of power. In this process, new epistemologies linked to resistance and participatory action have emerged. Derrida himself saw the very underlying motif of any dialectics as marked by the undecidable (Derrida 1981, 211). He called it “a confusion between the present and the non-present” (the past?) and emphasized its mediating quality between opposites, in a definition close to Bhabha’s understanding of an “in-between space” of hybridity (Derrida 1981, 211). However, contrary to Bhabha, he saw in-betweenness as a purely formal tool that influences the syntactic distribution of elements within a given system—be it the morphology of domination, as in the Russia–Ukraine colonial model (if applied to the subject of this book) or a colonial matrix of power, as in other colonial models, particularly, those  of the Global South (Derrida 1981, 220). However, the semantic order—where the epistemologies are produced—remains unaffected for Derrida. I propose that the defiance of the undecidable in the collective action of Euromaidan is a defiance of dichotomies produced by the established hierarchies of power, turning to a polylogue  that marks a different type of hybridization—that of many voices speaking on a “horizontal” level, where any dominant structure is replaced by democratic decision and popular resilience—and, consequently, has permeated the semantic level as a new way of signification and a newly emerging mode of disentangled epistemological production. This was also noted by Ilya Gerasimov, who proposed that as an outcome of Euromaidan, “the significance of hybridity as a new phenomenon in Ukraine, or rather as a familiar phenomenon that has

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changed its modality  from a sign of marginality and parochialism to a trendy and mainstream personal quality” (Gerasimov 2014, 32). Artist Anna Zvyagintseva reflected on the Euromaidan events in her photographic series Event (Gap) (2014–2015), in which she reconstructed the governmental attempts to suppress the protests through peripheral evidence of state violence and societal trauma and documented resistance on the fringes of the main action (Fig. 4.1). Her photographs feature the burnt corner of the Building of the Trade Unions in Kyiv, which was set on fire by governmental forces during one of the confrontations; piles of paving stones extracted by protesters from the pavement of the square to

Fig. 4.1  Anna Zvyagintseva, from the Event (Gap) series, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist

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defend against armed officialized militants; and red carnations lying on the spot  where the protesters  were killed, reminiscent of the blood spilled there. These proofs of violence are divided from their setting, which does not bear any traces of confrontation, with a blank line—an empty space of liminality. This divisive line between routine reality and the events fostered by the protests is only an illusory division, since they belong to the same temporal and spatial dimensions of resistance and trauma. The work rests on symbolic representations of undecidables, which emerged as a consequence of a tectonic shift brought about by the protests and their governmental suppression, at the same time pointing out blind spots created by the killings of Euromaidan protesters. Zvyagintseva’s interpretation of the return of visibility of a traumatic event, either in a void or in a fragment, echoes Alain Badiou’s proposal that a revolutionary event’s “belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself” (Badiou 2005 [1987], 181). This forensic, side evidence of confrontation and transgression, gathered by Zvyagintseva, resonates with Badiou’s vision of an event as a revolutionary moment, which uncovers the underrepresented and exposes the void and the excess previously concealed by the state structure (Badiou 2005 [1987], 117). The social space of Euromaidan actualized the political space of undecidability,  interwoven with intrinsic ambivalence, and dismantled it by reclaiming agency and reestablishing epistemological balance through reidentification. It extracted and exercised the symbolic power already present in social and cultural fields. This symbolic authority is the one that Russia attempts to adhere to, first resorting to mimicry, and then to explicit violent means. Miranda Fricker labels this “identity power,” a form of social power that relies on imaginary conceptions of identities that create an image of power and are shared collectively (Fricker 2007, 4). In the case of the Euromaidan protests, these manifested not only as internal conceptions but also  as externalized formulations embedded within the wider dynamics of the post-Soviet space, giving the first push to its dissolution, which intensified with the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine. These images of identity power were extrapolated toward Russia and fostered Russia’s violent move toward Ukrainian territories in an attempt to use the moment of undecidability for its colonizing aims and, at the same time, to cover its own lack of symbolic power, long suppressed by Putin’s authoritarian regime. The partial removal of the burden of

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postcolonial ambivalence, in this case, was decisive for Ukraine’s radical turn not toward Europe but, first of all, toward itself, permitting an introspective look at Ukrainian society’s overshadowed symbolic, political, and cultural sources of authority and agency. Timothy Snyder appears to counter undecidability as the main target of the Euromaidan protests when he points out that the revolution was an ultimate enactment of civil society, as it gathered people to freely unite against the unpredictable (“and then a dictatorial, and then a murderous”) state in the name of the rule of law and the European predictability. He argues that the political vision of Euromaidan linked the notions of identity, agency, and normativity through the “triad” of civil society, integration (external and internal), and the sovereign state (Snyder 2015, 705). The undecidable, therefore, belongs to the ambicolonial domain, and its challenge in the Euromaidan Revolution was a collective attempt to close the ambicolonial communication channel unilaterally. While ambicoloniality faced its dissolution with the Euromaidan Revolution as a profound impulse for detachment from the affective relationship with Russia and the subversion of the formative power of ambivalence behind it, Russia, upon suppressing any potential for its own revolution, became trapped in postcolonial ambivalence. Unable to exit this ambivalence, with its internalized enemy within, Russia turned to violent means and, instead of preserving the status quo, embarked on a hopeless and anachronistic quest of expanding the zone of aspired colonial influence through reconquest, viewing the post-Euromaidan swiftly closing zone of undecidability in Ukraine as a space where the colonial desire could be fulfilled. The decolonial turn prompted by Euromaidan, which began to be actively realized after the full-scale invasion, aims at the full dissolution of ambivalence, a goal unattainable in its totality. Zygmunt Bauman considered a struggle against ambivalence self-destructive and ascribed these potentialities of struggle to the work of modernity, which aims to order and subjugate the world (Bauman 1993, 7). For Bauman, it is modernity that eliminates ambivalence, not coloniality that strengthens it. If we turn to decolonial theory to discover once again that modernity is just another side of coloniality, this approach would seem contradictory. It is the domain of the power holder, and not the subaltern, where ambivalence procreates and begins its expansionist movement, eventually subverting and encaging its carrier. Bauman sees ambivalence as the limit of power for

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the powerful, while it is a source of freedom for the powerless (Bauman 1993, 179). Also, as Slavoj Žižek points out, the delimiting of the “absolute knowledge” carries a risk of internalizing contradiction or ambivalence as part of identity (Žižek 1989, xxix). The solution to this contradiction, as I propose in Chap. 7 of this book, is decentralization through exchange and the fostering of internal hybridity. The premise that a hybrid self must always be maintained is the standpoint idea of plurality, yet postcolonial hybridity is the particular hybridity that has to be (and is being) dismantled to lead to the decolonial disentanglement. The development of knowledge is essential to overcoming postcolonial ambivalence as a duality of radical options of homogeneity and split. This profound task of postcolonial transformation—and eventually decolonial release—requires a focus on cultural diversity and a multitude of voices entering into communication. Communication is a process that directly precedes the construction of knowledge and lies at the basis of maintaining or dissolving ambicoloniality.

4.2  Diversity/Equality The ideas of equality have been embedded in Ukrainian society for centuries, yet they were disseminated through Baroque culture. The prominent Ukrainian philosopher of the eighteenth century, Hryhory Skovoroda, expressed this through a metaphor of a fountain: God is similar to a rich fountain, filling diverse vessels according to their capacity. There is an inscription over the fountain: ‘The unequal equality is for everyone.’ From different pipes, streams flow into various vessels standing around the fountain. The smallest vessel has the least but it is equal in this to the biggest, as they are both equally full.2 (Skovoroda 1973 [1772], 435)

This pluralist worldview exemplifies the all-unifying impulse that made Skovoroda’s figure symbolically significant for the Maidan movement across Ukraine. In Kharkiv, the region where the philosopher was born and worked, after the violent escalation following  the governmental attempt to suppress protests in Kyiv, protesters often gathered next to 2  Бог богатому подобен фонтану, наполняющему различные сосуды по их вмЂстности. Над фонтаном надпись сія: «Неравное всЂм равенство». Льются из разных трубок разные токи в разные сосуды, вкруг фонтана стоящіе. Меншій сосуд менЂе имЂет, но в том равен есть большему, что равно есть полный. Translation is mine.

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Fig. 4.2  Hryhory Skovoroda, Unequal Equality to All, 1772. Wikimedia Commons

Skovoroda’s monument, leading to clashes with the anti-Maidan pro-­ Russian followers3 (Fig. 4.2). Skovoroda’s figure emerged as a symbol of a deeply rooted Ukrainian intellectual tradition and a sign of the existence of an underlying epistemology that can be projected onto contemporary social movements. Rather than reconstruction, it provided a conceptual tool for examining Ukraine’s condition of the newly emerging polyphony that was manifested in Euromaidan, where a variety of groups with differing political agendas coexisted and collaborated. Fanon pointed out that the reunification of the people within the past, which no longer exists, does not provide a necessary impulse for a revolutionary change. Equally, the radical anti-­colonial opposition as denial is not effective. Fanon presented his vision of the conduits of emancipation that ignite the productive revolutionary chaos and act as carriers of a hybrid identity, which they constantly attempt to renegotiate. He proposed that the transformation needs to be 3  “Na kharkivs’kyy Yevromaydan proryvayut’sya provocatory,” Den’, January 11, 2014. Available online at: https://day.kyiv.ua/ru/news/271221-na-kharkovskiy-evromaydanproryvayutsya-provokatory.

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more profound and oriented at self-reidentification within the hybrid space the protesters operate in, which at a revolutionary time is destabilized and open for change: “We must rather be reunited with them in their recent counter-move which will suddenly call everything into question, we must focus on that zone of hidden fluctuation where the people can be found; it is here that their souls are crystallized and their perception and respiration transfigured” (Fanon 1963 [1961], 163). This “rhythm that drives the nation” perfectly describes the decolonial processes of dissolving postcolonial ambivalence and irreversible changes to postcolonial hybridity that witnessed their onset during the Euromaidan protests. Contrary to Fanon’s statement about the intrinsic violent nature of decolonization (see Introduction), the Euromaidan Revolution was an initially peaceful protest, participants  in which were eventually forced to defend themselves from the violent actions of Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian government. A witness to the events describes the all-unifying force of the protests, expressed through sharing routine tasks such as the construction of barricades for protecting from the militarized governmental forces: I saw: just anyone [was building] […] It was women, children, teenagers – everyone who could help. Even those without a shovel scooped up snow with their hands into bags, carrying them to the barricades. Whatever people found, some stick or some metal object  – they brought everything. People came together spontaneously, seeing what needed to be done without direction.4 (Zaika and Chebanyuk 2019, 334)

When constructed, snow barricades were poured over with water and converted into an ice fortress in a matter of minutes, due to −20° C (−4° F) frost (Zaika and Chebanyuk 2019, 334). This collective building is also a metaphor for the paradoxical constructive energy behind the Euromaidan Revolution, not aimed at the destruction of the social order, but at its reconstruction within the frameworks of law and social and epistemic justice, in a complex and adversarial context.  Я бачив: просто хто завгодно [будував]… Це жінки, навіть діти там були, підлітки – всі, хто міг, в кого навіть не було лопати, він руками нагрібав сніг в мішки. І носили на барикади. Хто що там знайшов, якусь палку чи якусь залізяку – все несли. Люди просто дєйствітєльно згуртувалися, і не треба було керувати. Люди са́мі бачили, що треба було робити. Translation from Ukrainian is mine. 4

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The idea of collectivity and diversity/equality in solidarity action challenges the nationalist identity-building proposed in Euromaidan as just one element among many.5 This element is representative of defensive nationalism, which, as characterized by Ewa Thompson, affects communities at risk, caused either by their small size in regard to their potential invaders or by the direct threats they receive from more powerful expansionist neighbors (Thompson 2000, 30). If we add to the direct territorial threat the more ephemeral threats of silencing, depriving visibility,  and long-term cultural suppression, this definition of nationalist discourse as a defensive mechanism is characteristic of Ukraine’s particular case at a certain durée of postcolonial transformation, with early anti-colonial rhetoric still freshly embedded into it and deconstructed by Euromaidan’s emerging turn to decoloniality. Expansive nationalism, exemplary of the Russian position, looks outward rather than inward and is less aware of its own chauvinism and its colonial desire. Thompson points out: “Somewhere in that privileged space lies a proclivity to taking away the land of others and establishing their institutions of one’s own” (Thompson 2000, 30). Russia’s neocolonial war is the direct consequence of following this predisposition to territorial appropriation for the sole purpose of confirming one’s integrity. The defining actions of both nationalisms, however, were challenged by the Euromaidan Revolution, presenting another ramification in the morphology of domination. In the spirit of the heterogeneous revolutionary proposal of the “unequal equality” of Euromaidan, Chantal Mouffe questions whether the ideals of socialism can survive the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and overcome the discredit it has brought upon all attempts to struggle against inequality. She views it as possible to reinscribe socialist goals within the framework of a pluralist democracy (Mouffe 1993, 90). This chapter proposes that the new theoretical perspective should closely examine this aspect of Ukraine’s revolution and its consolidative force of anti-­ colonial resistance, avoiding the simplification of defensive nationalism often seen in English language literature and, instead, inscribing the liberating epistemology of the formerly oppressed into a polyphonic, nonlinear, democratic context that embraces a plurality of voices and melds them into a decolonial choir. 5  The ways in which Maidan’s revolutionary solidarity challenged nationalist discourse has been explored by Myroslav Shkandrij in Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917–2017: History’s Flashpoints and Today’s Memory Wars, London and New York: Routledge, 2019.

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One could argue that one of Euromaidan’s objectives was to counter precisely the remnants of the socialist past, which evolved into the postcolonial condition. However, the perspective on the particular values of equality and plurality emphasizes a particular strand rather than the entire obsolete political structure and its impact on the morphology of domination. As Mouffe continues, it is necessary to abandon the compromised idea of socialism as a completely different social system based on discarding the political principles of liberalism. She, however, calls not to abandon the objectives of socialism, adopting them as one dimension of the struggle for a more profound democracy. This is her proposition of the notion of “liberal socialism” (Mouffe 1993, 90). This unidimensional trace of socialism runs as a strand through the democratizing intentions of the Maidan revolutions: subconscious in the first, Orange Revolution; conscious in the second, Euromaidan Revolution. This idea reverses Wynnyckyj’s vision of the Euromaidan Revolution as “social liberal,” making an accent on the collective essence of it. This is another way of discussing unification under the premise of epistemic justice, participatory effort, and unifying sentiment. It was Euromaidan where defensive nationalism, as a marker of the postcolonial condition, gave way to the liberal socialist expression, viewed as collective solidarity and participatory democracy. The attacks on the Maidan protests as “nationalist” ones must, therefore, be called into doubt or at least examined critically. The pluriversality of the movement and the profound hybridity of the mass heading it are closer to Mouffe’s definition of the “liberal socialist” strand than to a defensive nationalist stance, yet in some aspects carrying its features. The Ukrainian revolution is thus paradoxical in many aspects: from being Eurocentric and decolonial at the same time to carrying deeply incorporated strands of socialist ideals of liberation through equality as its primary moving force and the protective calls to delimit the nation space through overthrowing the government inclined to the neocolonial neighbor. This flickering optionality of the otherwise consolidated movement gives way to exploring it from a decolonial perspective—permitting the decolonial option to unfold in full. Eight years after Euromaidan, in 2022, the Russian shelling of Skovorodynivka village in the Kharkiv region completely ruined Hryhory Skovoroda’s house museum and all the historical artifacts related to the philosopher’s life that were kept in it. Contrary to what the Russian army claimed, there were no Ukrainian military or infrastructural strategic

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objects in the vicinity of the village. This deliberate destructive action is representative of how the freedom of philosophical and political thought, and its strong, independent cultural legacy could be viewed as a symbolic threat to Russia’s colonial intentions regarding Ukraine—and how the affective dynamics of the war and resistance are expressed in ideas and ideology. While the Orange Revolution’s questioning of deep regional and cultural differences inside Ukraine and the first steps toward inclusion shattered the entangled positioning sought by Russian coloniality, the dissolution of ambicoloniality as a postcolonial phenomenon began as a marked process from the Ukrainian side as a result of Euromaidan—not as much because of the claimed Eurocentricity of the protest, but because of the profound understanding of the fluctuating spaces of unity, as heterogeneous, marked by diversity and equality despite identity gaps and historical traumas conditioned either geographically, culturally, or socially.

4.3  Revolution as a Threat to Ambicolonial Epistemology Detaching knowledge marks the essential basis for the dissolution of postcolonial hybridity and returning to the set of epistemes preceding colonial rule. Madina Tlostanova sees the dominant perspective of “the hubris of zero point” as the definitive reason for the subaltern invisibility of knowledge produced in the former post-Soviet space beyond Russian colonial impact (Tlostanova 2015, 41; Castro-Gómez 2005). It is the epistemological foundation of the power holder, a position that helps to observe without being observed (Mignolo 2011, 80); however, as discussed in this book, the notion of power as a colonial feature, whether symbolic or political, cannot be clearly defined due to the ambicolonial nature of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. Defining what emancipated or disentangled knowledge in Ukraine is, however, seems problematic, since the contact with its colonizer worked twofold: ever since Russia’s emergence as the Principate of Moscow in the thirteenth century and its further territorial claims over lands forming contemporary Ukraine. From the Pereiaslav Agreement signed by Bohdan Khmelnitsky in 1654, which legally subordinated Ukraine (Hetmanshchyna) to the Russian Empire, to the dissolution of the short-lived independent Ukrainian People’s Republic fostered by the Soviet Union in

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1918—Ukraine had to resist Russian territorial allegations. However, if zero-­point epistemology is defined as “the ultimate grounding of knowledge, which paradoxically is ungrounded” (Mignolo 2011, 80), rooting in the location that is under defense from the invasion and leaving the depths of colonial history, and building new epistemologies of freedom while looking at contemporaneity as the historical resistance unfolding today is the ultimate means of constructing detached, liberated knowledge. Euromaidan solidarity was one of the first steps to this epistemological “rooting.” The revolution of identity in Ukraine constituted a tectonic shift in the formation of new disentangled epistemologies. It first viewed dignity and subjectivity as essential parts of a new epistemological basis and agency as the means for the production of such knowledge, which is why it received the popular denomination of the Revolution of Dignity. This epistemic change occurred with deep underlying transformations in political and social consciousness, which manifested as delinking from colonial thinking and turning to the equality-based principle of power. Laclau and Mouffe propose that the radical difference that democratic society introduces is that the site of power becomes an empty space; the reference to a transcendent guarantor disappears, and a split occurs between the instances of power, knowledge, and the law, and their foundations are no longer assured (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 186). They find fragmentation a convenient opportunity for the placement of totalitarianism into this empty site where knowledge converges with law. However, this fragmentation also presents a chance for collective transformation leading to the formal turn in knowledge production, which fills the emptiness with new signification. Linda Nochlin associated revolution—which, contrary to decolonial thinkers, she saw as the struggle for modernity—with fragmentation. Examining works of art produced after the revolutionary impulse sparked the irreversible change in knowledge, she observed that the recurrent trope of fragments in revolutionary culture symbolizes not so much nostalgia for the past as enacting its deliberate destruction, or what she called “pulverization” of its repressive tradition (Nochlin 1994, 8). The decolonial situation in Ukraine presents unique challenges for the application of decolonial theory, as it requires a reconsideration of the theory’s evasion of modernity as a return to the emancipated and, simultaneously, rooted epistemology of the oppressed. The decolonial epistemology in Ukraine developed as a negation of both Soviet mythologized narratives and the perception of Ukrainian society as either autochthonous or homogeneous, and thus being capable of producing zero-point epistemology (and, consequently, mimicking colonial othering), instead turning the

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focus to the diversity of localized knowledge that enters into a polyphonic dialogue with the decolonial release. Boaventura de Sousa Santos attempts to describe the nature of a nonviolent protest that focuses more on the validity of decolonial epistemology than on the claim of reappropriation. He proposes the notion of the impermeable “abyssal line” that divides the oppressor’s and the oppressed’s ways of knowledge production (Sousa Santos 2018, 8). This line is normative by nature because the knowledge it is based on also defines the differing limits of the permitted in the colonizer and colonized spaces. Identifying it is the first step toward its dissolution or relocation. Sousa Santos claims that nonviolent resistance is aimed at subverting this discriminatory abyssal line. This refers to a capacity to undertake the powerful position of the observer, detached from the events and able to grasp the entire situation, adhering to the symbolic power of knowing. For example, he speaks of Mahatma Gandhi’s political project as a struggle that omitted the very fact of exclusion, overlooked appropriation, and epistemic and physical violence by the metropolis, and in this way dissolved the abyssal line of normative behavior conditioned by colonial knowledge. The overcoming of the knowledge of the colonized before the actual erasure of the limitation of inequality has thus become the key to emancipation (Sousa Santos 2018, 68). He further views the collective subject as one that challenges knowledge authorship through an emphasis on the ways of knowing rather than knowledge(s). The revolutionary, activist, and cultural origins of new knowledge in Ukraine laid the foundation for collective inquiry as a sum of individual experiences, which were only later consolidated into a new epistemology. Ilya Gerasimov and Marina Mogilner view the notion of “empire” as a “useful analytical category,” which refers to a wider context, semantic production, and hierarchical organization of multilayered and situational identities (Mogilner and Gerasimov 2024). I argue that while contributing to the objective detachment from the term and depriving it of its affective potential, the placement of empire into the epistemological epicenter returns us to the postcolonial condition. Turning the sight beyond imperial subjectivity and producing epistemes of freedom and equality, and delinking from the trauma of entanglement, whether experienced emotionally or analyzed rationally, brings the decolonial turn. This “beyond-­ imperial” thinking was effectively fostered by Euromaidan in its profound and spontaneous creation of decolonial agency. Here I address two vulnerabilities of knowledge production emphasized by Theodor Adorno: its arbitrariness and its dialectics rooted in intrinsic binarism (Adorno 2013 [1956]). The new epistemology impulsed

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by Euromaidan emerged as polyphonic and nonhierarchical, informed in the revolution’s commitment to equality, which sustainably proved to overcome binarism despite its explicit anti-colonial stance. One can view the arbitrariness of the emerging knowledge not only as part of freedom but also as the result of the power void pointed out by Laclau and Mouffe, when it is impossible to predict what knowledge will be dominant after filling the vacant place. Adorno’s work focuses on a different vision of epistemology, yet it informed—and influenced—decolonial scholars’ appropriation of the term, reinterpreting it as a multifaceted production. One of the important Euromaidan achievements is that, after the initial chaos marked by the trauma of violence and the subsequent territorial loss between the spring and summer of 2014, the emerging civil society managed to preserve the knowledge that formed its disentanglement and undermined the ambicolonial foundation, while subverting the ambicolonial affection and substituting it with a multivectoral, polysemic, pluralist affect, in a way more hybrid than the postcolonial hybridity permits. The ambicolonial epistemology in Russia has lost its balance after the loss of its symbolic counterpart, as one of the supporting pillars in the communication model that I discuss in Chap. 3. With Euromaidan, Ukrainian society entered into a new affective relationship: with its newly made history, with the new set of concepts and epistemes related to solidarity, support, and collective effort, but also the newly experienced effects of state violence: grief and fear, which marked the turning point of the loss of innocence of a postcolonial peaceful society that had not been exposed to explicit violence since the Soviet time. The witnesses and participants of the revolution describe this confluence of humility and terror in numerous testimonies: I was at work for a bit on the 20th [of February] and then went to […] Maidan, maybe help break up some paving stones again, maybe something else was needed—slice some bread, or something. […] And so, as I was approaching the post office, I saw men standing. […] Well, maybe some help was needed or something? I approached. And they were standing there, and in front of them lay five bodies  – our boys killed.6 (Sosnovska and Chebanyuk 2019, 312) 6  Я якраз теж двадцятого числа [лютого] трохи побула на роботі і пішла на […] Майдан, може, там знову бруківку допомагати [розбивати], може, щось треба – нарізати хліб чи що ще. […] І от, наближаючись уже до поштамту, дивлюся – стоять чоловіки. […] Ну, може, якась допомога потрібна чи що? Підхожу. А вони стоять, а перед ними п’ять тіл лежать – хлопці вбиті. Translation from Ukrainian is mine.

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This new collectivity of action—and collective witnessing of violence and sharing its trauma, has been formative for the model of exchange embedded into public knowledge.  Euromaidan manifested a turn from the ambiguous notion of ethnic identity to the notion of political identity, to eventually subvert them both in a move toward a multicultural, pluralist society that forms the basis for both the resilience and the decolonial spirit in current-day Ukraine. The multifaceted nature of the revolution inevitably incorporated certain elements of the antagonism (such as a brutal attack on the left-wing cultural historian Vasyl Cherepanyn by the followers of a marginalized right party) (Shore 2018, 247), yet these elements never outweighed the achievement of solidary expression. The Euromaidan Revolution came after the suppression of the protest movement in Russia at Bolotnaya Square. The difference between the two movements is that, as Lena Jonson points out, the Russian protests were marked by the dynamics of dissensus rather than open confrontation, due to the totalitarian nature of the regime (Jonson 2015, 7). She uses the notions of “subjectivation” and “disassociation” to describe the dissensus, as a form of slow, drifting disentanglement. The failure of Russia’s movement can be explained precisely by this initial reference to the consensual essence of political structure and the profoundly postcolonial vision of it as the overarching system that permits slow disassembly but not a rapid shift. However, as noted by Tlostanova, the strategy of the Russian state is “either to crush or to co-opt any direct forms of social and political protest” (Tlostanova 2018, 22), and such conditions require swift changes, which moreover respond to the polymorphous quality of the self-­ colonizing regime. Lacking in radical action, the action of disassociation—which does not presuppose the creation of new agency, but rather the denial of agency in the existing status quo—did not affect the intrinsic duality of the totalitarian Russian state and the profound ambivalence of its postcolonial condition. The dissensus in violent conditions does not provide sufficient potential for change, for the break with the traumatic past, since the backward-­looking present is also full of terror. It lacks the capacity for the production of new epistemology, leaving the desire for change only on a superficial level. The slow drift, which is proper for the postcolonial dynamics of recombination within what Mbembe calls durée, in the case of Russia has turned into longue durée of Putin’s regime, built on fear and terror. Instead, the violent suppression of the protests resulted in the regression—from dissensus to a new consensus, and the reestablishment of the consensual epistemology.

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The reactions to the Ukrainian revolutionary movement showed that even the most dedicated supporters of Russian protests and opposition often appear as subjects to ambicoloniality. The protest by Pussy Riot at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012, where the artists performed an anti-government guerilla action, showed that the open and radical confrontation in defense of civil society in Russia was possible only as an individual, one-time act and not as a collective movement. The action of Pussy Riot produced an isolated effect, despite being a powerful subversive gesture that pointed out new hybridities that Putin’s regime relied on: the syncretic unity between the militarized church and the state, which attempted at syncretic polarization of these two with a plea: “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin.”7 (Rumens 2012) However, the conversation between philosopher Slavoj Žižek and then-detained artist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova presented a particular misunderstanding of the moving force of Euromaidan vis-à-vis the Russian oppositional movement. Particularly, in its aspect that the disentanglement of epistemology and the decolonial turn are only possible as a result of collective action, as both a solidary and agonistic movement of thousands who maintain their differences yet put them in dialogue to reach the common goal. In his analysis, Žižek resorts to an ambicolonial interpretation, showing a profound misunderstanding of Ukraine’s situation regarding the dissolution of postcolonial defensive nationalism. He reluctantly accepts that “the Euromaidan protesters were heroes” but sees the internal “nationalist” struggle, that according to him would follow in Ukraine, as more significant than its resistance to Russian colonialism (which he calls “Putin’s intervention”). Despite the achievements of Euromaidan in creating a pluralist, multifaceted society, he sees Russia as a model for the protest movement: A new and much more risky heroism will be needed here. The model of this heroism is found in the Russians […] who courageously oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of those in power. What is needed today is to make the ‘crazy’ gesture of rejecting the very terms of the conflict and proclaiming the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians.8 (Žižek and Tolokonnikova 2014, 103–104) 7  Богородица, Путина прогони! Translation from Russian is by Carol Rumens. Quoted in Carol Rumens, “Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer is pure protest poetry,” The Guardian, August 20, 2012. Available online at:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/20/ pussy-riot-punk-prayer-lyrics. 8  Italics is Žižek’s.

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The undervaluing of the colonial component implicitly present in the exchange dynamics between Russia and Ukraine—and the resulting epistemological imposition that continuously aims at recolonization by the use of the ambicolonial channel—omits from the view that Russian production of expansive aggressive nationalist discourse is very far from Ukrainian defensive nationalism, and, therefore, cannot be used as a model for Ukrainian protest movements, taking into account societal differences and diverging epistemologies. This widening epistemological gap between the two countries helped to preserve Russia’s ambicolonial epistemology on all levels: from official to those permeated with the idea of resistance, and the presence of this ambicolonial epistemology suppresses potential dissensus.

4.4  Eurocentricity as a Decolonial Option? In Ukraine, Eurocentricity, proposed by the epistemology of Euromaidan, meant emancipation from the colonial influences of the empire to the East. Ukraine, however, has historically persisted as a boundary between East and West—being subject to what Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă call “inter-imperial creolization” within the framework of “a multiethnic and multilingual entity across empires” (Parvulescu and Boatcă 2022, 3–4). The Ukrainian borderline position has historically challenged both the decolonial and postcolonial theories’ visions of Eurocentricity: the former viewing Europe as a source of colonizing knowledge and the latter’s vision of it as the dominant center fostering hybridization and othering of the peripheries. Contrary to colonial models that oppose Eurocentricity, Euromaidan Ukraine  unequivocally proclaimed itself as “European.” Mychailo Wynnyckyj proposes that Ukrainian revolutionaries perceived their radical break with the “Russian World” as a “correction” of the stream of history and a return to Europe (Wynnyckyj 2021, 42). The return to Europe in this context not only is viewed as a civilizational choice but, above all, the restoration of epistemic justice and the acknowledgment of the European symbolic identity power and the related knowledge production, negating the ambivalence of Russia’s claims to be a separate civilization, synthesizing both European and Asian developmental trajectories.  This interpretation echoes the 1976 declaration of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group: “We, Ukrainians, live in Europe” (Plokhy 2015, 325). The discursive linking of belonging to Europe with the profound values of human

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rights and predictability as a democratic quality, ascribed to the post– World War II European political and cultural space, formed the basis for this symbolic and geographical adherence. Marci Shore narrates her conversation with volunteers of Euromaidan: “What kind of Ukraine do you want?” – “Free, European,” she answered. “It doesn’t matter, let it be European or any kind of progressive. With values—the values accepted all over the world—so that we would have them here, too. So that it would no longer happen that we choose for our president a man with two criminal convictions, who went to prison for stealing hats.” (Shore 2018, 186)

The indifference to the characteristics of Ukraine as “European” or not, contained in this answer, is representative of the general epistemology produced by Euromaidan: that clear political affiliation is not a necessary requisite for development; that the decolonial release lies in the detachment from the identification process in relation to any political or geographical entity. This brings forward the question of how pro-European Euromaidan was. Wynnyckyi points out that “For Ukrainians, ‘Europe’ became a symbol, and not the main demand”9 (Wynnyckyj 2021, 42). This symbolic Eurocentricity responds to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “imaginary Europe,” a construct that imposes “political modernity,” bearing the burden of European history of development, upon the social life of non-­ European countries, introducing the concepts of civil society, human rights, equality, and democracy (Chakrabarty 2000, 4). As the quote presented by Shore shows, in the Ukrainian case, the references made to Europe were largely of ethical and intellectual, and not pragmatic, character, which demonstrated the unifying power of an idea rooted in agency. Plokhy writes that “[The protests] turned the Maidan and its environs into a space of freedom from the corrupt government and its police forces. What had begun as a demand to join Europe turned into the Revolution of Dignity, which brought together diverse political forces, from liberals in mainstream parties to radicals and nationalists” (Plokhy 2015, 339). Ukrainian symbolic Eurocentric stance paradoxically coincides with a “maximalist” vision of agency, its essential idealization. This comes from 9  Для українців «Європа» стала символом, а не головною вимогою. Translation from Ukrainian is mine.

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the postcolonial condition and its perspective on the nation-state, which sees it persisting in the framework of defensive nationalism—where freedom is the ultimate aim, and the visions of “absolute” nonhybrid identity and “absolute” knowledge are considered possible. I argue, however, that overcoming the essentialization of political and ethnic identity was the most important achievement of the Euromaidan protests. Syncretic polarization has largely substituted the defensive nationalist strand in the collective resistance when the focus shifted from the one-sided anti-colonial expression to the polyphonic decolonial action, expelling the elements of colonial domination from the field of signification and knowledge production. Snyder points out that the main difference between European and global history (and related belonging) is encompassed by their relation to colonialism and the nation-state. He proposes to eliminate these differences through a more general reference to integration and disintegration as the processes of exchange and transformation, thereby reducing the conceptual weight of the “colonial.” His proposal brings us closer to the understanding of the decolonial processes in the region. He argues that once the post–World War I European nation-state succeeded in disintegration, it failed in integration, and this failure gave way to the tactical attempts at recolonization by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Ukraine happened to be at the intersection of these movements. It is noteworthy that Russia in Timothy Snyder’s model appears as part of the European domain, struggling to substitute integration with neocolonial reconquest (Snyder 2015, 697). Snyder argues that the European Union historically worked as a “substitute” for recolonization after the end of World War II.  It followed, however, different principles: despite the uneven political and economic weight, EU member states were treated as formal equals, while even smaller-sized states exercised “exaggerated power” within the integrated unity. He emphasizes this presumable equality when he calls the EU “a resting place for both former empires and former subjects of empire” (Snyder 2015, 701). This pluralism can be compared to the “liberal socialist” (Mouffe 1993) principles of Euromaidan solidarity. Ukraine’s Eurocentricity emerged as an emancipating decolonial movement, coinciding in its aims with at least two characteristics of the integration/disintegration model of consolidated Europe proposed by Snyder. It views Europe not as a point of gravity but rather as a point of deviation from Russia’s proposed orientalization of Ukraine’s public sphere, which failed with the victory of Euromaidan. It is viewed as a confrontation of

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rationality against chaos, the rule of law against the rule of informal power structures, and the rule of dignity against the neocolonial denial of agency to its former subaltern. Europe is viewed in Ukraine as a less-affective formation, and the affiliation with Europe is considered disentanglement rather than new entanglement—or, using Snyder’s terms, “rather than recolonization.” Although claiming to be part of Europe, Ukraine has not formed an ambicolonial relationship with it—not least because Europe as a collective entity, did not express the explicit desire to adhere to the Ukrainian symbolic field. In the shadow of Europe, Ukraine has historically entertained invisibility—similar to its invisibility due to Russia’s oppression, yet carrying different characteristics. While the first “type” of invisibility proceeds from the lack of knowing, the discrepancy in the formation of relevant knowledge due to the presumable marginality of the subject, the second “type” of invisibility is the result of deliberate elimination of any cultural or symbolic trait that could stand out, that could be characteristic of the location that it connotes and the people that it represents. As a collective entity, versus the centralized geopolitical body of Russia, contemporary Europe also allows for heterogeneity and plurality, which render any ambicoloniality impossible. Ambicoloniality, therefore, appears as a trait of a centralized state; moreover, its embeddedness in the affective dynamics is linked to the authoritarian—or reenacted totalitarian—essence of the colonizer. The disengagement of Ukraine from the ambicolonial relationship with Russia through Euromaidan had its affective consequences and triggered the deeply underlying shifts in the hybridity of both countries. García  Canclini emphasizes the inability of the cultural notion of hybridization to reach a logical closure because in a “hybrid abyss” stability is permanently challenged, as hegemonic groups cannot fully assert themselves, and subaltern groups are unable to establish their identity on an exclusive basis (García Canclini 1995, xxxii). This definition is reminiscent of the postsocialist limbo, both Ukraine and Russia have been immersed in after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where the hybrid identities were not completed within the ambicolonial situation and at the same time could not dissolve due to insufficiency of syncretic polarization. Zygmunt Bauman argues that the idea of identity proceeds from the crisis of belonging, as an unfinished, unfulfilled task calling for action (Bauman 2004, 20). This crisis that manifested the end of the postcolonial longue durée was expressed in the revolution from the Ukrainian side, and the

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beginning of the war from the Russian side, and it enunciated the void and insufficiency present in hybrid identities at the time of respective events. Chakrabarty proposes that the symbolic Eurocentricity (along with alignment with political modernity) is characterized, first of all, by historicism, as an idea that everything needs to be seen in its historical development—and Europe is seen as a source of knowledge and as a guide  to interpreting the world for its former colonies. Russian colonialism mimics discursive methods of European colonialism of the past and presents a similar claim to own and form history, and takes it further by abusing historicism with pseudo-historical claims about Russia’s teleological and absolute essence, and its special historical mission. One such example is the notorious article by Vladimir Putin published in 2021, in which he claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people—a single whole” (Putin 2021). Through a series of historical manipulations and appropriations (such as the transpositions of the Kyivan Rus legacy to Russia), he denies the existence of Ukraine before 1917 and its historical agency and proclaims that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped—for a significant part—on the lands of historical Russia.”10 The resistance to Russian propaganda claims, creating not an “imaginary Europe” but an “imaginary Russia”—almighty, overseeing, and strong—has framed Ukrainian decolonial truth as a process of de-­ historicization. The new epistemology of Euromaidan—and further of the war—broke with this logic of creating epistemology rooted in linear, “vertical” history permeated with colonial affect and anti-colonial resentment. The production of disentangled knowledge, therefore, broke with historicism and its hybrid discourse and turned to history-in-the-making. The row of “revolutionary” movements in Ukraine, from the 1990 Revolution on  Granite to the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, aimed to achieve the necessary syncretic polarization and construct a vision of the acceptable and unacceptable elements to be included in the Ukrainian visions of agency. This disentanglement undertook radical forms aimed not only at the transformation of the societal structure but also the reassembly of the politics of memory rooted in the creation of new history. The exit from the hybrid abyss is in 10  While the Russian original says, “at the expense of historical Russia,” the English translation transofrms it to “on the lands of historical Russia,” in this way giving territorial dimension to this statement.

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restructuring the hierarchy through syncretic polarization and expulsion of essential elements that mark its historical rigidity and in turning to the nonpolarized epistemology as “horizontal” knowledge production. The Eurocentric turn as a nonnationalist, peaceful in its essence, decolonial turn emerges as an option, which marks Ukraine’s reorientation toward decolonial release from Russia’s impacts. However, Russia’s own ambition has been based on the assumption of the indispensability of Ukraine as the historically subaltern entity.

4.5  Syncretic Polarization as Epistemological Expulsion In Chap. 3, I outlined two stages of syncretic polarization as a process of the expulsion of colonial epistemology and a mechanism for the dissolution of ambicoloniality that grants release both to the oppressor and the oppressed. The first, radical stage of syncretic polarization refers to anti-­ colonial resistance and relies on the “mirroring” power effect noted by Pavlyshyn (1992), wherein  the actions of the colonizer are actively and discursively imitated by the colonized (or the society under the threat of colonization), marking profound transformations in language and the knowledge underpinned by this language. This process is marked by the expulsion of conflicting knowledge as disentanglement from colonial impacts, which takes on different nonessentialist forms. This process is largely related to struggle and denial. The second, stabilizing stage of syncretic polarization refers to the decolonial processes of epistemological delinking as forgetting and to the intensified decolonial knowledge production, filling the collective memory reservoir. Taking detachment from traumatic historical memory as a departure point, new knowledge is created in parallel, “as if” the preceding colonial influences did not exist, and eventually, the newly produced body of knowledge forms the predominant, disentangled epistemology, which in Ukraine refers to liberation, agency, and justice. Collective solidarity of Euromaidan embarked on the first stage of syncretic polarization with the denial accepting and incorporating several moves of the pro-Russian government, some political  and others symbolic. The discussion of the preceding events, however, gives a wider context for the search for syncretism in Ukrainian culture. One of these events directly referred to the initial definition of syncretism as an overlapping of

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forms and expressions of religious beliefs, and took place shortly before Euromaidan. On July 27, 2013, a symbolic celebration of 1025 years of the Baptism of Rus took place on Saint Volodymyr Hill in Kyiv, a park on the slope of the Dnipro River topped with the monument to Prince Volodymyr of Kyivan Rus, who in AD 988 delivered a mass baptism of Kyivites into Orthodox Christianity. The celebration, supported by the government of Viktor Yanukovych, took on a clear-cut political form. The ceremony included high-profile delegations from post-Soviet countries; Vladimir Putin gave a speech titled “Orthodox Slavic Values: The Basis of Ukraine’s Civilizational Choice.” Serhii Plokhy quotes this speech in his detailed account of the event: “We have the Ukrainian people and the Belarusian people and other peoples, and we are respectful of that whole legacy, but at the foundation, there lie, unquestionably, our common spiritual values, which make us one people” (Plokhy 2023, 149). This statement repeated the standpoints of Solzhenitsyn’s imperial views that were formative in their time for the Commonwealth of Independent States, yet it firmly replanted them on a clerical ground, erasing the boundary between the religious and the political. The Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchy refused to participate in the ceremony and held its own celebration. Ambicoloniality was fully manifested at this event, with Russia’s adherence to Ukraine’s historical and cultural legacy and a simultaneous attempt at its appropriation through a confluence of religious congregations, with the Moscow Patriarchy as the dominating power. As The Economist reported, “The event took place amid rising concerns in Russia over Ukraine’s future.”11 This seemingly protective concern about the future of the neighboring sovereign country marked a growing inability of Russia to distinguish between internal and external politics, with the border as a filtering mechanism having been corrupted and given way to ambicolonial desire.12 11  “The 1,025th Anniversary of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus. The Event Took Place amid Rising Concerns in Russia over Ukraine’s Future.” The Economist. July 30, 2013. Available online at: https://www.economist.com/eastern-approaches/2013/07/30/the-1025thanniversary-of-the-baptism-of-kyivan-rus. 12  The polymorphous coloniality of Russian political narratives went even further in their ambicolonial affection. The short article on the Russian ultraright “Russkyi Mir” Foundation website mentioned the date of the Baptism in conjunction with the birthday of Hryhory Skovoroda: “On March 21 and 22 two historical dates are being celebrated in Kiev [Russian spelling of ‘Kyiv’] – the 1025th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus and the 290th anniversary

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The ceremony in Kyiv showed that Putin’s colonialist worldview and religious stance form one political whole and Russia’s vision of religion are not separated from the state but weaponized for the purposes of Russian expansive nationalism and the resulting neocolonial war. The expulsion of the Moscow Patriarchy from Ukrainian political and cultural spheres after the relevant law was accepted in 2023 exemplified syncretic polarization, which had to address two very similar conceptual proposals, yet drew toward two different political vectors: Ukrainian and Russian. The revolutionary impulses produced in Euromaidan several months later were expressed as a simultaneous fragmentation of the past and a reformatting of the present through collective participatory action. The protests offered several directions of syncretic polarization within the existing—and changing—morphology of domination. These ways presented themselves as expulsion—as processes of extracting obsolete knowledge marked by  colonialism—and they fully manifested within the epistemological space, liberated by the popular uprising against the oligarchy and colonial entanglement. Another example of radical syncretic polarization in Euromaidan was the conversion of the unfinished Christmas tree, which the city government began constructing for celebration in late November 2013, into a symbol of revolution. The empty metal carcass of the “tree,” which was supposed to hold several cut trees, remained unassembled as the protests unfolded. Moreover, Viktor Yanukovych’s government initially attempted to remove the protesters’ camp under the pretext that it was obstructing the city’s preparations for winter celebrations. This gigantic skeleton became redundant and was soon covered by an eclectic combination of protest slogans, depictions of Ukrainian and European symbols and insignia, and flags of countries supporting the revolution. This construction, which art historian Nazar Kozak calls an “anti-monument” (Kozak 2017, 16), formed a definitive center for the extraction and expulsion of symbols associated with both internal oppression and colonial domination. of the birth of the great Ukrainian philosopher, poet, and teacher Grigory (Hryhorii) Skovoroda. A number of events have been planned in honor of these two dates and representatives of the Russkiy Mir Foundation have traveled to Ukraine to take part.” “Jubilee of Grigory Skovoroda and 1025th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus Celebrated in Kiev,” Russkyi Mir, March  22,  2013. Available online at: https://russkiymir.ru/en/ news/135869/.

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The “tree” of the Maidan responds to Bhabha’s vision of a nation-state in construction, which persists “in the process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in medias res, and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made” (Bhabha 1990, 2). This in medias res quality of the hybrid space of protest enables the filtering out of meanings, even without the necessary requirement of their completeness, because elements marked by oppression also may appear as partial. Similarly, those elements that carry the mark of defensive nationalist exclusivity may be integrated into this eclectic image, but only  as a small portion of the general polyphony. The profound hybridity of nationalist discourses, pointed out by Bhabha, becomes one more target for expulsion through the profound overturn brought  by Euromaidan and the resulting syncretic polarization, where the skeletons of old political and social structures acquire new, diverse meanings. Euromaidan’s radical syncretic polarization undertook three main directions. First, the protests marked the epistemological expulsion of narratives produced by defensive nationalism as the core nation-building concept under the permanent conditions of an overhanging colonial threat, deeming them obsolete. In doing so, the revolution marked the multifaceted ways of defining the controversial concepts of “nation” and “identity,” or even discarded the necessity of outlining them, focusing on agency as central to decolonial development. The break with the identity-centered approach marked the beginning of the dissolution of hybridity and postcolonial ambivalence. Second, Euromaidan marked the expulsion of the epistemology of marginalization as the embedded knowledge of fixed divisions into centers and peripheries, defining the obscure, subaltern zones of nonrepresentability. The reunification of “East” and “West,” proclaimed in the 2004 Orange Revolution resonated in the popular solidarity and participatory democracy of Euromaidan, which gave the first impulse to internal hybridization as the decolonial alternative to the processes constituting postcolonial hybridity. Cultural decentralization became one of the important aspects of acquiring this new polyphony, which resulted in the new government’s recognition of the necessity of regionally strengthening institutional networks, particularly related to culture and especially in the face of Russia’s warfare. The work of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation between 2018 and 2021, which largely supported cultural and educational initiatives across the country, paid particular attention to bringing visibility to

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the previously marginalized zones. This resulted, for example, in Mariupol’s previously unseen “cultural renaissance” before its destruction by the full-­ scale invasion in 2022. Third, the revolution marked the expulsion of the epistemology of historical trauma as the standpoint value in the postcolonial system of coordinates. This overcoming was decisive for the turn from the postcolonial condition to a new decolonial situation—which, nevertheless, took eight years to fully manifest itself with the complete shift from slow decolonization to a swift one following the need to resist Russia’s synchronic colonization attempts during the full-scale invasion. The overcoming of historicism helped dismantle Ukraine’s epistemological codependence with Russia and subverted the ambicolonial appropriation of Ukraine’s history, which has a symbolic significance for Russia’s state ideology and its expansive nationalist identity.

4.6  Case Study: Euromaidan Practices; from the Rethinking of History to the Production of New Narratives Euromaidan gave an impulse to the intensified production of new epistemologies; it has been largely expressed through a nondiscrete visual language of artistic works that highlighted the reinterpretation of belonging and identity, as well as the underlying change in the understanding of solidarity and consolidation.  Euromaidan’s social practice and art activism reflected postcolonial and eventually decolonial developments in the (post-)revolutionary Ukrainian society. One of the iconic projects portraying the chronology of revolutionary development is the Kyiv Diary, a series of paintings by Vlada Ralko, which depicts the changing situation during the Euromaidan Revolution in Kyiv and the subsequent events of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014 (Ralko 2016). It aims to grasp the fast flow of events, which, from peaceful protests, escalated to violent confrontations with the police. The imagery employed by the artist is violent and frequently includes depictions of rape. The figure of a woman raped by a bear reappears in the paintings from the diary several times, as does that of a man enveloped by the two wings of a two-headed eagle (Fig. 4.3). The man bears an uncanny resemblance to the then president Viktor Yanukovych himself, but rather represents a typical profile of low-educated

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Fig. 4.3  Vlada Ralko, from the Kyiv Diary series, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist

young men (titushki) who were inadvertently hired by the government to provoke unrest during the protests. The symbolic depiction of Russia’s colonial action in Ukraine, with its attempts at political influence through the corrupt government, takes on a gendered, pornographic aspect. In other works from the series, the same young man is depicted tearing his chest into two parts, with inner organs exposed. The violent action of an attempt at colonial domination, viewed as rape by a monstrous animal-like creature, is replaced with a theme of painful, aggressive division—of a body and a territory—that affects everyone involved.

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One of the paintings from Ralko’s concurrent series Premonition (2013–2014) addresses the theme of a split from colonial influences and a simultaneous territorial loss, showing the mutilated body of a young woman who cuts her chest into two parts, her inner organs falling out, while a group of people watches this action as the rest of the world passively observes the tragic events. Notably, the brightly painted inner organs not only are representative of the ruining impact of Russia’s brutal involvement in Ukraine’s inner affairs and the subsequent occupation of part of Ukrainian territory but can also be seen as a kind of cornucopia. The Revolution of Dignity brought to light the excess of state-sponsored violence, but it also actualized another excess—a myth of Ukraine as a “breadbasket” of Europe and the world, which has more than once contributed to the formation and strengthening of national identity (Plokhy 2014, 285). The series explores political tension as a gendered division, and in this interpretation approaches the decolonial point of view of what Gloria Anzaldúa described as a particular tabooed quality of the borderline, which crosses the hybrid condition produced by durable colonial impact: A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the halfbreed, the half-dead. (Anzaldúa 1987, 3)

Precisely, the hybrid, monstrous appearance of the incorporated oppressor is the common thread that unites the entire series of Ralko into a single, coherent narrative. It serves as a reminder that hybridity manifests itself in the colonized, but the colonizer is the main carrier and source of its most exaggerated, excessive, grotesque features. An important reflection on the revolutionary fragmentation of the past as both a violent and a reconstituting act (Nochlin 1994) is the painting by Oleksandr Roytburd Raising the Banner (2014) (Fig. 4.4). The detachment from the past is rendered in Roytburd’s work through a tribute he pays to the eponymous socialist realist painting by Soviet official artist Geliy Korzhev, a centerpiece from his triptych Communists (1959–1961). In Korzhev’s painting, a communist activist lifts the red standard from the ground, after it has been dropped by his killed comrade. Formative for the socialist ideology of Khurshchev’s times, this work was an iconic representation of the struggle for socialism in the world. In Roytburd’s reinterpretation, the painting depicts the artist’s self-portrait raising the Ukrainian

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Fig. 4.4  Oleksandr Roytburd, Raising the Banner, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate

flag. His body is fragmented into parts, casually recombined into a grotesque collage, with the limbs contorted. The flag is handed to him by his own arm, suddenly appearing from the opposite side of the painting. This representation of a collective effort as an individual act, and the simultaneous, ironic, self-heroization of Roytburd, who actively participated in Euromaidan, allows for a deeper look at the symbolic weight of a revolution that dismantles and reassembles social and political bodies. For Roytburd, the fragmented body has agency. It is also more dynamic than complete bodies; it persists in the process of reconfiguration; it is bound to act. Here, the irony of Roytburd goes further, bringing in sense of the burlesque  inversion between the permitted and the prohibited, the sacred  and the blasphemous, the ethical and the physical, with its explicit sexual connotations. This fragmentation draws a parallel between corporeality and spatiality, marking the shattered integrity that permits breaking up with the haunting past and its oppressive ideology and replacing it with its own struggle for emancipation, taking on different dimensions of knowledge. The repetition that returns us to the single  nude figure in the work of Roytburd recalls the equality and solidarity of the work of a collective as an individual entity, and simultaneously marks this

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transformation as a disordering, disorienting, and spontaneous disintegration of a collective body before its new reassembly. If the revolution uncovered the void of undecidability underpinning violent Yanukovych’s regime, the excess exposed by it, in Badiou’s terms, was best represented in the creative impulse of the Art Barbican, an open-­ air plywood construction erected by artists among the barricades. The entrance to the improvised art space, which was used for impromptu exhibitions, literary readings, and discussions, carried an ironic slogan: “Artists, unite for the communal catharsis!” (Lozhkina 2014). The space showcased the work of a group of artists: Ivan Semesyuk, Olexa Mann, and Andrii Yermolenko, yet it merged with the popular art of the Maidan and presented the creation of new forms and ways of collective expression through political art. Another Maidan initiative was an Open University—a stage where the events took place. The ambicolonial relation has manifested in Euromaidan as well, in the form of an idea of exchange of revolutionary impulses, when Russian artist Piotr Pavlensky, who arrived from St. Petersburg, gave a talk about radical actionism as art activism. Euromaidan gave way to the idea of trans-local solidarities, which found an outlet in the “export” of revolution beyond the Ukrainian border— namely, to the domain of the aggressor. Russian ambicoloniality was emphasized through the artists’ explorations of similarities, both formal and conceptual, between Russia and Ukraine. The engagement of former Soviet, now-European regions, such as the Baltic perspective, in this artistic interplay of power further accentuated Russia’s biggest fear: the spread of freedom through the channels of cultural proximity. In 2014, the Manifesta Biennial took place in St. Petersburg despite objections from the Ukrainian cultural community, which argued that such an event should not be hosted by a country that had recently invaded part of its neighbor’s territory.13 The collaborative project Iron Arch (2015) between the Estonian artist and filmmaker Kristina Norman and the Ukrainian performance artist Alevtina Kakhidze drew on the experience of Euromaidan and addressed the possibility of the realization of the revolution in St. Petersburg. Referring to the revolution as an unfinished, continuous process, Norman installed a sculpture titled Souvenir (2014) in Palace 13  The artist Maria Kulikovska, who lost the possibility to visit her home in Crimea after its occupation, has staged a protest by imitating a lifeless soldier covered with a Ukrainian flag on the stairs of the Hermitage Museum, one of the main sites of the Biennial. The attention, however, that she managed to attract was that of the security of the museum who escorted her from the building.

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Square, in front of the Hermitage Museum. Life-sized green metal scaffolding reenacted the Maidan Christmas tree as a symbol of expanding resistance. Shortly after its installation, the museum administration removed the sculpture due to its potential political implications. At the same time, Norman filmed Iron Arch, where Kakhidze narrated her experience as a witness to and a participant in the Euromaidan protests, calling to the imagination of the viewers to locate the Ukrainian events in the architectural structure of the Palace Square. Pointing to the side of the Hermitage Museum, she says: “Here, there was the confrontation. To the left, there was a barrier of security forces. […] There, where there is the Stadium “Dynamo,” and here, at the National Art Museum [of Ukraine]. All the paintings had to be moved down to the basement because there was an outstanding amount of soot around.”14 (Norman 2015, 00:03:49–00:04:20) In her narration, Kakhidze used visual similarities between the architecture of the two squares, Palace Square and Maidan (Independence Square) featuring a column in the center of it, topped in the Ukrainian case with the statue of Independence, in the Russian case—with the monument to Emperor Alexander I.  However, the location in Kakhidze’s story is not fixed, and the events she describes in the quote refer to heated confrontations near  European Square in Kyiv, several hundred meters from the Maidan. The attempt to symbolically share the radical transformation of Euromaidan, using cultural proximity and postcolonial hybridity, appears as a symbolic “reconquest” of the territory of power by projecting the logic of liberation from the former colonized to the former (and aspiring) colonizer. This work emphasizes the ambicolonial perspective on the connection between the two countries and challenges totalitarian Russia’s vulnerability to the protest movement, thereby equalizing the power hierarchy and hypothetically presenting Russia’s social space as mimicking the decolonial processes of Ukraine. The legacy of Euromaidan’s take on “unequal equality” and the experience of transforming epistemological production through solidarity have influenced the comprehension of Ukrainian society’s agency in the production of social and political change, as well as fostered decentralized reimaginings of ongoing cultural transformations. The questions of 14  Противостояние было вот здесь. Слева был заслон силовиков. […] Вот там, где стадион «Динамо» и Национальный Художественный Музей. Все картины пришлось снести с первых этажей вниз, потому что гарь стояла невероятная. Translation from Russian is mine.

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agency, both collective and individual, and diversity became central and overshadowed the previously dominating focus on identity, “absolute” or “ambivalent.” This shift provoked further disentanglement and brought about a decolonial turn. This turn can be conceptualized through various theoretical lenses, not only those of decolonial theory. I find it useful to refer to art historian Piotr Piotrowski’s famous definition of horizontal art histories, which calls for considering every local art scene individually in its own social and political context. While not being a postcolonial or decolonial scholar, Piotrowski proposed an effective method of disentanglement by applying a nonlinear, diffuse, and polyphonic model to the context of local histories, as opposed to hierarchical, “vertical” art history, which divides the field into centers and peripheries of art production (Piotrowski 2008). For example, we need to accept that Ukrainian art history is crafted from notions and visualities belonging to different ideologies, once-suppressed cultural elements, and distorted, hybrid identities, each unique to its location. The collision of these individual aspects has produced a new cultural reality that is still, and on many occasions uneven, and the decolonial processes aim to unify it and give equal visibility to all the elements. The emergence of these elements and their establishment in public culture has been guided by the growth of new institutions after Euromaidan and, at the same time, the elaboration of new independent artistic languages and idioms of art criticism following 2014.

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Piotrowski, Piotr (2008). “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History.” Art / Umění. Vol. 56, No. 5, 378–383. Plokhy, Serhii (2014). The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. Basic Books: New York. Plokhy, Serhii (2015). The Gates of Europe. A History of Ukraine. Basic Books: New York. Plokhy, Serhii (2023). The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. W. W. Norton & Company: New York. Portnov, Andrii (2013). “Memory Wars in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1991–2010).” In Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. Edited by Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor, 233–254. Palgrave Macmillan: New York and London. Putin, Vladimir (2021). “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” President of Russia. 12 June. Available online at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/ president/news/66181. Ralko, Vlada (2016). Kyiv Diary/ Kyivs’kyi shchodennyk. ChervoneChorne Gallery: Kaniv. Riabchuk, Mykola (2000). Vid Malorosii do Ukrainy: Paradoksy zapizniloho natsiietvorennia [From Little Russia to Ukraine: Paradoxes of the Belated Nation-­ Making]. Krytyka: Kyiv and Cambridge, MA. Riabchuk, Mykola (2024). “What Remained of ‘Two Ukraines’?” Lecture. 13 May. Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXktNVe_A8Q&t=1467s. Rumens, Carol (2012). “Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer Is Pure Protest Poetry.” The Guardian. 20 August. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2012/aug/20/pussy-­riot-­punk-­prayer-­lyrics. Shkandrij, Myroslav (2019). Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917–2017: History’s Flashpoints and Today’s Memory Wars. Routledge: London and New York. Shore, Marci (2018). The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT. Skovoroda, Hryhory (1973 [1772]). “Razgovor, nazyvaemyi alfavit, ili bukvar’ mira” [Conversation, Called an Alphabet, or the Primer of the World]. In Hryhory Skovoroda. Povne zіbrannya tvorіv u 2kh tomakh [Full Collection of Texts in 2 Volumes]. Edited by Volodymyr Shynkaruk, Volodymyr Ievdokymenko, and Leonid Makhnovets et  al. Vol. 1, 411–463. Naukova Dumka: Kyiv. Snyder, Timothy (2015). “Integration and Disintegration: Europe, Ukraine, and the World.” Slavic Review. Vol. 74, No. 4, 695–707. Sosnovska, Tetiana, and Olena Chebanyuk (2019). “Interview.” In Maidan. Priama mova [Maidan. Direct Speech]. Vol.1. Edited by Olena Chebanyuk and Oksana Kovalyova, 311–316. National Museum of the Revolution of Dignity: Kyiv.

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CHAPTER 5

War

5.1   Uncovering the Epistemology of Violence While the Euromaidan Revolution produced new epistemologies of equality and solidarity that further transformed into disentangled epistemologies of decoloniality, the war of Russia against Ukraine introduced new epistemologies of violence, manifested in the sudden and traumatizing understanding that extreme aggression exists. The road to this new knowledge was paved by the same Euromaidan events, through the state violence against “the Heavenly Hundred”—nearly 100 protesters shot by pro-government forces during the confrontations in January and February 2014.1 This was the first time in many decades that Ukrainian society faced explicit, unveiled violence against civilians, and it took time to comprehend the order of the events. The further invasion of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea ushered in a new, horrifying vision of the reality in which aggression was not a surprise but rather an expectation. The reports from the east were particularly worrying: the local 1  According to the briefing note of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, 98 people: 96 men, including 1 boy and 2 women were killed. Available online at: https:// ukraine.un.org/en/108759-briefing-note-accountability-killings-and-violent-deathsduring-maidan-protests

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_5

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pro-­Ukrainian deputy who was found in a canal with his abdomen cut, the torture rooms in the Izolyatsia political prison, and the first civilians who died from shelling in Donetsk—these then-distant rumors were only the beginning of what followed in 2022 with the full-scale invasion. The horror of the expectation of nearing death overwhelmed the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions when Russian tanks rolled into Ukrainian territory through the northern border with Belarus. A few days later, the voices of witnesses to Russia’s crimes in Ukraine became a choir, with new and more eyewitness testimonies appearing, as if the multitude of evidence could help the collective comprehension of the events previously unseen by the living generations of Ukrainians: A few days ago, on the outskirts of Irpin, in the Kyiv region, Russian troops opened fire on civilians when they tried to leave the city. At least eight people died. Despite the constant shelling and bombardment, the civilian evacuations continue. To stay in the city, or in neighboring Vorzel, Bucha, Borodyanka, or Hostomel, means risking your life every moment. Houses are targeted by Russian air strikes, and many have been destroyed. The dead remain under the rubble and don’t receive a proper burial. (Bezruk 2022, 54)

Dead bodies scattered on the streets of the town of Bucha—and 300 more uncovered in the mass graves. Media images of dead bodies, those of men, women, and children—and unidentified bodily fragments—have become the difficult routine of the war. Izyum, Irpin, Kharkiv—and Mariupol— which stands out even from this unbelievably cruel landscape of atrocity. The word “Children” in the Russian language had been written in front of the Mariupol drama theater to warn of the numerous children hiding with their parents in its basement, which became a burial place for them all after Russians shelled it. Several hundred unrecognized, unaccounted-for lives; invisible suffering of the dying; unheard calls for help. Throughout Ukraine, mornings after mass shelling begin with calls to relatives and friends to check if they still exist—and continue with incessant mourning for the people who did not make it that day. The next day they would be substituted by new victims of Russia’s war. The all-­ encompassing, total quality of the war became the everyday routine of every person who remained in Ukraine. Internal displacement was but a temporary solution because Russian shelling and drone attacks eventually reached the relatively “peaceful” regions in the west of the country, while the south and the east reported daily losses.

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A dead three-month-old baby, her mother, and her grandmother in Odesa, while her father was grocery shopping.2 The news of the father’s death months later on the front line.3 Entire families that have been erased by the war. The story of a mother in Kherson whose son was shot by Russian soldiers when he left the bomb shelter, and who could not recover his body for two days due to the incessant shooting and shelling (Bura and Podobna 2022, 40). A grandmother in Irpin who single-handedly buried her grandson in the same garden where she grows her salad vegetables and had to exhume his body two months later when the Russian soldiers were gone and the Ukrainian police had full access to the area (Mykhailiuk 2023, 00:25:00–00:25:23). These painful stories portray just a small portion of individual pain—while collective pain is an unbearable burden. Among numerous testimonies, there are marked attempts to identify those responsible for the atrocity. The investigative documentary Bucha 22 (2023) by the national “Suspilne” channel was dedicated to the story of a family from Donetsk who relocated to Bucha in the Kyiv region after Russia’s occupation of Donbas in 2014. In 2022, they encountered war again, becoming victims of a war crime committed by the Russian army during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In March 2022, during the occupation of Bucha by Russian forces, Margarita and Oleksandr Chikmariov, along with their two sons, attempted to escape the city by car. However, as they were leaving, their vehicle was struck by fire from the occupiers. Margarita and the children died instantly, while Oleksandr survived but lost his leg. The family’s burnt-out car was abandoned with their bodies inside, not discovered until Ukrainian forces fully liberated Bucha (Vasylchenko 2023). This is one of the numerous examples of extreme atrocity, for which individual responsibility must be undertaken by every aggressor within the Russian army.

2  “Vid obstriliv v Odesi zahynula maty z nemovliam. Ukraintsi v sotsmerezhakh vyslovliuiut’ shok i smutok” [A Mother and a Baby Were Killed by Shelling in Odesa. Ukrainians express Shock and Grief on Social Networks] BBC News Ukraine. April 24, 2022. Available online at: https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-61150197. 3  “Na fronti zahynuv viys’kovyi z Odesy. Ioho sim’iu mynuloho roku u ZHK ‘Tiras’ vbyla raketoiu armiia RF.” [A Soldier from Odesa Died on the Frontline. Last Year, Russia Killed His Family with a Missile in the “Tiras” Apartment Complex] Suspilne. Odesa. November 5, 2023. Available online at: https://suspilne.media/odesa/610241-na-fronti-zaginuv-vijskovij-z-odesi-jogo-simu-minulogo-roku-u-zk-tiras-vbila-raketou-armia-rf/.

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The unbearability of this knowledge makes it impossible to call these epistemologies of violence “colonial” or even “neocolonial.” As difficult and incomprehensible as they are, they are still the epistemologies of resistance—unceasing, untiring reminders of the real cost of freedom. They are also anti-colonial epistemologies, as they demand the efforts—and lives— of someone’s brothers, daughters, grandfathers, and cousins enlisting in the Ukrainian army—voluntarily or by the call of duty—for the resistance against the Russian invasion. These are the frontiers, the real-life abyssal lines, the crossing of which means no return. These frontiers break up with ambicolonial thinking and mark the point of dissolution of any possibility of belonging to a space producing such unimaginable atrocity. This new epistemology of violence is mediated. It is also lived—and died for. It is paid for with thousands of deaths of innocents. The epistemology of violence requires expansion, even if it means moving on beyond the comprehensible. It requires answers—to the questions of what happened to all the war victims, every single one of them. No one should remain invisible in this process. This is what the true decolonial release entails. The testimonies of survivors point out the incompleteness of the knowledge that we possess about those who perished and the acknowledgment of their struggle for life: It was March 16 [in Mariupol]. That night something hit the yard and caused the building to shake. I thought: This is it. I hid the children under the mattress, covering them with my body, plaster falling on my head. I thought, They will bury us with this concrete and nobody will even look for us. If a missile comes we’ll die quickly, but if it buries us we’ll slowly suffocate and die from the dust and our injuries. How long does it take to die from dehydration, three days? (Yaroshynska 2022, 154)

Only the identification and accounting of every victim of this war, only their rehumanization and the recovery of epistemic justice will push forward the decolonial turn and bring the long-awaited liberation. What is the destiny of the people who perished in Mariupol? In Kherson? In Mariinka? In Volnovakha? No victory in this war of aggression will be complete without knowing the exact answers to these, and many other, questions. The epistemology of violence will lead to a decolonial release only if it eventually transforms into the epistemology of truth about violence and, subsequently, regeneration.

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5.2  Powerless Neocolonial Violence Hannah Arendt proposed that power is already a kind of mitigated violence, and this brings us closer to understanding Russia’s quest for power through war. However, while power is the essence of all governments, violence is not—it is a defensive characteristic of a totalitarian state. Arendt underlines the instrumental nature of violence, which requires justification of its purpose (Arendt 1970, 51). The purpose of Russia’s violence in Ukraine was justified by its propaganda machine as the benevolent act of “protection”—first, of Russian speakers in Ukraine, and further, when this axiom began visibly falling apart, of Russia itself, from a presumed future invasion by Ukraine. The victimhood mimicry expressed in this idea is central to understanding not so much Russia’s neocolonial quest for power, but rather its implicit acceptance—even if a “faux” one—of its own powerlessness. The extreme, unreasonable, and unregulated violence of Russia’s military actions in Ukraine follows the logic of an abuser who keeps abusing not to seem weak. Arendt places the concept of peace in absolute categories. The end of any war, for her, is twofold: either peace or victory. But to the question “What is the end of peace?”, she finds no answer (Arendt 1970, 51). Power for her is in the same category, but she proposes that the end of every power is violence. Arendt points out that if Mahatma Gandhi’s non-­ violent resistance had met with Stalin’s Russia, as an example of absolute terror and overwhelming violence, it would not have withstood repression. The outcome of resistance to the tyrant fearing the loss of power would not be decolonization but massacre. She subverts Sousa Santos’s argumentation (Chap. 4) of the universal effectiveness of Gandhi’s strategy for the dissolution of the colonial abyssal line (Sousa Santos 2018, 68). Here I return to the previous discussion on violence that represents the loss of power (Arendt 1970, 53). Arendt argues that when the government’s power is shrinking, terror as a powerful position declines into sweeping and indiscriminate violence, and the system turns against itself when victims and offenders are no longer distinguishable (Arendt 1970, 55). Putin’s Russia, inspired and fascinated by Stalin’s example, falls through the same cracks—of power escaping the fingers of the iron fist designed to hold it tight in the first place—resulting in the active extrapolation of violence, as well as the inner self-destructive action.

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Putin’s internalized terror of the 2000s, which allegedly included the explosions of residential houses in Moscow and the Nord-Ost and Beslan attacks to maintain order and centralization through fear, declined into sheer violence in the 2010s. This process overfilled the borders and spilled out in its most explicit form: that of the war of aggression against “nearly the same, but not exactly the same” Ukraine. In the process of copying, reenacting the past, Putin’s regime emulates Stalinist terror in an even more powerless and violent way, externalizing the repression onto a foreign territory and elevating it to mass murder. The aggression of Russia in Ukraine marks a transition from the recognition of internal powerlessness and the incorporated sense of inferiority of Russia as a second-rate empire (at times treated through the lens of not imperial but self-imposed colonial difference (Tlostanova 2018)) to the externalized and explicit recognition of its incapability to resist its ambicolonial desire. The main enemy of Russia is Russia itself, with the incorporated imperial mindset and a perplexity of drives, resentments, and desires. This symbolic dispossession of Russia’s power in the process of the violation of Ukraine’s border positions Ukraine as the Russian territory of desire, a historical core of its symbolic aspirations (including the mythogenesis linked to this core— such as Kyivan Rus as the cradle of “Russianness”)—and possibly, the axis of Russia’s integrity as a state. The ambicolonial political vision of Ukraine by Russia is rooted in this misconception that the reclamation of the symbolic power can be executed through violence—while violence can only be the main cause of its loss. Arendt observes that violence can destroy power but is incapable of creating it (Arendt 1970, 56). This statement is clearly visible with Russia’s own political crisis fueled by its aggression against Ukraine, including ruining any other alternative systems of ethical, political, or epistemic authority and virtual erasure of opposition, with further decline into a totalitarian state. The attack on Ukraine is also what Judith Butler calls the relocation of “constitutive injurability,” which she sees as the main characteristic of state violence. The attempt to retranslate this intrinsic injurability onto the other, as the effect of injuring this other, aims at producing an illusion that the subject enacting violence is impermeable to it (Butler 2009, 178). This discursive move has its roots in fear of internal instability, which proceeds from deeply rooted doubt in one’s own agency. Painter Danylo Movchan depicted the Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression as a collective action of a consolidated society against a lonely violent figure that approaches a steady, peaceful, and unified group with

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Fig. 5.1  Danylo Movchan, Holding Back, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

two blades (Fig. 5.1). The figure of the attacker persists in fierce movement, while the resisting group remains static and counteracts him with a protective gesture. Icon painter by training, Movchan works with the narratives of resilience, and this perspective echoes Arendt’s position on the powerlessness, loneliness, and isolation of those seeking power through violence. Conversely, it also reflects her questioning of the effectiveness and durability of nonviolent resistance against an authoritarian, violent state that rests its power on terror. Both the aggressor and the resilient society in Movchan’s work appear with their inner organs and entire bodily structure visible from the outside, marking the profound corporeal vulnerability exposed by extreme war violence. This brings in another effect: the transparencies employed by the artist permit him to portray the bodies of

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subjects and objects of brutal action as if they were already dead; the knowledge of death and immersion into its logic, being the only inevitable result of the war. In the neocolonial context, powerless violence means the self-­subversion and injurability of the colonizer’s system, which emphasizes both the imperial difference and the self-colonization dynamics akin to the ambicolonial condition of the colonizer, if unacknowledged but deeply incorporated. The epistemology of violence further subverts the power structure sustaining it, showing its hollowness and the indiscriminate quality of colonial desire permeating its hierarchy. On the Ukrainian side, the epistemology of violence marking the disentanglement evolves as a detachment from the narratives carrying the mark of this violence: neocolonial discourse in its polymorphous form. From the Russian side, this is mirrored as an ambicolonial epistemology of powerlessness as the deep-rooted knowledge of the aspiring colonizer of own weaknesses and shortcomings. The neocolonial invasion is an attempt to cover this profound void.

5.3  Ambicoloniality and the Contemporary Russian War Machine Achille Mbembe has pointed out that the colonial conquest paves the way to a sphere of unregulated war, to war outside the law, led by a state which, in so doing, externalizes violence to some place ruled by non-­ normative conventions and customs (Mbembe 2019, 25). Whether or not one bears arms, the enemy to be punished is considered intrinsic, an enemy by nature; therefore, attacks on the civilian population in the colonial conquest are not only permitted but encouraged. Russia’s war against Ukraine follows this model and places the outdated idea of colonization in a new light by turning it into a neocolonial war: more massive in killing, more pervasive in ambition, more exhaustive in resources. Mbembe, who introduces the notion of “necropolitics,” considers it to be the domain of postcolonial spaces, where proclaimed democracies exercise the divisive politics of death, which mimics that of a colonial state. He proposes that a colonial war is particularly haunted by the desire for extermination, and this profound desire makes it borderless (Mbembe 2019, 26). However, at the same time, he views borders at the core of necropolitics—which he sees as already-dead devastated spaces of nonconnection and exclusion, as a multiplicity of spaces where loss and dispossession have

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taken their toll (Mbembe 2019, 99). In this contrasting image, Russia can be considered a state that utilizes necropolitics as part of its polymorphous capacity: that of a neocolonial state mimicking decolonizing rhetoric in a postcolonial condition. The necropolitics of Russia aims to substitute Russia’s colonial power of the past—and both internal and external killing of innocents is the main means of reaching this goal. The necropolitics of Russia, in its inclination toward war crimes, dehumanization of victims, and extreme cruelty, goes beyond Mbembe’s definitions of necropower as a postcolonial democratic tool, as it exceeds the notion’s rational capacity for mass murder. However, Russia’s necropolitical actions of mortification follow the most explicit and violent forms proposed by Mbembe: namely, the terror of actual massive death or the threat of destruction of a culture, under false promises of “saving people from themselves,” such as Russia’s proclaimed attempts at saving the Russian speaking population of Ukraine from an invisible threat to their liberties (Mbembe 2019, 200). In Russia, the modern-type necropolitics has encountered a powerful mechanism for its over-realization: that of a totalizing apparatus of a war machine that subordinated and tamed the state. Mbembe views Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the war machine as characterized by its capacity for metamorphosis (Mbembe 2019, 85). This responds to Russia’s polymorphous coloniality and colonial mimicry, that provide an advanced tool for transformation together with the violent war apparatus that incorporated and subordinated them. Ambicoloniality takes a central place in this violent process, as the exaggeration of Ukraine’s role in Russia’s historical processes and political integrity, together with the paradoxical devaluing of Ukraine’s agency as a sovereign state. Vladimir Putin’s speech on February 24, 2022, in which he declared the beginning of the genocidal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is permeated with ambicolonial affect and discursive manipulations: We see that the forces that carried out a coup in Ukraine in 2014, seized power, and hold it with the help of essentially decorative electoral procedures, have completely refused to resolve the conflict peacefully. […] It was necessary to immediately stop this nightmare  – the genocide against the millions of people living there, who hope only for Russia, who hope only for us. […] Today’s events are not about wanting to undermine the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. They are about protecting Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and its people. (Putin 2022)

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This perplexed rhetoric aims to involve the reader in a sequence of transpositions—from the presumed threat to Ukrainian people who hope only for “us” to already “us” who are under attack, momentarily switching from the role of protector to the role of victim. The quote shifts its argumentation as it attempts to capture the attention not by the entire message but by its fragments, those that the viewer of the address—or its reader— finds more appealing. This rhetorical fragmentation and the messianic vision of Russia’s role in Ukraine as its only hope, claiming to protect from an imaginary genocide resulting in the real genocide against civilians of an unseen scale of inhumanity, are representative of the polymorphous coloniality as exemplary of Russia’s necropolitical metamorphosis. The imperial ambition of the war machine as a system that operates outside the state apparatus is externalized and multivectoral (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 354). Its mechanisms use mythogenesis and propaganda to establish a dominating relationship with territories outside of a state’s borders. In the case of Russian neocolonialism and the war in Ukraine, this war machine is fueled by affective dynamics that constitute both the postcolonial entanglement and neocolonial aspiration. The Russian state uses its war machine as a set of warfare concepts and propaganda-inflamed discourses and actions for constituting a relationship—real or imaginary, as in the Ukrainian case—with a territory that lies outside its borders and is often out of its control. Deleuze and Guattari remark that the affective quality of the war machine is likened to “projectiles” that actively discharge emotions like weapons, whereas “feelings” are introspective and passive tools (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 71). The affective dynamic of Russian neocolonialism that we witness in the war on Ukraine responds to this missile-like quality of the senses holding together the colonial entanglement that fuels this war and the anti-colonial resistance that counteracts it. The ambicolonial quality responds to the definition given to the war machine as a “flow of absolute war stretching between an offensive and a defensive pole” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 218). The initiator of the absolute, borderless war—persisting in the inferiority of the war machine action, is a suicidal state, led by the war machinery until its complete downfall. This is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the sacrifice of the sacrificers unleashed in passion” (Nancy 1991 [1986], 32). The RussiaUkraine ambicoloniality is thus sustained by the war machine, which does not recognize borders, nor does it acknowledge agency—including that of the aggressor state, rendering the quest for power through violence

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meaningless. Ambicoloniality is imbued with Russia’s death drive (which I discuss in detail in Chap. 6), and it demolishes any capacity for agency of the colonizer. Paradoxically, the destruction of ambicoloniality and turning it into conventional colonial domination is Russia’s ultimate aim, since the Ukrainian agency affects Russian imperial aspiration and highlights its status as a “second-rate empire” acting within the imperial—and colonial differences (Tlostanova 2018, 2–3). The anachronicity of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which I discussed vis-à-vis the interpretation by Serhii Plokhy in the preceding chapters, plays its role here. It largely invokes the nineteenth-century Romanticist idea of a homogeneous nation-state based on cultural proximity and common language. These historical references, alongside Russian propaganda’s pseudohistorical manipulations, fuel the war machine. Discussing Russia fully in terms of its navigation by the autonomous and externalized, faceless and dominating machinery of war would, however, be incorrect, since the responsibility for a homicidal crime—assuming individual or collective responsibility—takes place according to any version of human laws, from the times of Hammurabi and the Romans to the modern and contemporary times. The active stage of the war in Ukraine manifests Russia’s throwback to what seems like colonial reconstruction but, factually, to the early stages of the postcolonial condition, when the structure of the state was still unstable and colonial resentment was fresh, as was the colonial desire. Ukraine finds itself in a complicated and dangerous situation between the ambiguous actions of Western necropolitics of void and the destructive actions of the war machine driven by its genocidal neighbor in the East. The space between two borders, western and eastern, has become the terrain where the structural—necropolitical—quality of Ukraine as “the last outpost of civilization”—and the affective quality of the externalized war machine have met and collided. This necropolitical mechanism works twofold for Ukraine, where we can observe a meeting point for necropolitical projections from various states. Magda Górska, Tereza Hendl, and Ewa Majewska examine the counteraction of necropower in the Eastern border of Poland, where the vision of “killability” and “othering” of those deemed “non-Western” and “non-European” is prevailing (Górska et al. 2025). They point out that while the necropower is borne from internal divisions and inequalities, when successful as an inner policy, it further metamorphoses to become externalized and projected beyond the border. Ukraine as a borderland

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has historically been a space where exclusion meets integration, and there was a confluence of necropolitical stream. Yet, there is an enormous difference between exercising necropolitics in peaceful circumstances (i.e., being a silent killer or a creator of Mbembe’s “walking dead”) and under the conditions of active war. The silence of some European—and non-­ European, for example, the Global South —states regarding Russia’s war ravaging Ukraine, and their presumable neutrality, is an example of a contribution to such externalized necropolitics. Western necropolitics of exclusion interlinked with colonial and postcolonial othering has historically pushed Ukraine toward ambicoloniality with Russia, emphasizing Ukraine’s importance for Russia, both as “the last borderland” and as the closest option for Russia’s self-colonization with Western rhetoric. Consequently, Russian active politics of violent expansion uses ambicoloniality as the main channel for the destructive impact, and at the same time, through this brutal action, burns the bridges and eliminates the basis for future ambicolonial entanglement. Yet, in this image, there is an affirmative action, as there are undoubtedly exceptions to the Western-centric necropolitical image painted by Mbembe, and this exception lies in the European Union’s support of the Ukrainian efforts to counter Russia’s war. By heartfelt resistance, first to the pro-Russian corrupt government of Viktor Yanukovych, then to the Russian brutal invasion, Ukrainian society has gained visibility and long-­ sought acknowledgment beyond the Western border, which has significantly reduced Ukraine’s othering, which would have its  deadly consequences in a time of war. However, as Snyder puts it, “No society should have to resist a Russian invasion in order to be recognized” (Snyder 2022).

5.4  Syncretic Polarization Through Epistemological Transformation: War’s Disruptive Force War is the manifestation of a different type of hybridization—ferocity in resistance (or attack) implies metamorphosis as a result of affect. Deleuze and Guattari write, “wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men of every animality […] animate the battlefield” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 243). The dehumanizing quality of war creates hybrids that go beyond habitual postcolonial description. They obey the power of the war machine. Anzaldúa’s monsters of hybridity placed on the borderline would obey it

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too, imbued with a new sense of knowledge—the epistemology of violence. The Ukrainian resistance to the war gives a unique chance for the partial dissolution of hybridity, by means of what I call syncretic polarization. Historian Olesya Khromeychuk lost her brother on the front line in 2014. It took her years to comprehend his death, and this necessity of accepting the loss led her to write and stage a play—and later to write a book, The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022). In her book, Khromeychuk describes one of the main struggles of this war: the struggle of not becoming yet another victim of the war affect: The struggle not to let hatred consume us from within will last beyond the struggle on the battlefields, and all victorious frontline battles will be futile if we lose this crucial one. I wrote this book to battle my own demons: grief, resentment, fear. I wrote it in an attempt to make sense of a loss: a combat loss that was just one of thousands for the Ukrainian Army; the loss of a brother that was unique for me. (Khromeychuk 2022, 12)

What Khromeychuk calls “hatred” could form a basis for syncretic polarization—but it should not, as it would subvert the epistemology of violence in its decolonial action while reversing the order of the things to an ambicolonial one, filled with mutual affect. The transformative power of war establishes itself in clear binary divisions—of friend/enemy, defense/ attack, and good/evil. In other words, it is a return to much more simplified dialectics than peaceful time permits. Deleuze and Guattari proposed that war might be an intermingling of very different kinds of bodies, including territorial and subjective ones, but the declaration of general mobilization expresses an instantaneous and incorporeal transformation of these bodies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 81). This transformation is informed by polarization. The war fuels syncretic polarization, as it becomes more all-encompassing. Although Russian actions in Ukraine sometimes defy this binary logic by bringing evil to extremes, to an incomprehensible, nonrepresentational state of it, the profound polarity found in every military action forms the basis of the war’s functioning, which nevertheless differs in its aims: as a policy of order from the defending side and as a policy of chaos from the attacking side. Following numerous losses, the process of mourning transforms personal grief into a form of resistance against narratives imposed by the aggressor, thus driving syncretic polarization through the intimate scale of personal suffering, which becomes part of society’s identity.

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If syncretism is defined by the overlapping systems of beliefs—often irrational beliefs in supernatural forces—the reverse process of splitting this overlap would require the demythologization of these belief systems, forcibly voiding them of what they contain and simulate. One such belief is in the “brotherhood” of nations, which appears as a monstrous combination of the Soviet culture of subordination under the label of socialist equality and the Russian contemporary take on cultural proximity as definitive for national belonging. Syncretic polarization crossed personal spaces by breaking with the Russian informational field; it has dismantled family relationships, as hostility permeated the connections between family members disseminated in Russia and Ukraine; it has completely transformed the defensive stance by expelling old defensive narratives and replacing them with narratives of consolidated resistance that focus not on a single identity but on survival and the possibility of fostering numerous identities. From Russia’s side, however, this is not a war for hybridity, but for a new, reinvented, aggressive “Russianness,” for the justification of society through extrapolated violence, the purpose of which is to slow down disintegration processes. The reinvention of Russian ambivalent identity through atrocity, through a projection of a hybrid Self onto the Other who seeks disentanglement and emancipation, represents self-­identification through conquest, using the injurability of the formerly colonized as a pretext for omitting Russia’s own internalized confrontations and lack of agency. The war acts as a medium through which this new “Russianness” is tested and manifested, constituting syncretic polarization that confronts Russia’s embedded imperial aspirations with current geopolitical realities. As Fanon mentions, every subject of revolution is a hybrid subject—to the same extent as those they rebel against (Fanon 1963 [1961], 163). Extending his thought, any anti-colonial resistance contains a hybrid subject, incorporated into its mirroring quality. Moreover, every subject of the war is also a hybrid subject—and the struggle these subjects are immersed in eventually affects this hybridity, leading to its dissolution, what I would call violent dehybridization, where the systems of belief, hopes, knowledge, memories, affects, are crushed. The extraction of a new, disentangled epistemology presupposes the implosion of ambicolonial thinking—and this  entails dealing with two difficult tasks: first, the collective detachment from the historical trauma of the past, and second, the rationalization and acknowledgment of the historical trauma of the present. Both these processes can be observed in contemporary Ukraine.

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In 2017, theater director Vlad Troitsky staged the “opera-requiem” Iyov, by composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. The opera was presented as a compilation of minimalist and atonal music, recitals of Latin texts, and the narration of the story of Job, with a detailed description of all the struggles and trials sent to him when he refused to curse God. It received wide acclaim. Not only does this work allegorically reflect on the condition in which Ukrainian society perceived itself—that of resilience in the face of trials and a premonition of more tests to come; it also marked the new contemporary sensibility of the relation with the trauma and loss, acknowledging its existence, yet not permitting it to overtake the space that remains for comprehension, resistance, and the creative process as the production of knowledge. The opera resonated with the overcoming of dichotomies to be found in postcolonial visions of hybridity and ambivalence, presenting that epistemology and identity are comprised of numerous elements that, only taken together, render them meaningful. The experience of the expulsion of historical trauma and the dialectics it  produced by from the field of knowledge production after the Euromaidan Revolution left an important legacy. This legacy was the possibility of the expulsion of the historical trauma of contemporaneity caused by the war as one of the markers of further (neo)colonial entanglement sought by Russia. The overcoming of hatred, proposed by Khromeychuk, and the consolidated effort in constructing an independent, strong society as processes of decolonial epistemological change are central to Ukraine’s decolonial turn, as the ability not to forget or forgive—but to produce new narratives that look beyond the horizon of atrocity.

5.5  Epistemology of Violence as a New Beginning If Zygmunt Bauman called the potential dissolution of ambivalence “the end of history” (Bauman 1993, 11), the real history-in-the-making is endless as long as those who produce it are alive. The ways of comprehending the wartime situation are guided by those who define the spaces impacted by the war and those who keep these spaces protected. The epistemology of violence atomizes the world reflected in the atrocious reality, and this fragmentation affects bodies and territories alike. Within the onset of extreme violence, it is enough to see a part to reconstruct the whole. In a

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photograph from an uncovered mass grave in Izyum containing more than 440 bodies, after the counterattack by the Ukrainian army liberated the town, only one arm of the victim of the massacre was depicted—an arm with blue-grayish skin showing clear signs of decomposition, covered in soil, and with a bracelet in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag. This bracelet helped to identify the Ukrainian soldier Serhii Sova, whose wife later recovered his body for reburial. This was a fragment of the body made so by the frame of the photograph. Other bodily fragments remain outside the focus of a photographer’s lens because of their irrepresentability, and the ethical inability to show them to a wide public. This image was addressed by Ukrainian society, with numerous people posting photographs of their own arms with blue-and-yellow bracelets alongside the traumatizing image from Izyum on social networks, as a sign of solidarity with the dead and as a manifestation of the sense that everyone could be in their place. The war not only fragments bodies and identities physically but also deprives them of any sense of belonging, dispossessing them of the past, and jeopardizing the future by the immense risk of sudden violent death. Butler, speaking of “frames of recognition,” pointed out that the grievability of lives is conditioned by their framing in the general image of the war (Butler 2009, 5). In the case of Ukraine, despite Russia’s attempts to present Ukrainian (and Russian) losses as nonessential side effects of their “special operation,” it is the visual bits of fragmented evidence that reach out to the public and, if not depict, then give an impression of the magnitude of the tragedy. The epistemology of violence is, therefore, an approximation reconstructed from fragments. In 2014, the poet from Luhansk, Lyuba Yakimchuk, wrote a poem “Decomposition,” which became iconic of the indispensable fragmentation experienced by Ukrainian society when they first uncovered the existence of the epistemology of violence: Don’t talk to me about Luhansk it’s long since turned into hansk Lu had been razed to the ground to the crimson pavement […] and where’s my deb, alts, evo?

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no poet will be born there again no human being […] I have gotten so very old no longer Lyuba just a -ba. (Yakimchuk 2021 [2015], 85)4

The fragmentation of the Self and the country are interconnected for those who experienced displacement and those who witnessed the atrocity; they both result in a fragmentation of memory, which becomes no longer reliable or valid. Even personal memory splits into two parts. First, a labyrinth of memories containing traumatic echoes of the past, which is no longer available, where access is prohibited—such as the things of the past that were previously enjoyable but are not anymore when it became clear that they formed an essential part of the colonizer’s culture and were therefore contaminated with colonial affect: children’s cartoons, films, once-favorite books, music, celebrations of particular festive days, songs, poetry, and prose. Aside from those, there are treasured memories constituting the present and giving power for resistance: not the things or events, since the things or events seem to be permeated by the colonial past, but the feelings and epistemologies, of liberty, emancipation, creativity, and resilience. Beyond the very tangible dematerialization brought about by Russia’s destructive  war, which causes displacement and dispossession, and the situation in which the most valuable possession is one’s own life and that of their relatives, we have to deal with the dematerialization of the past in Ukrainian culture. The rejection of the material culture related to the colonial past that occurs in Ukrainian society is one of the signs of decolonial release; it is also a stumbling block for it, since every society functions through (re)producing materiality, and here the continuity is disrupted and the knowledge is dispossessed. In speaking about disentangled epistemology in a time of war, one inevitably needs to speak about what is left out behind the frame: a dispossessed epistemology, a devalued, mutilated knowledge. 4  Hе кажіть мені про якийсь там Луганськ  /  він давно лише ганськ  /  лу зрівняли з асфальтом червоним […] / а де бальцево? / де моє бальцево? / там більше не родиться Сосюра  /  уже більше ніхто з людей не родиться  […]  /  і поле соняхів опустило голови / вони стали чорні й сухі, як і я / вже страшенно стараі / i я більше не Люба / лише ба.  Translation from Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina.

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Butler sees dispossession as imposed by the “normative and normalizing violence which determines the terms of subjectivity, survival, and livability” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 2). In other words, the necropolitics of Mbembe’s “borderless” war (Mbembe 2019, 26) still imposes its own, nonethical norms and frontiers that rule the ways society is deprived of both belongings and a sense of belonging and define the “harmfulness” of the past vis-à-vis the traumatic present, where the forceful material dispossession in its widest sense equals the dispossession of knowledge. Therefore, the decolonial turn in the conditions of armed violence is not only the result of liberation and breaking of the last colonial bonds but also the inability to maintain the past, of which the society is deprived by violence. The epistemology of violence, as the recognition of loss and the underlying reason for this loss, returns to materiality as it shows the immediate impact of violence on bodies (biological, geopolitical, cultural) and communities. It dissolves ambivalence through fragmentation that exposes the profound heterogeneity of the uneven epistemological basis Ukrainian society has been treading upon ever since entering the postcolonial condition. The epistemology of violence also dissolves ambivalence by changing the language used to speak about things. It shifts hierarchies; it turns attention from the previously unimportant and marginalized locations, events, and communities and puts them in the epicenter, reconstructed after the atrocity. The strength to be found in society to absorb the epistemology of violence at its zero point and turn it into a means of conscious resistance, as history-in-the making, is characteristic of the decolonial processes ongoing in Ukraine. Writer Serhiy Zhadan commented on the transformative quality of war violence that it exercises upon all the reality that can be named and described: War diminishes the value of language. Events, phenomena, and meaning all lose their weight as soon as we enter the force field of death—as soon as death changes from an abstraction into something concrete and present, something that can be felt in the morning air, recognized by heavy breathing and the smell of burning. […] War, without a doubt, requires restarting the language, reassembling its main mechanisms, and renaming the essential and important. (Zhadan 2022, 9)

This “renaming” and reassembling are essential for the construction of a new reality, a new identity, to detach from the ones lying in ruins—and, most importantly, from the cause of these ruins. The comprehension of

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violence—and acknowledgment of its existence, the acceptance of the possibility of dealing with beyond-comprehensible evil—is the step to the decolonial release which once and for all closes the channel of ambicoloniality. What Zhadan calls “language” is heterogeneous knowledge, incorporating notions, memories, affections, perspectives, and beliefs—each of these needs to be reconsidered and thoroughly reframed and reevaluated. The explosion of unprovoked aggression is the turning point where priorities and ways of seeing have changed—and they are no longer rooted in past conflicts or past traumas, which appear only as abstract constructs detached from a far more horrifying and real present. The knowledge of violence permits no looking back. It is the border that has been crossed, the alternative abyssal line that divides the knowledge of the former colonized from the knowledge of people liberated from the entanglement. The lived experience of wartime violence and collective resistance to it form the epistemological basis for decolonial detachment; they also form the basis for the affective field lying beyond ambicolonial affection. The affects produced by the repulsion, suffering, and determination to survive require a new language to describe them; otherwise what comes in their place is silence—and the forced silencing of the war’s victims—which leads to an epistemological void and further loss of agency. The absence of language leads to the oblivion of those who remain forever in the recent past. As Oleksandr Mykhed puts it, “the language of war is when, working on the book, you change the present tense into the past tense. Because those you are talking about are perishing.”5 (Mykhed 2024 [2023], 330) This language conveys the emotion and affect brought about by the war losses and drawing limits to them, including the horizon of what is located beyond mourning. The existence of disentangled epistemology of resistance  in wartime depends on defensive actions undertaken at “absolute zero”—the frontline, which does not produce new immanent senses but instead provides the living with the possibility to survive. Writer Artem Chekh, who enlisted in the Ukrainian army during Russia’s occupation of Donbas and continued serving during the onset of the full-scale invasion, describes the knowledge gained in the field as the capacity to understand everything 5  Мова війни—це коли, працюючи над книжкою, виправляєш теперішній час на минулий. Бо гинуть ті, про кого розповідаєш. Translation from Ukrainian by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv, and Abby Dewar.

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without words, to act upon invisible signs produced by silence in the face of looming death and extreme violence (Chekh 2020, Part II, Ch.31, Par. 8). This epistemology of violence from the forefront of violent action is different from that experienced by civilians, as it implies the ability to face the enemy who came to kill and to possess the means for defense. Therefore, the epistemology of violence from the front line is highly introspective, as it involves profound knowing of oneself, one’s own affects and fears, and the responsibility this knowing undertakes. Developing proper terminology and methodology to address Ukraine’s particular situation is one way to break the silence, produce new knowledge,  and concurrently  create  a new (meta)language of description and analysis relevant to the acquired epistemology of violence. The deadly aggression that is already present and the losses that already occurred— and will keep occurring while the war lasts—are the triggers for knowledge production, yet the ways of looking at them have to focus on the constructive projection of the future while acknowledging the trauma. The transgression stage, the final phase of Russia’s ambicolonial action, intensifies the powerlessness of the transgressor while marking the emergence of a new center of power in the morphology of domination—one that recognizes the epistemology of violence and undertakes conscious action informed by this awareness. The sweeping war, imbued by necropolitics, dissolves the last ambicolonial filter that prevents the aspiring colonizer’s power position from crumbling.

5.6  Case Study: Documentary Turn in Ukraine Against Ambicolonial Epistemology The glorious moment for Ukrainian documentary production marked the reception of the first Ukrainian Oscar award in 2024: for the film 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), which depicted the atrocity of the war crime that occurred in the town upon its siege and subsequent invasion by the Russian army in 2022. “I wish I had never had to make this film,” said the film director Mstyslav Chernov, holding the Oscar statuette during the award ceremony. The human cost of the film was the thousands of lives of those civilians—children, men, and women—who died in Mariupol at the hands of the Russians. As part of the Associated Press team, Chernov, with a filming group including photographer Yevheny Maloletka, was trapped in Mariupol

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under Russian siege and constant shelling. Being the only journalists in the city, they documented the new and horrible ways in which the life of the town had changed: the wounded and dead people in the hospital, the bombing of the newborn ward, and the fear, grief, and despair that enveloped the city. When not showing the total magnitude of destruction, the film reconstructs the atrocity only in part—and even this part changes our knowledge about the limits of human suffering. A large part of the film is dedicated to the destinies of children in the occupied city: the camera records them in bomb shelters, in reanimation cars, and in the hospital; terrified, wounded, or dead. At times, the film’s tension  produces an almost-surreal perception of irrationality and cynicism of the depicted events directed against everything living—against life itself—and evokes a deep sense of the impossibility of forgetting the tragedy unfolding before the viewer. The common stories from the film exceed the limit of pain, “Two weeks in hell. We were hiding. Shells flew in. Lots of shrapnel. There were only civilians in our yard. An explosion, everything was buried. We crawled out, but a boy and a girl died. Five and seven years old” (Chernov 2023). The dialogues in the film make viewers wonder: What are the destinies of those people interviewed by Chernov? Are they alive, or did they perish along with the city? How do they live with these memories? 20 Days in Mariupol is a culmination of the documentary turn that occurred in Ukrainian art in 2014, when artists, writers, and filmmakers turned to record the situation on the front line and in the “gray zone” adjacent to it (Biedarieva 2021). In 2014, artists and filmmakers undertook the role of conduits of resistance in the zones adjacent to the front line and became sources of information for Ukrainian society beyond the occupied territories about the ongoing situation there. Many of these cultural producers experienced displacement from eastern and southern Ukraine and narrated their perspectives on the onset of violence and the transformations caused by loss and dispossession. Since the beginning of the war, documentary projects by Ukrainian filmmakers, artists, writers, and journalists have challenged the powerlessness of violence, exposing the suffering of Ukrainian society and the irrationality of Russian aggression led by ambicolonial desire and the death drive. Chernov writes: “The war is everywhere, inside us too” (Chernov 2022 [2020], 360), and this expression becomes the leitmotif for Ukrainian documentary production, which in 2022 shifted from detached observation to an introspective position of witnesses of violence, reflecting

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on the cruel events unfolding in front of them and sharing the collective trauma of Ukrainian society immersed in tragedy, as a reminder that in a polarized world, first of all, we need reconciliation with ourselves. The fragmented images from the war work as forensic evidence of Russian war crimes, however partial this evidence might be, not because of a lack of sources but due to their abundance—and the excess of traumatic burden that they carry. Artist Alevtina Kakhidze has addressed the impossibility of visually recording—or comprehending—extreme violence. Her drawing Bucha. Me. 47 Minutes by Car (Fig. 5.2) reflects on the massacre that occurred in Bucha, a town near Kyiv that was heavily affected by Russian occupation, with more than 300 civilians killed by the Russian army and buried in mass graves. The artist’s body is bent in sorrow, shown in front of a vast red blot, which marks the site of Russian soldiers’ killings and rampant rape of civilians. This work directly addresses the irrepresentability of violence—an important notion that entered European scholarly and philosophical discourse in the aftermath of World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Kakhidze’s work echoes Theodor Adorno’s famous statement that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1997 [1967], 34), as every artistic representation of death

Fig. 5.2  Alevtina Kakhidze, Bucha. Me. 47 Minutes by Car, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

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became excessive and unnecessary after the horror of the unspeakable. The artist addresses this phrase directly in another drawing, Interview with Adorno (2022), where she asks the question, “Is it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, Irpin, Mariupol, Bucha?” Ukrainians’ immediate experience of the war brought about the idea that any attempts to represent this violence are inevitably reductive and that the only way to truly confront its horrors is to acknowledge its irrepresentability. From a decolonial point of view, this irrepresentability presents a problem of forming a decolonial epistemological basis as a set of new disentangled narratives because the creation of new knowledge is obstructed by the impossibility of visualizing the events—and, consequently, comprehension of their magnitude. Therefore, the violence and suffering can often be silenced or ignored by still-dominant (post)colonial narratives. The task of Kakhidze, in this work, is to return representability to them through addressing them and by representing her own life experience of proximity to the massacre: not showing the trauma itself but the artist’s reaction to it, condensed into a seemingly naive reflection. Such a decolonial gesture challenges the vision of irrepresentability that, according to Jacques Rancière, in politically engaged art practices deprives victims of their image, turning instead to the depiction of the atrocity as a rhetorical figure, actualized by communication between the artist and the event, as a relative connection between them (Rancière 2008, 77). The War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, in turn, manifests war documentation and daily dispatches from Kyiv surrounded by the Russian army as active resistance against Russian neocolonial attempts. In her series of texts, The War Diary (2022), the artist presented her eyewitness reflections on the ongoing unprovoked atrocities, incessant shelling and destruction, and the feelings of fear, despair, and anger, but also solidarity and resilience proper to wartime Ukraine, forming her testimony to the ongoing ruination in the form of a personal diary. Belorusets also produced an eponymous reportage photo series documenting the situation of the first 42 days of the invasion in Kyiv between February and April of 2022. The series of photographs examines the challenges of everyday life in wartime Kyiv. For example, the work from March 17, 2022, shows a view of the city with violet-gray smoke rising over it. It is unclear whether this was a cloud or a trace of a rocket hit by anti-air defense and falling on the city, as passers-by who claimed to be witnesses of this event told the artist. The official media remained silent about this occasion. This ambiguity and the subtle balance between deadly threats and the peaceful weather phenomenon as a marker of everyday life in this photograph create tension, evoking anxious expectation of the unknown

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Fig. 5.3  Yevgenia Belorusets, from the War Diary series, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

(Biedarieva 2024). Other photographs from the series depict the direct consequences of Russian violence, such as the aftermath of the shelling, rubble, and broken glass in central Kyiv (Fig. 5.3). The artist describes the horror and uncertainty of the early days of the invasion: In the evening I learned that a friend of mine was evacuated from the small town of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv. On the way, she lost her dog, who was frightened by the explosions and ran off in a panic. She saw with her own eyes how women with children were being targeted as they tried to get on an evacuation bus. Then something heavy crashed to the ground not far from them, a bomb perhaps, and everyone on the bus was knocked over. My friend told me, “I want to survive so I can describe this evacuation in The Hague.” […] Some were murdered during the evacuation. The estimate so far is six women and children, but the exact number of victims and injured is still being clarified. (Belorusets 2022)

This series of texts and photographs by Belorusets presents an important movement from documentation to memorialization—anachronistic while

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the invasion is still ongoing and the danger is still imminent. Based on the texts from The War Diary, Belorusets created an installation One Day More, which was originally shown at the Citizens’ Garden in front of the European Parliament and which featured the artist’s account of shelling, destruction, and human losses during the days of the occupation of the Kyiv region. The text describing a day in the risk zone is etched into the metal of the table. According to the artist’s idea, over time the surface will rust, but the text will remain inscribed there as evidence of the crimes witnessed and narrated by Belorusets and her closest circle. In Belorusets’s words, the table helped her “to ponder the weight of a single day in the war zone.” However, it can paradoxically also be seen as a symbol of dialogue, an invitation for two (or more) sides to communicate over it— which, given the traumatic experience inscribed on its surface, becomes a sign of its impossibility. The text negates the very possibility of such a peaceful exchange, inverting the object’s meaning to the opposite, and at the same time functioning as evidence of atrocities committed by the Russian army on Ukrainian territory. This work can constitute a shift to the artistic documentation of Russia’s war on Ukraine, as a memorialization of it, and the conclusive decolonial statement, although it might be seen as premature while the historic traumatic events are still ongoing. As the invasion continues, decolonization, documentation, and memorialization go hand in hand.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor (1997 [1967]). Prisms. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Arendt, Hannah (1970). On Violence. Harcourt, Brace & World: New York. Bauman, Zygmunt (1993 [1991]). Modernity and Ambivalence. Polity Press: Cambridge. Belorusets, Yevgenia (2022). War Diary. Translated by Greg Nissan. New Directions: New York. Bezruk, Tetiana (2022). “There Were Four People There. Only the Mother Survived.” 77 Days of February Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Country’s Own Journalists. Edited by Marichka Paplauskaite, 54–59. Translated by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan. Scribd, Inc.: San Francisco, CA. Biedarieva, Svitlana (2021). “The Documentary Turn in New Ukrainian Art.” In Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021. Edited by Svitlana Biedarieva, 53–78. Ibidem Press: Stuttgart. Biedarieva, Svitlana (2024). “Postcolonial Past to Decolonial Future: Ukrainian Art in the Ages of Revolution and Resistance (2014–2024).” In Art in Ukraine:

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Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance. Edited by Svitlana Biedarieva, 166–182. Routledge: London and New York. Bura, Daria, and Yevhenia Podobna (2022). Liutyi liutyi 2022. Svidchennia pro pershi dni vtorhnennia [Severe February 2022. Testimonies about the First Days of the Invasion]. Folio: Kharkiv. Butler, Judith (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso Books: London. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou (2013). Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Polity Press: Cambridge. Chekh, Artem (2020). Absolute Zero. Translated by Oksana Lutsyshyna and Olena Jennings. Glagoslav Publications: London. Chernov, Mstyslav (2022 [2020]). The Dreamtime: A Novel. Translated by Peter Leonard and Felix Helbing. Academic Studies Press: Boston. Chernov, Mstyslav, director (2023). 20 Days in Mariupol. Film. 97”. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1987 [1980]). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN. Fanon, Frantz (1963 [1961]). The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. Grove Press: New York. Górska, Magda, Tereza Hendl, and Ewa Majewska (2025). “Metamorphic Necropolitics: Deadly Othering in the European East-West Power Relations.” In Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies. Edited by Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Magdalena Radomska. Routledge: London and New  York. Forthcoming. Khromeychuk, Olesya (2022). The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. Hachette UK: London. Mbembe, Achille (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. Mykhailiuk, Olia, director (2023). Irpin’: Khroniky vidrodzhennia [Irpin: Chronicles of Revival]. Film. 75”. Mykhed, Oleksandr (2024 [2023]). The Language of War. Translated by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv, and Abby Devar. Allen Lane: London. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991 [1986]). The Inoperative Community. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. MN. Putin, Vladimir (2022). “Address by the President of the Russian Federation” President of Russia. 24 February. Available online at: http://en.kremlin.ru/ events/president/news/67843. Rancière, Jacques (2008). “El teatro de imágenes” [The Theatre of Images]. In Alfredo Jaar: La política de las imágenes [Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images]. Edited by Nicole Schweizer, 69–90. Ediciones Metales Pesados: Santiago de Chile.

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Snyder, Timothy (2022). “Ukraine Holds the Future: The War between Democracy and Nihilism.” Foreign Affairs. 6 September. Available online at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-­war-­democracy-­nihilism-­ timothy-­snyder. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de (2018). The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. Tlostanova, Madina (2018). What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. Vasylchenko, Vladyslav, director (2023). Bucha 22. Film. Suspilne Media. 35”. Yakimchuk, Lyuba (2021 [2015]). Apricots of Donbas. Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina. Lost Horse Press: Liberty Lake, WA. Yaroshynska, Iryna (2022). “Her Long Voyage.” 77 Days of February Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Country’s Own Journalists. Edited by Marichka Paplauskaite, 150–158. Translated by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan. Scribd, Inc.: San Francisco, CA. Zhadan, Serhiy (2022). “Introduction: Witness and Remember.” In 77 Days of February Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Country’s Own Journalists. Edited by Marichka Paplauskaite, 9–12. Translated by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan. Scribd, Inc.: San Francisco, CA.

CHAPTER 6

Desire

6.1   The Ambicolonial Drive and the Hybrid Subject of Desire As the Euromaidan Revolution was embedded in an ethical drive and political longing simultaneously, it was still based on the final resurgence of modern coloniality, or what Vitaly Chernetsky discusses as the “Second World postmodernity” (Chernetsky 2007, xvi). Yuri Andrukhovych’s The Moscoviad invisibly echoes in this last push that leads to the birth, if not of an entire political nation, then of its unbound, disentangled knowledge, leaving aside what Leela Gandhi has called “a hybrid subject of desire” (Gandhi 2006, 21). This hybrid subject was critically illustrated in 2013 by Ukrainian artists Mykola Matsenko and Oleh Tistol from the Natsprom group in the monumental painting Together Forever1 (Fig. 6.1). The painting portrays a passionately kissing couple—an industrial worker, presumably a miner, 1  It is noteworthy that Oleh Tistol and Mykola Matsenko did not define their work as “postmodernist,” claiming that they oppose postmodernism with the so-called “liberatory angle of postnational eclecticism,” a movement that was established by the artists in the late 1980s and focused on the definition and reconstruction of “national” elements of culture; yet for this, they used building blocks of postmodernism, such as irony, collage, and simulation.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_6

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Fig. 6.1  Mykola Matsenko and Oleh Tistol, Together Forever, 2013. Image courtesy of the artists

and a nude woman with a flowered headdress reminiscent of Ukrainian folk flower crowns. While the male figure points to the industrial achievements of the Soviet Union, epitomized by the Donbas but also extrapolated to the post-Soviet Russian industrial sector, the female figure, representative of Ukraine, appears as an objectified and aestheticized subaltern. The ambivalence of the male figure draws a connection between the figure of Russia as a colonizer and Ukraine’s East as its “native informant,” returning to the profoundly postcolonial discussion on “two Ukraines,” pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian, which was further successfully

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resolved by Euromaidan. The vow of “together forever” addresses the ambicolonial drive, portraying geopolitical relations exemplified by Viktor Yanukovych’s regime as a hybrid, affective relationship that met resistance with the resulting decolonial turn. The setting of the painting refers to the colonial myth discussed in this book, of Ukraine’s essence as a breadbasket of the region, with abundant fruit surrounding the couple—and a traditional wedding towel under their feet saying, “For happiness; for destiny.” The ambivalence of the miner’s figure, incorporating references to both Russian industrialized and extractivist modernity and the postcolonial marginalization and stereotyping experienced by the Ukrainian East, highlights the hybridity of desire that recreates a colonial power structure. According to Gandhi, postmodernism’s break with the dyad of Kantian ethical agency and Marxist political agency has profoundly modified this hybrid subject of desire, which appeared to be too ambiguous to be constrained within the “unitary and austere” solidarities of gender, race, nation, or class, and too fanciful to reserve the meaning of political or ethical action (Gandhi 2006, 21). This particular link between desire and hybridity is what subverted the Bolotnaya protests in Russia, in contrast to the Maidan protests in Ukraine. It displayed not only the authoritarian repression and the indoctrination of the followers of the regime but also the profound embeddedness of the protest action in the postcolonial, postmodernist, whimsical, fragmented context, which denies any possibility of decolonial release since, for a postmodern consciousness, everything is incomplete, and everything is a game. This is the primary reason for Russia’s inability to exit ambicoloniality. There is no way to dissolve the externalized dependency when the ethical and political agencies have been plundered by continuous, relentless hybridization and any subjectivity of the former colonizer and subjects once belonging to its core structure has been irreversibly lost and substituted by a nihilist desire, which, in the words of Gandhi, “can only claim satisfaction through negation or destruction of the desired object” (Gandhi 2006, 22). This urge for the destruction of the desired object due to the inability to possess it was explained by Jacques Lacan through the notion of jouissance as a beyond-pleasure principle that incorporates drives that contradict harmony or pleasure and leads the entity exercising it to irrational choices, reaching as far as self-destruction. Among all the harmful impulses forming the extended work of desire, Lacan distinguishes a particular type of jouissance: that of transgression. He points out that “to trample sacred laws underfoot, itself excites some type of jouissance” (Lacan 1992

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[1959–1960], 195). The violation of the borders of a sovereign state and the killing of its population can be a strong example of such trampling of laws. Lacan’s further question, “What is the goal jouissance seeks if it has to find its support in transgression to reach it?” (Lacan 1992 [1959–1960], 195) resonates with the one that Ukrainians (and not just them) repeatedly ask: “What is Russia doing in Ukraine, violating both ethical and international laws?” Russia’s neocolonial aspiration transgresses, splits, and eventually aims to destroy the object of longing—which is, nevertheless, a utopian object, a faint shade of Russia’s imaginary Ukraine of the past, invoked to life by Putin’s self-deceiving propaganda:  subordinate, subaltern, exoticized, and profoundly Russian. The perpetrator loses their own integrity in chasing this colonial fantasy of the past. The fatal desire creates a new order of things where the object of desire is unattainable—and this impossibility creates a new power hierarchy that breaks away from the mutuality of exchange or even a regular colonizer/colonized dichotomy. Now, in refusing to be this ghost of colonial daydreaming, Ukraine becomes Russia’s symbolic colonizer. “Love itself is a war machine, endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980], 278). Desire can be ruining and destructive especially when it draws on ambicolonial power as the self-colonizing force. What makes Russia’s colonial desire particularly bloody, irrational, and genocidal? The powerful and striking image of the grand prize awaiting the winner. This exaggerated, grandeur vision fueling the atrocity also points to the impossibility of Russia winning this war: the desired prize simply does not exist, and if the goal is reached, ruin will spread everywhere. Instead, Ukraine, in the image of the prize, impacts the clarity and coherence of Russia’s decision-making, contributing to the disintegration and neocolonial subordination—not of Ukrainian territories, which fiercely resist the invasion, but of Russia’s epistemologies, which become subaltern in the new, violent, power hierarchy. Gandhi’s hybrid subject of desire was preserved in Russian culture, which continues to exist within the framework of postmodernism. Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin reflected on the power-led desire in his collection of essays Sugar Kremlin (2008) (Sorokin 2008). The image of the Kremlin as a sugar-made phallic fetish reappears in each of the 15 texts from the cycle. At the beginning of the short story “Dream,” staged in the near future, the female monarch experiences sexual excitement as, in her dream,

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she walks undressed around the buildings of the Kremlin. She realizes that it is the power of the Kremlin walls and objects concealed within them, made not of simple sugar but of a drug that rejuvenates her body and provides her with further arousal. The brief dream of the ruler of a dystopian (but no less dystopian than actual reality) future Russia in Sorokin’s interpretation becomes both representative of Russian fanatical longing for power and the recognition of the deadly essence of its appeal (Sorokin 2008, 77–78). The sugar Kremlin is no different from Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house, which brings in the death drive as the infantile desire for excess, without precaution or limits. That is why it rejuvenates the gerontocratic state only to bring it into the liminal space between life and death. The death of others—and of the Others—is not seen as an obstacle here, as the obsolete, self-centered structure is concerned only with one matter: survival when its own existence is threatened by the flow of time. Russian scholar Alexander Etkind has proposed that the countermodern moves of Russia, exemplified by its unjust and unreasonable war in Ukraine, are conditioned by the obsolete, outdated worldview of the Russian ruling elites and population alike (Etkind 2023, 23). He sees the legacy—and continuation—of Soviet gerontocracy in the power relations of contemporary Russia. These obsolete elites are bound to guarantee Russia’s prolonged existence within the fragmented postcolonial—and ambicolonial—domains. Lacan points out that the transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by reinforced law—therefore, Russia’s turn to authoritarianism and the virtual erasure of any oppositional options are the consequences of the same desire for deadly excess and the simultaneous death drive, expressed in the intentions to invade Ukraine, even at the cost of its own integrity. The death drive, per Lacan, is deeply rooted in the historical dimension, and it aims in reality, not at the stated domination and possession of the object of the desire but at the symbolic subjugation to it, through the entire fascination with its imaginary power. Chakrabarty’s vision of historicism that connects “imaginary” territories, in this case, contributes to the understanding of Russia’s obsession with Ukraine (Chakrabarty 2000). This longing converts it into an ambicolonial drive. The fatal desire creates a new order of things where the object of desire is unattainable (and has to remain such in order to maintain desire)—and this impossibility creates a new power hierarchy that breaks away from mutuality of exchange.

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Lacan best expressed the problem of what I call the “ambicolonial drive” when he problematized the ethical directive to love one’s own neighbor. He presented a hypothetical situation where he has to confront the fact that “my neighbor’s jouissance; his harmful, malignant jouissance is that which poses a problem for my love” (Lacan 1992 [1959–1960], 187). This perfectly describes the destructive desire guiding Russia’s actions in Ukraine, defying any present possibilities for reconciliation. It would be reductive, however, to resort to drive and desire as the only impetuses for Russia’s aggression: its military campaign is equally guided by a more rational ambicolonial affect, as a means of reconquest and deterritorialization.

6.2   Affect over the Place: Ambicolonial Perspective Affect—and affection—constitute the ambicolonial situation, marking the last stage before the transgression. While the use of Lacanian jouissance helps to explain the irrational side of ambicolonial dependence, as well as the destructive action that aims to prevent the dissolution of such an entanglement, affect, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari, helps to explain its rationality and intelligibility vis-à-vis intrinsic violence. Therefore, in Russia’s ambicolonial war, affection precedes transgression. Building upon the chronology of the war events, the so-called hybrid stage of Russia’s war following 2014, aimed at reestablishing ephemeral “integrity” through domination over the neighboring nation, was largely led by affect, which, by 2022, turned into jouissance as an extension of the death drive and uncontrollable desire. As I discussed in Chap. 3, affective ambicoloniality can be constituted only by the process of diachronic colonization over decades and centuries, and this colonization mode gives it shape and volume; however, the consequences of such an entanglement are manifested in the jouissance of synchronic colonization as a swift and violent process. Affect, while being guided by desire and drive, nevertheless defines the action; therefore, it extends the effect of emotions into a pragmatic field and makes desire impactful. Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine is an example of such an impactful and destructive action. Nigel Thrift refers to affect as “a different kind of intelligence,” and in his view it is not possible to consider it irrational or sublime (Thrift 2008, 60–61 (appendix)). It is, therefore, a more rational, state, in its own way, that oversees and preconditions a certain logic of actions and is subject to change depending on the

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situation. Desire and drive, conversely, are peripheral to the affect—the former being an intensive feeling, and the latter containing an impulse to action. Brian Massumi refers to Spinoza to define affect as an “impingement upon” the body, which passes the threshold and changes the body’s ability to affect or be affected; in other words, affective dynamics work as a two-­ way process (Massumi 1995, 92; 2015, 4). He considers that the body’s charge of affection is not fixed. It can change with time, as both positions of power within any hierarchical system (e.g., the colonial matrix of power) and the characteristics of the identity transform. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of embeddedness and a heightened sense of belonging (Massumi 2015, 6), which, under conditions of the Russian neocolonial claim, may lead to an attempt at the deterritorialization of the Other (Ukraine). The ambicolonial application of affect expresses itself as the mutual (or self-imposed) course of action that aims at reaching an irrational goal by relatively rational methods. If violence is instrumental by nature (Arendt, see Chap. 5), affect is rational insofar as it justifies this violence. The occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea was part of a strategy for Ukraine’s deterritorialization and reconquest, as well as a pointed attack on its agency and integrity in the world’s eyes. Although now widely viewed as part of the ambition of a genocidal madman in power, at the time, in 2014, the order of actions managed to deceive foreign observers who viewed the process of occupation as a local matter, avoiding direct definitions that would point out the profound legal and ethical infringements produced by such occupation, reducing it to a “conflict” or a semi-legal “annexation.” But they were not the only ones deceived—despite the wide documentation of Russian military action in the east and the south of the country, and the massive displacement caused by it—Ukrainians largely refused to believe in the possibility of a full-scale invasion. In January 2022, I conducted a series of interviews with Ukrainian artists Maria Kulikovska, Piotr Armianovski, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and Alevtina Kakhidze for October journal. All of the participants in the interview, including myself as the interviewer, were doubtful about the Russian ethical and pragmatic capacity to invade Ukraine with heavy military forces (Biedarieva 2022, 137–149). Deleuze and Guattari examine the transgressive quality of affects, “Affects transpierce the body like arrows, they are weapons of war” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 356). Affects are also double-edged weapons, as they produce impact going both ways—with self-directed

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harm, in the case of Russia, now isolated from the international community and to an even larger extent immersed in the resolution of inner problems. The intrinsic rationality of affect, however, justifies its embedding into social and political structures, which constitute the continuity between the past and the present. Epp Annus speaks about the affective weight attached to certain events and periods: the affective burden of the past, which has a prolonged impact on the postcolonial situation (Annus 2018, 149). Using the Baltic states as an example, Annus addresses the general postcolonial condition of the (former) post-Soviet space, with many of the now-­independent states that formerly belonged to it aiming to rid themselves of this postcolonial affective burden. Conversely, Russian studies scholars still see affect as the byproduct of Russia’s “special way” in modernity, reenacted either in nostalgia or backward-looking mythology. Svetlana Boym considered that affection and alienation are manifested in a particular mode of hybridity that she calls “off-modern,” viewing it as an outcentered reflection on the modern tradition that remains outside its limits. Through the off-modern lens, Boym considered Russia’s rootedness in the past and imperial nostalgia not as an alarming condition of being trapped in the colonial worldview but as signs of being eccentric to the mainstream, experimenting with time, and turning the device of othering into a survival strategy (based on her case studies of Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Brodsky). It is also another way to call it anachronic, as is  Russia’s colonial desire (Boym 2001, 257). Etkind, in turn, defines the current postcolonial condition of Russia as “paleomodernity,” proposing that this is a type of “faux” modernity crafted by the Soviet project, which had no place for people, only for the militarized industry that looked increasingly obsolete with every decade and was later resurrected and restored by Vladimir Putin’s neocolonial regime (Etkind 2023, 4). These attempts by Russian studies scholars to define Russia’s special position outside the modernity narrative, in a way, contribute to decolonial scholars’ vision of modernity as the other side of coloniality and, therefore, once again obscure the discussion of Russia’s profound and extended coloniality. Moreover, these inquiries also frequently demonstrate the scholar’s own affection for the Ukrainian topic. For example, Etkind appropriates the colors of the Ukrainian flag for the cover of his book in question while he remarks that “Before and during the Russo-­ Ukrainian war that began in 2014, modernity was as big an issue for Russia as the agency was for Ukraine” (Etkind 2023, 3). The borrowing of the

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visual identity in this context shows that, from the Russian studies perspective, the mentioned affect is still in place, while recognizing Ukraine’s agency remains an issue. By means of appropriation and the “retrospective” view on Ukraine’s subjectivity, the critics and ideologists of Russia’s “alternative” modernity inscribe themselves into the ambicolonial system through affect, and provoke a counterquestion—What about Russia’s agency? The dichotomy of Ukraine/agency and Russia/modernity drawn by Etkind seems to offer an incomplete perspective, lacking certain aspects in light of the discussion on violence as powerlessness and appropriation as belonging in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. Russian attempts at discursively defying rationality as a mark of modernity are part of the postcolonial mimicry that has been discussed in the preceding chapters. Its neocolonial stance is profoundly postmodern, as is Russian contemporary culture, marked by incessant doubt and irrational fear, enveloped by affect. Timothy Snyder points out that Russia’s fascism exists only on the surface of society, its elitist circle, and is hollow at the center of Putin’s regime (Snyder 2022). Russian society, as a demobilized society, embraces emptiness as part of the postcolonial rootedness, which also  appears to be postmodern. Yet, this void predates the genocidal regime of Putin, which exploits people’s weaknesses, reducing affect to a mere drive. Late communism was another powerful source of such a void. Ukraine-born artist Ilya Kabakov, who became a prominent representative of Moscow Conceptualism, wrote after visiting Europe for the first time: A gigantic reservoir, the volume of the emptiness in question which represents “our place” is not emptiness per se—a “vacant place” in the European meaning of the word. This approach would characterize emptiness as a space not yet filled, not yet mastered, undeveloped or developed poorly, a little, etc. […] The emptiness of “our place,” […] presents itself as an extraordinarily active volume—as a reservoir of emptiness, as a particular void-like state of being, staggeringly catalyzed, but opposed to genuine existence, genuine life, serving as the absolute antipode of any living existence. (Kabakov 1990 [1982], 53–54)

This postmodern void, as opposed to living experience, is again rooted in nihilism, as a passive longing for collapse and (self-)destruction, which, according to Snyder, after 1991, flowed together with the Western idea that democracy was merely the result of some impersonal forces (the vacant place in Kabakov’s interpretation). He concludes: “It turned out,

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these forces pushed in different directions, toward oligarchy or empire” (Snyder 2022). The picture painted here by Snyder precisely portrays the morphology of domination that overtook the colonial matrix of power. Here, lies the explanation of why Russia has avoided similar protests to those in Ukraine—as the ultimate means to prevent the void, which is covered by the state, from being uncovered in a revolutionary event (Badiou 2005, 181). Speaking about imperialism and its discontents, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak introduces the Lacanian notion of foreclosure as the rejection of colonial affect (Spivak 1999, 4). According to her, rejection of affect serves as the energetic defense of the colonizing mission (Spivak 1999, 5). She quotes Freud: “Here, the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all” (Spivak 1999, 4). This rejection of affect—with its simultaneous embracing within the intrinsic ambivalence—lies at the basis of Russia’s polymorphous coloniality, its intrinsic mimicry, where the affect as an applied action, “a weapon of war” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 71; 356), is unleashed and simultaneously foreclosed as an epistemic instrument. The foreclosure of Russia’s affect occurs when the rational component of its impulse to impact the Other (or at least to be impacted by this Other, whose image is constructed in the image of the Self) sinks into this invisible yet tangible void, an emptiness found in place of the political agency of Russian society. Massumi speaks about affect as what remains of the potential after the body performs all its actions, regulated by necessity—it is a perpetual bodily remainder, an excess, a life overspilling (Massumi 2015, 8). There is no life overspilling in Russia’s desire to conquer Ukraine— instead, there is death, violence, atrocity, and destruction, which consume the affective dynamics of the conquest, depriving it of a future. In other words, affect finishes together with the things that it condemns to destruction; it empties itself and needs to be constantly fueled by the actions of imperial and colonial mimicry: the production of propaganda with its inversion of reality and terror with its violent imitation of power. Due to its supportive role in the defense of a colonizing quest, the foreclosure of affect that fuels ambicoloniality is an essential tool for preserving its integrity. The colonizer, rejecting the possibility of acting according to the field of impact charted in affect, not acknowledging the atrocity committed or the harm caused, contributes to the consolidation of the

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inner perception of the nobility of the mission, which, from this perspective, aims to protect people, restore justice, and reconstruct connection rather than simply destroy and kill in the name of an abstract good. If the foreclosure of affect conceals the real aim of the colonizer, drive and desire become formative for the epistemology of violence. In the case of Russia, the most complicated scenario arises when the discursive foreclosure of affect, combined with the simultaneous embracing of colonial desire, gives way to dehumanization through neocolonial violence.

6.3  Challenging Oedipal Visions of Russia’s Colonialism The widespread claims by Russia, inherited from the Soviet Union, that Ukraine and Russia are “one people,” along with the use of notions imitating family relations are exemplary of such affection. As Evgeny Dobrenko has argued, the ideal of socialism is an “adult child,” and its strategy is the conservation of childhood because the consciousness of the child can be easily manipulated and is exposed to myth creation (Dobrenko 2000, 35). Such an infantile worldview was expressed through Soviet appellations related to vertical and horizontal relations, marking affective entanglement through family bonds: “Rodina-mat’” (Mother Motherland), “the Father of Nations,” “sister republics,” “peoples-­brothers,” and “the elder brother” (Dobrenko 2000, 36). While some of these notions emphasize equality, others immediately subvert this emphasis, bringing the real colonial hierarchization to light. This fabricated orientation toward the family as the primary model aimed to veil the oppressive social and political relations and epistemic violence occurring within the Soviet Union, and it had negative effects on Russia’s worldview despite its agency in producing this faux family-centrism. Not only were these terms emotionally colored, but the structure they connote became also charged with sentiment and passion as the main drives for the entanglement. This Soviet discursive legacy is used by researchers of Russian colonialism to highlight this construct of family bonding as a marker of simultaneous belonging, possession, and affection. For example, the title of the book by Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times, into Ukrainian translation transforms into Embraced by

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the Empire;2 Paul D’Anieri uses Leonid Kravchuk’s notion of a “civilized divorce” to trace how it led to a “uncivil war” of Russia against Ukraine in his book on the post-1991 history of Ukraine and Russia (Shkandrij 2001, 2004; D’Anieri 2019). The mention of affection, desire, and/or family bonds is present in the discussions on Russian colonialism in Ukraine. The ambicoloniality, therefore, is conditioned not only by the shared border and cultural proximity embedded into territoriality but by the particular, also shared, construct constituted by the historical Russian desire to not only dominate Ukrainian territory but also physically belong to a symbolic structure, resembling a family. The painting Together Forever (2013) by Tistol and Matsenko, which I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, refers to Oleh Tistol’s earlier painting Reunification (1988), created shortly before the downfall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tistol’s work explores the notion of “brotherhood” as confluence and hybridization (Fig.  6.2). Returning to the history of the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty, when the Ukrainian Hetmanate signed allegiance to imperial Russia, the painting presents a “reunification” of two expressively painted, lookalike male figures who passionately embrace each other. They hold Cossack maces as symbols of power, referencing the remythologization of the historical relationship between the two countries as an equal unity rather than colonial belonging. By employing elements characteristic of the vision of a nation-state in the (post)colonial context, the artist addresses the widespread idealization based on shared values and cultural proximity. To break the illusory harmony of the process of reunification, he portrays two figures in the background, adorned with symbols of faith (Christian crosses) and abundance (cornucopia), as two core elements of colonial syncretism, who whisper to each other and embody the threat and treachery that await the central figures in this historicized colonial hybridization. One year before Solzhenitsyn published his manifesto on the unity of Slavic peoples, that was later employed by Putin in his neocolonial program, Tistol critically addressed the notion of “brotherhood” as a utopian affective construct fraught with pitfalls and dangers. 2  В обіймах імперії. Myroslav Shkandrij (2004 [2001]). V obiimakh imperii: Rosiis’ka i ukrains’ka literatury novitn’oi doby [Embraced by the Empire: Russian and Ukrainian Literatures of the New Era]. Translated by Petro Tarashchuk. Fakt: Kyiv.

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Fig. 6.2  Oleh Tistol, Reunification, 1988. Image courtesy of the artist

The ambicoloniality is supported  by  turning from viewing  the colonized (political) nation as an exoticized nation, only as the colonial Other, as in Hohol’s writing, to seeing it as a “significant Other,” akin to a spouse or relative, which implies a degree of idealization. Kiossev proposes that the historical dynamics of colonial relations highlighted controversial changes—from the dehumanizing, monstrous appearances of colonial “Others” to the idealized descriptions of “heavenly innocent,” angel-like figures of Native American people in the Columbus’s diaries (Kiossev 2011 [1995]). This othering-through-idealization is also

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characteristic of Russian rhetoric of infantilization toward former subaltern, aimed at disarming their emancipatory discourses. It conceals colonial desire, which imitates care, protection, and the preservation of their belonging, while in fact converting each of them into an Other and producing an infantile figure of the “native informant” (Spivak 1999). In this post-Soviet “family” interpretation, the concept of the “native informant” receives new aspects as it discursively complies with the colonialist worldview and absorbs its features, such as polymorphism and double consciousness. While excluded from the field of knowledge production within the colonial power structure, the native informant underpins it, guides its subconsciousness and reasoning, obscured with desire. This figure of appropriation as belonging involves more than exotization as alienation. The native informant, therefore, mediates within an affective state, yet is viewed as inferior. Russia’s neocolonial discourse aims to revive and reconstruct this affective figure with regard to Ukraine as the basis for ambicolonial entanglement; yet the reality that has been changed provides it with nothing more than the “walking dead” of necropower. Russia’s colonial rhetoric extends to countries that are not in direct contact with its necropolitics and neocolonial aggression yet appear as its supporters, and it symbolically recolonizes them using mimicry as the main mechanism for reconquest. An example of such polymorphous colonial rhetoric, resulting in the appropriation and weaponization of the decolonization discourse, is the hosting of Bolivia in the Russian pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Banned from the Biennale for its violent actions in Ukraine, Russia maintained its historical pavilion and retained the right to lend it to other countries for their representation at the International Exhibition. In 2024, Russia announced that Bolivia would take the space of the pavilion for an exhibition of Indigenous artists, focused on decolonization. The exhibition featured works by Indigenous Bolivian artists that addressed essential topics, such as the preservation of Indigenous culture, languages, and the defense of human rights. Russian media, as the “new Columbus,” presented the exhibition with colonial clichés similar to those used when speaking about the former subaltern nations, describing it as an exhibition about “brotherhood, joy, and unity of intentions.”3 The political context, in which the exhibition 3  Sofia Bagdasarova, “Rossia predostavila svoi pavilion na Venetsianskoi biennale komande iz Bolivii” [Russia Gave Its Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to a Team from Bolivia], The Art Newspaper Russia, March 21, 2024. Available online at: https://www.theartnewspaper.ru/ posts/20240321-skua/.

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was presented, was, however, less peaceful or liberatory: when announcing the exhibition, Russia made sure to remark that it lent this pavilion to Bolivia as a valued partner for lithium mining on its territory, for further use in Russia’s nuclear program. In this collaboration, we are witnessing the emergence of a global native informant, which is not the direct neocolonial subject, yet confers and contributes to the whitewashing of the colonizer’s aggressive politics by providing it with a presumably emancipated, decolonial, Indigenous appearance. The foreclosure of affect (or, as in Spivak’s interpretation, of the native informant affiliated with affect) requires the process of expulsion, somewhat similar to syncretic polarization. However, if the classical Lacanian model used by Spivak sees it as the expulsion of a signifier from the symbolic field—of the powerholder, in our case—in syncretic polarization, epistemes constituting knowledge are expelled, specifically those linked to a wider symbolic and affective dynamic in motion: that of ambicoloniality. The unidirectional affect toward neocolonialism, be it based on desire or repulsion, is then substituted by the emancipatory polysemic and pluralist affect that goes beyond any dichotomy. Syncretic polarization splits jouissance, disarms colonial affect, and breaks the connection between them. It dismantles the inherent sense of belonging, turning it into antagonism in an anti-colonial scenario—and into agonism in a decolonial one. Chantal Mouffe views agonism as the resolution of political tensions rooted in binary oppositions, giving them a pluralist direction instead, and this model can be applied to fill the void produced by syncretic polarization and to turn to new epistemologies that do not carry the colonial affective burden (Mouffe 2013, xii). As I will show in the last chapter of this book, internal solidarity and agonism coming after the initial syncretic polarization—can form the basis for internal hybridity as the resolution of tensions and self-identification in a decolonial situation. Syncretic polarization is able to undermine ambicolonial desire from the Russian side if it has a chance to permeate Russian society in a process that presupposes the detachment from the ambicolonial channel, exchange, comprehension, and, subsequently, the expulsion of narratives marked with colonial affect. Yet, this would mean a break with Putin’s polymorphous totalitarian regime, full integration, acknowledgment, absorption, and transformation of the epistemology of violence—and the dissolution of jouissance as a means of exercising modernity.

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6.4   Desire for New Epistemology The desire for a new epistemology, “sedimenting” the epistemology of violence, is expressed in the changing language of the war, which turns away from ambicolonial desire (and resistance to it) and toward the desire for the acquisition and preservation of agency through a profound comprehension of the ongoing war events. War violence, as discussed before, is not fully representable or intelligible, so the full formation of the epistemology of violence is never complete. Its reconstructive force comes from the knowledge that allows for rationalization and explanation of the traumatic events, and this knowledge requires a language of description and analysis. In his book of reportages from the first months of Russia’s full-­ scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, writer Oleksandr Mykhed speaks about the simplification of “wartime” language in Ukraine at the beginning of the full-scale invasion: [It is] a language in which everything is called by its name. A war is a war, not an operation. “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” is a national slogan. Total isolation is the weapon chaos deserves. The biggest relief is that the family are OK, the hometown is standing, and the Russian invaders have been exterminated.4 (Mykhed 2024 [2023], 15)

The seeming reduction of the expressive and conceptual capacities of language is caused by trauma and the limitation of the importance of objects and events beyond the actual circle of livelihood. Mykhed, who lost his house in the Russian shelling of the town of Hostomel in the Kyiv region during the first days of the full-scale invasion, experienced dispossession firsthand and witnessed the atrocity of the Russian army in the spring of 2022. This simplification has also been discussed in an exhibition “How Are You?” at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv in June 2023. The exhibition used five floors of the large-scale modernist building to show the reduction of language from its descriptive qualities to a simple phrase: “How are you?” while returning through time to February 24, 2022. The laconic question 4  Мова, в якій все називається своїми іменами. Війна—це війна, а не операція. Русскій воєнний корабль, іді нахуй—це національна ідея. Тотальна ізоляція—зброя, на яку заслуговує хаос. Найбільша втіха—що з рідними все добре, рідне місто вистояло, а російські окупанти—винищені. Translated from Ukrainian by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv, and Abby Dewar.

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represents a devastating comprehension of the scale of the tragedy but also reflects  the empathy that unites the traumatized society as a means of understanding beyond words. The circular architecture of each floor carried a reminiscence of “circles of hell” that the Ukrainian society has passed through to exit this stage of the reduction of language. In addressing the expressive and representational crises brought about by trauma, exhibition curators propose that words can be reduced to a code whose only function is to compassionately check the existence of a connection, to see whether the recipient of the message still lives—and beyond that, no additional questions or answers are necessary (Balashova 2023). This silent compassion gradually turned to passion in producing new texts and new narratives that would reflect the war and collective resistance to it, embarking on the capacity of language and art to treat society’s bleeding wounds. Conversely, language that conveys the desire for recovery, as the final closure of the epistemology of violence, can also injure. Judith Butler discusses linguistic vulnerability through its capacity to produce—or incorporate—an injury by asking the question: “When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?” Butler proposes that society ascribes an agency to language, gives it the power to injure, and positions its members as the objects of the language’s injurious trajectory. “We claim that language acts, and acts against us, and the claim we make is a further instance of language, one which seeks to arrest the force of the prior instance” (Butler 1997, 1). By acquiring injurability, as a temporal matter that represents its anti-colonial phase,  the language of Ukrainian resistance reclaims its agency. The address of the Russian warship that Mykhed mentions—a phrase coined by the Ukrainian defender of Snake Island in the Black Sea when the Russian warship “Moskva” ordered them to surrender—became a popular refrain among Ukrainians that entered public life and media. Its use of a vulgar word is proof of the affective quality of “defensive” language against Russian colonialism and its entire war machine, in this case represented in the appropriately symbolic form of a warship. Yet, what if language is injurious by the simple fact of its existence? What if it is injurable because it transmits desire and channels affects? While Butler uses the term “language” in general to define the underpinnings of speech action, I will refer to the language in particular, in terms of natural language—Russian or Ukrainian. The Russian language, or rather its imaginary construction by Russian propaganda as a marker of

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Russophone ethnic belonging to the “Motherland,” played an ambiguous role in the war. It was used by Russia’s polymorphous rhetoric as a vessel for ambicolonial affection and subjugation under the symbolic power of the formerly colonized. Journalist Luke Harding, in his analysis of possible underlying reasons behind Russia’s unstoppable desire to invade Ukraine, found that its most plausible explanation was the axiom that if Ukraine, as home to millions of native Russian speakers, could succeed as a Western-style democracy following the Euromaidan Revolution, which uncovered the plurality of voices within civil society and brought them into a productive polylogue, so potentially could Russia (Harding 2022, 6–7). This represents both the acknowledgment of the threat—which Ukraine’s crossing the line between the postcolonial condition and the decolonial stage posed to the Russian social sphere, by giving an example of emancipation—and the recognition of the degree of self-colonization with the West embedded in Russia’s power structures, which could lead to Putin’s regime’s  downfall. The Russian vision of language as a marker of identity—and, moreover, as a marker of power—and its exceptionalist perception of the particular role of language in constructing the Other in the image of the Self, with the onset of the aggression reduced it to a mere instrument of neocolonial desire. Accepting these definitions would mean contributing to Russia’s exploitation of ambicoloniality. In 2002, Yuri Andrukhovych wrote that, from both “love” and “hate” of postcolonial transitoriness, he sought refuge in the Ukrainian language “as if in political asylum,” viewing it as neutral territory, free of ambivalence (Andrukhovych 2018 [2002], 108). Deleuze and Guattari viewed the “process of desire,” which exceeds pleasures and produces reality, as rooted in reterritorializations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980], 156). The reterritorialization of language and its re-rootedness, is such a process of desire. For Russia, colonial desire operates conversely through the deterritorialization of language. The destruction of Mariupol as a Russian-­ speaking city, which had resisted Russia’s attempts at its occupation since 2014, is one such example of real-life deterritorialization. However, as the diaries of one of the witnesses and survivors of Russia’s atrocities in the city explain, “After 2014, we fell in love with the Ukrainian language. […] Freedom and independence were important to us” (Arhirova 2022, 113). In a time of colonial war, language, while being a channel and, therefore, a beyond-territorial formation, enunciates itself through a territory. This territory becomes subject to the “process” of desire and the influence of

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either colonial affect or  a decolonization impulse. Deterritorialization, therefore, is resisted by withdrawing from the channel of mutual entanglement and its affective flow and by turning to a channel that detached from it—such as the Ukrainian language imbued with the signification of “freedom and independence” for its speakers. Dispossession and displacement are examples of deterritorialization, yet they are also representative of movement, place-changing, re-rootedness, and exchange;  therefore, they are exemplary of reterritorialization. Whether internal or external, they foster changes in the morphology of power relationships, bringing symbolic impact to previously unaffected places. The production of the epistemology of violence as a process of knowing closes its cycles, as detachment brought about by temporal or geographic distancing permits both forgetting and the reconstruction of traumatic memories,  along with the closure of the affective dynamics related to them. The reterritorialization of this knowledge occurs as indifference to the colonial impact sets in, and wounds are, at least in part, healed, creating space for the production of knowledge “beyond” the awareness of the destructive force of violence, thus leading to a nonaffective epistemology of decolonial release: an epistemology of regeneration.

6.5  Case Study: Crimea as an Affective Territory Crimea is exemplary of an ambicolonial in-between space, a site of colonial dispute, encaged nostalgia, and a container for colonial desire. The territory of Crimea has been historically filled with a sense of not only geopolitical significance—remembering that it was the favorite summer residence for Russian emperors, where also the destinies of the empire were at times decided, or the infamous Yalta Conference between Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt, where the post–World War II peace was agreed upon. Crimea is also a cradle of symbolic affection and postcolonial ambivalence, not least because of its rich landscape and diverse nature, marked by the numerous ethnicities that have settled there over the centuries, leaving behind entire historical and archeological layers, either intersecting, creolized, or intact. Throughout the centuries, Crimea was home to the Scythian and Sarmatian nomads, the Greeks building their polises, the Tatars who settled there after the Golden Horde invasion, the Crimean Karaites, the Krymchaks, the Ukrainians, and the Russians.

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Crimea, as a postcolonial space, nurtured syncretism and creolization, containing events, personalities, and objects desired by numerous cultures. For Russia, the entanglement with Crimea means symbolic domination over the very fabric of history, denoting the absolutism of power, similar to the expansionist colonialism of the Russian empire. Bhabha places postcolonial ambivalence in the domain of desire as an in-between space, a third space where colonial power is articulated (Bhabha 1994, 112). In Ukraine, Crimea has become iconic of such a manifestation of ambivalence due to its nature of division and intersection between cultures’ rivalry for this territory. This competition, however, has been unequal, since Russian settler colonialism historically aimed at the oppression of other ethnic groups—and dissident thinking—in the peninsula. While the actual military warfare takes place in the east and south of Ukraine’s mainland, Crimea remains a symbolic battleground for domination over the Ukrainian territory. This symbolism is justified by hybridity that permeates the peninsula’s history and, not least, its symbolic significance for colonial desire. Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov addressed the hypothetical isolation and political neutrality of Crimea in his 1981 novel, The Island of Crimea. Set in an alternate history, Aksyonov’s novel depicts Crimea not as a peninsula but as an island in the Black Sea which, during the 1917 revolution, sheltered the White Guard, did not join the Soviet Union, and became an independent country. Aksyonov portrays the island as pro-European, relying on equality and ethnic diversity. In this model world, the 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars never occurred, and they maintained peaceful coexistence with the Russians on the island. Yet Soviet colonialism reached Crimea with the ideology of “Common Destiny.” As a culmination of the novel, the island is taken by the Soviet army, and the protagonists of the novel, previously sympathetic to the idea, are killed (Aksyonov 1981). The book of reportages, The Lost Island (2020) by Natalia Gumeniuk, reinterprets the allegory proposed by Aksyonov. In the testimonies gathered from witnesses of Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 and its aftermath on the peninsula, Gumenyuk shows that ambicoloniality is contested by a third essential element: the Crimean Tatar culture as a culture of resistance (Gumenyuk 2020). In real life, the Soviet government attempted to erase hybridity through ethnic cleansing and the deportation of the Crimean Tatars following World War II in 1944. In the 1990s, they began to return from exile in Uzbekistan, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. Reterritorialization became the objective of generations, and the

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return to “home” was seen as the ultimate goal. “All fifty years, we struggled to return,”5 says one of the representatives of the community (Gumenyuk 2020, 94). The exodus of the Crimean Tatar community happened once again after the occupation of the peninsula by Russia, with a very high rate of displacement: at least 20,000 people out of 300,000 left their homeland (Gumenyuk 2020, 122). Numerous activists have been killed, and others have  experienced severe repression, torture, forced displacement, and imprisonment. Despite the pressure that increased with the onset of the full-scale invasion, many decided to remain in Crimea because of the affective relationship they had established with the peninsula as their homeland. “Leaving Crimea is like leaving an ill mother”; this phrase projects affective expression onto Crimean territory (Gumenyuk 2020, 122). The Crimean Tatar connection to the land is widely expressed in their cultural production. The lyrics of the popular singer Jamala’s song 1944, titled after the year of the Crimean  Tatars’  deportation from Crimea, say, “I wasn’t allowed to enjoy my youth / And to live my life here / I couldn’t have enough of my homeland.”6 The context of the song’s production is fully guided by the affective logic of profound entanglement and resistance within the epistemology of violence. Moreover, the importance of Crimea for Ukrainian society at large, within its cultural diversity, has been addressed by numerous voices who emphasize it as a zone where affection is manifested. Crimea, as an affective territory, has historically found itself at the crossroads of migration routes, multicultural exchange, economic and political rivalry for the place, reterritorialization and deterritorialization, and finally, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, forced deportation and genocide, settler colonialist policies and repressions. These movements formed close attachments to the territory among different communities and defined Crimea’s symbolic power from both Ukraine’s and Russia’s perspectives. Affect, underpinned by drive and desire, formed the social and cultural landscape of the peninsula, and this pre-existing multilayered and uneven terrain constituted Crimea’s symbolic role in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

 Усі 50 років ми боролися, аби повернутись. Translation from Ukrainian is mine.  Yaşlığıma toyalmadım / Men bu yerde yaşalmadım / Vatanima toyalmadim. The author is grateful to Nedim Useinow for his support in translation from Crimean Tatar language.  5 6

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Crimea as a territory was historically filled with conflicting desires and opposing affective vectors, serving as a container of postcolonial ambivalence through which ambicoloniality could be reenacted. Not least, it was viewed as a territory of power due to the presence of the Russian imperial palaces, “the shadow of Yalta” (Piotrowski 2009), and the military bases in the area. Serhii Plokhy provides a detailed account of the consolidation of the ambivalence formed by the presence of the Russian fleet in Ukrainian territory after 1991. The Baltic countries expelled the Soviet army after gaining independence, and Ukraine attempted to follow their example. However, the Soviet military presence in Ukraine was too large, and Russia could not accommodate them all. In 1997, Ukraine and Russia signed an agreement permitting 300 ships and 25,000 naval personnel to remain in Sevastopol until 2017 in exchange for a treaty that guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity (Plokhy 2015, 324–325). Russia violated this treaty in the spring of 2014. Artistic works dedicated to Crimea best reflect the ambivalence of the peninsula’s cultural and political position throughout history. Working with the themes of corporeality and territoriality, Crimean artist Maria Kulikovska uses her body as a document, taking sculptural molds from her own figure. Her sculptural project Star Dust (2019) interweaves the topics of Crimea’s occupation and the artist’s personal family history, questioning both bodily agency and territorial integrity (Fig.  6.3). Unable to return to her hometown since 2014, Kulikovska addresses the Kerch Peninsula in Crimea, where she was born and grew up. Kulikovska dedicates her project to her grandmother, who arrived in Crimea in the 1950s. As Kulikovska’s grandmother told her, at that time, Crimea was mostly salted soils, sunburnt steppe, and the sea, with no supply of drinking water, no fertile land, and no green areas. Following the forced deportation of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet government, the post–World War II reconstruction of Crimea was performed by migrants from other Soviet territories, such as Kulikovska’s grandmother. The artist reinterprets the map of the Kerch Peninsula as she recreates its topography and landscape through its contours. She also uses casts of her body that evoke Greek sculptures, referencing the seventh–sixth century BC Ancient Greek city in present-­ day Kerch named Panticapaeum. The sculptures are made from the same materials as the model of the peninsula, including metal, wood, different types of soil, fossils, cement, stone, dust, sand, iron oxides, and sea salt. Her small-scale recreation returns the peninsula to Ukraine, serving as a reannexation of the land that had been severed from the rest of the

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Fig. 6.3  Maria Kulikovska, Star Dust, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist

communal-national body; thus, reuniting the body and the territory she prevents it from further falling into oblivion. The corporeality demonstrates affect and entanglement, as “being created from the same soil.” In addressing the affective dimension of territoriality and deterritorialization, sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova’s installation Untitled (2014) consists of a fragment of  a  wall from a Soviet-era abandoned factory cut in the shape of the Ukrainian map. A piece of it, representing the Crimean Peninsula, is broken apart (Fig. 6.4). The front side of the work was made of brick burnt on the surface, while the opposite side, significantly damaged by time, was covered in yellowed Soviet wallpaper, which was still in use at the time in many provincial towns and villages in Ukraine. In working with two surfaces, Kadyrova’s work examines the postcolonial perspective on how the subconscious underpinnings of past memory are profoundly interconnected with the ruin of the present. The artist has also explored the territorial dimension of this rootedness, using the map of Ukraine as a model for the conflicting identity entangled with historical trauma—where Crimea is set aside. The breakout of Crimea actualizes this trauma, representing Ukraine as a damaged, decaying, abandoned zone,

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Fig. 6.4  Zhanna Kadyrova, Untitled, 2014–2022. Image courtesy of the artist

suffering from its intrinsic ambivalence in durable stagnation between the past and the present. However, the piece, representing Crimea exposes only one, burnt, side of the surface, turning from ambivalence to unidimensionality under the impact of Russian occupation. After 2022, Kadyrova amended her project  by adding rubble from Ukrainian buildings shelled by Russia to the installation. In doing so, she shifted the focus from a postcolonial perspective on the decaying industrialized past to a wartime decolonial perspective, exploring how violence reframes previous knowledge about trauma and resistance. The occupation of Crimea represented colonial oppression that flattened heterogeneity through political repression and eliminated freedom of speech. It also manifested its vision as an “island,” an isolated space that, after having been emptied, can be refilled with new symbolic power. Artist Olia Mykhailiuk challenged this vision of Crimea’s isolationism with the audiovisual project No One Is an Island (2014). She referred to the famous devotional lines by John Donne, “No man is an island / entire of itself; every man / is a piece of the continent, / a part of the main” (Donne 1923 [1624], 98). Unable to enter Crimea—which she and artistic

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collaborators saw as “a third dimension,” a space of confluence of meanings—they attempted to recreate its landscapes, cultural patterns, and feelings embedded in them in the context of mainland Ukraine. The resulting video and audio works highlighted the continuity that can be drawn between the space of loss and the space of its reconstruction, emphasizing the deeply rooted interconnection between mainland Ukraine and Crimea, and the profound  hybridity not disassembled but actualized by Russian occupation: “Any man’s death diminishes me, / Because I am involved in mankind. / And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee” (Donne 1923 [1624], 98). The hybrid subject of desire is enunciated in the shared sense of belonging and affection for the place and the epistemology of violence that builds within the “in-­between” space of hybridity. Despite destructive consequences to Ukraine, Russia’s occupation of Crimea also came at a cost to the occupant. The occupation of Crimea meant the undertaking of a symbolic burden of self-colonization with the “hybrid subject of desire.” The attempt at the forced appropriation of the peninsula came as a challenge to the Russian capacity to avoid further ambicolonial movements and signified the beginning of the end of ambicoloniality as such. Over centuries, the “in-between,” “third dimension”7 of the Crimean Peninsula has been a vessel for hostility, displacement, and appropriation, transforming into affect. It has also been a utopian land of belonging, diversity, and fruition—a place of attachment and symbolic power.

Bibliography Aksyonov, Vasily (1981). Ostrov Krym [The Island of Crimea]. Ardis Publishing: Ann Arbor, MN. Andrukhovych, Yuri (2018 [2002]). “What Language Are You from: A Ukrainian Writer among the Temptations of Temporariness.” In Yuri Andrukhovych. My Final Territory: Selected Essays, 98–108. Translated by Mark Andryczyk and Michael M. Naydan. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, ON. Annus, Epp (2018). Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands. Routledge: London and New York.

7  “Crimea. The Third Dimension.” ArtPole Agency. Available online at: https://artpole. org/en/activity/crimea-the-third-dimension/.

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Arhirova, Hanna (2022). “I Remember Dividing Two Boiled Eggs into Fifteen Pieces. Everyone Was So Happy.” In 77 Days of February Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Country’s Own Journalists. Edited by Marichka Paplauskaite, 101–115. Translated by Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan. Scribd, Inc.: San Francisco, CA. Badiou, Alain (2005 [1987]). Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. Continuum: London. Balashova, Olga (2023). “Curatorial Text for Floors 1 and 2.” Exhibition “How Are You?” 1–25 June. Ukrainian House, Kyiv. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge: London and New York. Biedarieva, Svitlana (2022). “Art Communities at Risk: On Ukraine.” October. Vol. 179, 137–149. Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books: New York. Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge: London and New York. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Chernetsky Vitaly (2007). Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal. D’Anieri, Paul (2019). Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1987 [1980]). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN. Dobrenko, Evegeny (2000). “Sotsrealizm i mir detstva” [Socialist Realism and the World of Childhood]. In Sotsrealisticheskii kanon [The Socialist Realist Canon]. Edited by Hans Günther and Evgeny Dobrenko, 31–40. Akademicheskii Proekt: St. Petersburg. Donne, John (1923 [1624]). Donne’s Devotions. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Etkind, Alexander (2023). Russia Against Modernity. Polity Press: Cambridge. Gandhi, Leela (2006). Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. Gumenyuk, Natalia (2020). Zahublenyi ostriv: Knyha reportazhiv z okupovanoho Krymu [The Lost Island: A Book of Reportages from Occupied Crimea]. Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva: Lviv. Harding, Luke (2022). Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival. Guardian Faber Publishing: London. Kabakov, Ilya (1990 [1982]). “On Emptiness.” Translated by Clark Troy. In Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism. Edited by David A. Ross, 53–60. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

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Kiossev, Alexander (2011 [1995]). “The Self-Colonizing Metaphor.” Atlas of Transformation. Available online at: http://monumenttotransformation.org/ atlas-­o f-­t ransformation/html/s/self-­c olonization/the-­s elf-­c olonizing-­ metaphor-­alexander-­kiossev.html. Lacan, Jacques (1992 [1959–1960]). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Vol. 7. Edited by Jacques Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. W.W. Norton & Co: New York. Massumi, Brian (1995). “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique. No. 31, “The Politics of Systems and Environments,” Part 2, 83–109. Massumi, Brian (2015). Politics of Affect. Polity Press: Cambridge. Mouffe, Chantal (1993). The Return of The Political. Verso: London. Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso: London. Mykhed, Oleksandr (2024 [2023]). The Language of War. Translated by Maryna Gibson, Hanna Leliv and Abby Dewar. Allen Lane: London. Piotrowski, Piotr (2009). In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. Translated by Anna Brzyski. Reaktion Books: London. Plokhy, Serhii (2015). The Gates of Europe. A History of Ukraine. Basic Books: New York. Shkandrij, Myroslav (2001). Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times. McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal. Shkandrij, Myroslav (2004 [2001]). V obiimakh imperii: Rosiis’ka i ukrains’ka literatury novitn’oi doby [Embraced by the Empire: Russian and Ukrainian Literatures of the New Era]. Translated by Petro Tarashchuk. Fakt: Kyiv. Snyder, Timothy (2022). “Ukraine Holds the Future: The War between Democracy and Nihilism.” Foreign Affairs. 6 September. Available online at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-­war-­democracy-­nihilism-­ timothy-­snyder. Sorokin, Vladimir (2008). Sakharnyi Kreml’ [Sugar Kremlin]. Astrel: Moscow. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press. Thrift, Nigel (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge: London and New York.

CHAPTER 7

Ruin and Reconstruction

7.1   The Unfolding Ruin The ruin is the object that remains after death and destruction occur. The specters of those who perished in violence and inhumanity may still inhabit these remains, yet they are as invisible and unheard of as the subaltern voices they once were. Ruins are symbolic signifiers of death, but being ambiguous like the situation that produced them, they are also material signifiers of oblivion and of human forgetting as an expression of epistemic injustice. Ruins represent the condition of society, yet it depends on that society whether they signify a transitive state or a durable condition. The photographs from Mariinka, Bakhmut, and Mariupol, among many other Ukrainian cities and villages, show only partially the extent of total destruction that the Russian army inflicted on Ukraine. The ruination aimed at causing chaos, uprootedness, and deterritorialization reaches its objective only when the epistemology upholding these experiences, and turning the collective and personal reaction to them from affect to resilience, is lost irretrievably. Before that, there is hope. Ambicoloniality, as stated in the preceding chapters, rests on two pillars that ensure the continuous channeling of influences both ways—from the colonizer to the colonized and reciprocally. When one of these pillars is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_7

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plunged into ruin, the communication model ceases to function. The ruin, therefore, is not only the tangible outcome of the war. It is also its intangible consequence of a disrupted connection. Through the ambicolonial channel, Russia’s destructive urge had its repercussions on the Russian neocolonial and authoritarian system too—this intangible self-­ subversion of the essential societal structure will risk collapse as soon as the totalitarian regime is shaken. In this condition, it is important to restore the borderline while discarding its filtering ambicolonial quality, relying on the slow-paced natural regeneration and a faster-paced reconstruction, which, following the example of Eurocentric twentieth-century models, such as postwar Germany, would depend on retributions from the aggressor and their possible eventual fragmentation preventing similar terrifying experiences. However, one must keep in mind that both the victor and the defeated must accept that the full restoration of communication to its preceding form is not possible due to several historical determinants. The first determinant is that the power relation is not renewable when the localized part of the colonial matrix of power collapses—and this, as I intended to show in this book, collapsed at the beginning of the war, when the multivectoral morphology of domination replaced its structure, allowing for Russia’s extended capacity for colonial mimicry and polymorphous coloniality. The possibility of a major war is what the decolonial scholars from the Modernity/Coloniality group do not take into account when they view the colonial matrix of power as some kind of constant. The destruction and disillusionment brought about by the war are responsible for deformations and ruptures in the matrix, and state-led propaganda further modifies its function within a globalized space, rendering it hardly repairable to its initial state. The second determinant is that once dissolved, ambicoloniality loses its initial cultural, social, and epistemological meaningfulness. The epistemology experiences profound changes when delinked from the neocolonial state, which poisoned the ambicolonial epistemes with its death drive and colonial jouissance. The production of new knowledge from then on proceeds independently of—and indifferently to—the symbolic affection pursued by the other side. The war-caused ruination in Ukraine included the built environment, the natural landscape, the objects of cultural heritage, and, above all, numerous human lives. Not all these losses occurred in zones of

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immediate impact; many of them are invisible because they represent less tangible and more ephemeral negative influences and are, therefore, more difficult to trace: the distortion of family structures, the massive decline in public mental health, the deprivation of memory and belonging, and uprootedness as a result of displacement. I employ the Deleuzian notion of the “fold” to describe the continuous and nonlinear expansion of Russian neocolonialism into zones outside the immediate reach of its army and missiles (Deleuze 1992). This fold, as a result of a chain reaction triggered by the invasion within the workings of the war machine, envelops the war zone in a logic of atrocity, violence, trauma, and neocolonial aggression, capturing the entire area of the oppressive impact. The fold presupposes an “unfold,” an expanding and infinitely replicating zone where the effects of the war extend, illustrating how the impact of the war’s violence extends beyond its physical consequences (Deleuze 1992, 6). The extended action of trauma in each person’s life highlights the long-term effects of the war, not only on those who experience it directly but also on those who are geographically distant from it, as well as those who are within temporal range, such as subsequent generations. If we speak of neocolonialism, the unfold may be seen as what decolonial scholars designate as “coloniality,” yet with the results of violence visible in front of us, and not in the remote past. The ruination unfolds, procreates itself through a series of violent actions, having not only tangible effects but invisible ones—ruined families, ruined lives, ruined destinies. The unfolding logic of ruination implies its unstoppability—which will continue even after the war is completely over. The “unfolding” ruination works both ways, in the case of Ukraine affecting the integrity of the infrastructure, and in the case of Russia further and further decomposing the very fabric of society together with its epistemology, undermining the regime which already expressed its powerlessness in its violent action. Despite the continuous action of the ruination, the reconstruction process is possible as a concurrent movement. The buildings destroyed in Kyiv and the Kyiv region by Russian shelling have been recovered. While everything  cannot be returned, there is hope for the reconstruction—if not retrieval—of much from what has been lost to Russian aggression, except for lost human lives.

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7.2  Decolonial Release as Liberation The “decolonial release” is the overcoming of the final threshold that divides the colonial realm from the decolonial world. In defining this term, I draw on the vision of decoloniality by decolonial scholars, such as Tlostanova, who view decoloniality as an unreachable, utopian horizon. Ukraine’s decolonial release is rooted not in dichotomies between imperial (colonial) and anti-colonial (decolonial) but in a dynamic model that considers a wider panorama of mutual influences, reconsiderations of positions, and shifting borderlines of hybridity. This final frontier of freedom relies on a profound change in Ukraine’s position, which subverts both the Western-centric colonial matrix of power and the morphology of domination fostered by Russia. It requires the full defiance of Russia’s necropolitics, which is delivered through the mutual channel of ambicoloniality. This decolonial release is a turn to plurality and epistemological independence without an overhanging threat of recolonization. This utopian dimension of the decolonial release is discussed in Kateryna Lysovenko’s work Propaganda of the World of My Dreams: The Last Day of the Last Totalitarianism (2022) (Fig. 7.1). The large-scale painting depicts a mythical space where human agency is restored and the borders of knowledge as abyssal lines enclosing Ukrainian society are broken, setting them on the path to liberation and emancipation. While some creatures from Lysovenko’s bestiary mourn their dead, others move on to the endless blank space beyond the limits of their enclosure; the final defiance of colonialism and the decolonial release also means the reunification of spaces of freedom, the erasure of differences, and the elimination of the characteristics of “otherness” through both territorial and personal integrity. The mythical world of Lysovenko reflects on pain and grief but also on the hope of erasing barriers and reclaiming agency and rehumanization that is forthcoming. Lysovenko’s metaphorical view of Russia’s expansive regime as “the last totalitarianism” is representative of a vision of its dominant position in regional power relationships. The victory over the regime of sheer violence would reiterate the vectors of the morphology of domination in the region, exposing its powerlessness, now deeply hidden behind the smoke screen of atrocity and war crimes. The erasure of borders limiting societal and individual liberties and the eventual emancipation from the enclosure again return us to the problem of identity as the unanswerable question of

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Fig. 7.1  Kateryna Lysovenko, Propaganda of the World of My Dreams. The Last Day of the Last Totalitarianism, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist

the essence of “zero-point” knowledge versus the knowledge of ourselves against a wider horizon of events. The vision of the decolonial release as the erasure of borders represents a problem for ambicoloniality, which relies on different types of borders— political, geographical, and personal—as filters. Syncretic polarization rather than the dissolution of borders relies on the strengthening of dividing lines, making them impermeable to ambicolonial affect. However, multiple borders cross the hybrid subject of identity, transforming Bhabha’s “third space” (Bhabha 1994) into a multiplicity of undefined spaces. This is what Anzaldúa defines as borderland, “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). The simultaneous or consequent closure of these borderland spaces ends the state of transition and opens the space to a new, emancipated epistemology, which relies on liberty and collective development.

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It is a complex question whether a true decolonial release is at all possible. The decolonial theory views decoloniality as a continuous process with no end, as the full release from the entanglement and the full dissolution of hybridity is not reachable. However, we speak of the situation burdened by the war—and every war has a victor. The important, even essential, question for Ukraine is: Does decolonial release condition victory, or is the logic reciprocal? Is it correct to link the victory to the decolonial release at all? The decolonial release, as the final dissolution of postcolonial hybridity, will inevitably create a void that cannot be substituted by any means or filled by any other hybrid subject. Rather, it will create a set of voids in the place of former borderlands: a void of signification, a void of affection, a void of the Other,  and a void of the Self. The hybrid subject of desire, however harmful it is when used as a neocolonial tool, is an intrinsic part of every former subaltern, even those who were already born with an intrinsic trace of subalternity. The new generations are not exempt from this curse of hybridity; they are still in between what they have acquired and achieved and what they want to be rid of. These conflicting identities and contradictory epistemes form personalities that would be reduced of their essential traits or deprived of their hybridity, ambivalence, and ambicolonial affects. Néstor García Canclini proposes a possible compromise to resolve this problem when he speaks of “restricted hybridization,” where the fluidity of communications facilitates the appropriation of elements from many cultures, but that does not mean that we accept them indiscriminately (“I will listen to their music but they are not marrying my daughter”) (García  Canclini 1995, xxxvii). However, as Russia’s masterful propaganda influence has shown, cultural proximity does not permit such partial acceptance of colonial influences, which present themselves as a totalizing effect of possession and appropriation, inevitably followed by transgression in the ambicolonial model. This is the case when listening to the colonizer’s music eventually leads to the daughter being abducted and raped. Similarly to García  Canclini, Bauman supports the preservation of ambivalence when he proposes that “The gift of God is the knowledge of ambivalence and the skill of living with this knowledge” (Bauman 1993 [1991], 174). He appears as a dedicated defender of ambivalence (as it has also been discussed in Chap. 4), claiming that wishing to abolish the essential ambiguity means abolishing a person in their unfathomable liberty of choice (Bauman 1993 [1991], 52). He reaches as far as viewing the dissolution of ambivalence and searching for “pure identities” as a

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totalitarian, or even racist, gesture. Bauman has a strong reason, yet again here we need to distinguish between the two situations Ukraine has been immersed in simultaneously: the rhetoric of anti-colonial resistance and the “mirroring” of the colonizer’s actions proper for it (Pavlyshyn 1992), if not on the battlefield, then in the discursive dehumanization, and the decolonial disentanglement that proclaims indifference to any neocolonial impacts of the present or the colonial influences of the past. Bauman’s vision of the end of ambivalence as the end of history is rooted in the idea of vertical linearity of history and ambivalence as a stable determinant: but what if history is made simultaneously in different places, what if there are numerous histories, and each place, where history is being made, brings in its own, unique identity? In such a vision of the world, where the intersections are fluid and situational, ambivalence as a constant has no place; therefore, its dissolution would be a natural rather than violent process. After all, the “end of history” has already been predicted as linked to the collapse of the Soviet leviathan (Fukuyama 1992), or even the “end of epistemology” (Adorno 2013 [1956]); yet the world continues and creates new history and new knowledge, using even more violent methods than those employed by the Soviet colonialism. If the end of history did not happen with the destruction of the Soviet Union, immersing Ukraine and other countries of the post-Soviet space into early postcolonial chaos, could the final collapse of the empire lead to decolonial release? Slavoj Žižek finds the characteristics of the Lacanian sublime in the example of the wreck of the Titanic, which he sees as a positive material object elevated to the status of the impossible “Thing” (Žižek 1989, 77). If applied to the decolonial context, one might say that the mere expectation of the wreck of the Titanic, and its catastrophe, such as the collapse of Russian colonialism, is uplifted to a decolonial sublime, not only for Ukraine but also for other countries that historically suffered from Russian expansionism. Tlostanova, who coined the term “decolonial sublime,” proposes that first and foremost it is grounded in delinking from global coloniality while preserving it as an image, a metaphor. The decolonial version of sublime de-automatizes our perceptions and pushes us toward agency, making a final connection between the rational and the emotional (Tlostanova 2018, 32). Žižek’s sublime object is contradictory because it implies its presumed indestructibility, which is hidden from the eyesight, or at best “half-seen,” and yet it records the grand event of its destruction (Žižek 1989, 5, 192). The unreachability of the sublime rests on the illusion created by it:

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approaching it deprives it of its grandeur (Žižek 1989, 192). The expectation of this collapse, and the eventual realization of decolonization, can be seen as a decolonial sublime that is rooted in the wound of colonization and its healing, yet it cannot be described until the event has happened— and it is impossible to say whether the wreck of the colonial regime is occurring now. The traumatic and straightforward reflections, therefore, form a kind of apocalyptic expectation of the final decolonial release, and the focus on ruin, shifting from constituting victimization and objectification to the reclaiming of agency through defiance of the evil, is one of the symptoms of such desire. This desire for decolonization is driven by a sense of apocalyptic expectation, as the final release from colonialism is seen as a momentous event that will transform society and usher in a new era of freedom and justice. The decolonial sublime, therefore, is not only a response to the trauma of colonization but also a proactive vision for the future. This reconnection between rational and emotional spheres that was disrupted by the malignant interaction of ambicolonial affect and ambicolonial desire seems important for at least partly reversing the initial harm produced by the war aggression. The main premise of the current vision of decolonization is precisely the retrospective ambition of reversal of time, the achievement of the previously unachieved recognition, and the restructuring of the hierarchical model  of the past. This transformative inquiry into the past constitutes the ability to return to it after the present-­ looking decolonial situation has been settled and acknowledged. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood speak about a plural temporality of works of art, proposing that many works become an imitation of themselves, being placed in an ontological space that resists chronology and having a beyond-­ of-­time value. The anachronic value of objects can be responded to with attempts to reconstruct the past that was suppressed or taken away, giving new possibilities to the culture that could not unfold fully (Nagel and Wood 2010, 7). Decolonial personality and disentangled identity are not objects; however, they can be viewed as painstakingly crafted, ever-­ changing, kinetic works of art. In the context of decolonization, the retrospective ambition of reversal of time can allow for the recovery and recognition of the perspectives and experiences of those who were historically marginalized or excluded. This can involve a reevaluation of historical narratives, the recognition of previously silenced voices, and the creation of new forms of knowledge and understanding. The anachronic value of historical narratives, should we address them as yet another type of

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epistemes, can be the source of further disentanglement if we avoid the temptation to inscribe them into a new postcolonial condition, validating their recombination and reinvoking the traumas of the past. The dissolution of ambicoloniality is, therefore, the final yet unachievable aim of the decolonial release. The geographical borderline dividing and merging two states will always be there, and the threat to Ukrainian territory and people will persist while Russia’s imperial ambitions last. Restricted hybridization, in the case of Ukraine, necessitates overcoming the anti-colonial situation with its binary dichotomies and mirroring rhetorics, which does not seem possible while the war is ongoing. Learning to obtain strength in the epistemologies delinked from these double-sided entanglements—and to construct these epistemologies accordingly—is the principal challenge postwar Ukraine will face. The new knowledge production can be enabled by two processes or stages that are already in action, even if the war still lasts: that of syncretic polarization and that of internal hybridization.

7.3  Syncretic Polarization: Threats and Potentialities In the conditions of war-caused ruination, the essential task of syncretic polarization is to divide the ruin from the preserved—in other words, to define the final ruin and the ruin that can still be recovered and reconstructed. This pertains to tangible objects and intangible phenomena, processes, and experiences. Knowledge production is both threatened and fostered by this splitting. When the surrounding world lies in ruins, the only hope is regeneration through the incessant production of new knowledge. One such example of interpreting the new epistemology of violence as a compelling representation of wartime ruin in the aftermath of a disaster is the opera Gaia-24: Opera del Mondo  (2024) by the composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko, premiered by the Ukrainian company “Opera Aperta” (Fig. 7.2). Focusing on the disastrous consequences of the explosion of the Kakhovka Hydroelectrical Station in the Kherson region by the Russian army on June 6, 2023, the opera addresses the fragmentation brought about by the ruining impact of the resulting flooding on the vast territory and the nonreversible impact left on the landscape by the catastrophe. While referring to the previous opera Chornobyldorf: Archaeological Opera (2022), which focused on the apocalyptic aftermath of the Chornobyl

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Fig. 7.2  Illia Razumeiko and Roman Grygoriv, extract from the video for Gaia-24: Opera del Mondo, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists

catastrophe, Gaia-24 breaks with the ephemeral repercussions of the traumatic past and looks into the present, extracting the knowledge of tangible destruction from the history-in-the-making. The construction of the Kakhovka artificial water reservoir and the homonymous hydroelectric power station in the Kherson region in 1956 was aimed at providing water and energy to the southern parts of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, including the Crimean Peninsula, which had joined Ukraine two years earlier. The reservoir’s construction involved the destruction of more than a hundred villages, numerous historical sites, and cultural landmarks that had shaped the area’s history. This structure was just one of a series of major infrastructural developments across the territory of Ukraine in the Soviet period, which ensured irrigation and water supply for settler colonialists in Crimea. From the moment of its construction, the artificial reservoir came to represent uprootedness, displacement, and the destruction of cultural heritage under the pretext of modernization. The construction of the reservoir flooded six different sets of Cossack Sich fortifications dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These sites were symbolic of Ukrainians’ earlier attempts at anti-colonial resistance. They were destroyed along with the site that marked another aspect of Ukraine’s uneasy history of colonial conquest, the fourteenth-century capital of the Golden Horde’s Khan Mamai, in the town of Zamyk, which was located in the area of flooding. In addition to its irreversible destructive impact on the land and fertile soils and deforestation, the creation of the reservoir

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dramatically altered the ecological composition of the water, leading to extensive contamination and extinction of endemic fish species and devastating terrestrial fauna as the flood affected 47 national protected areas and biospheric reserves of national and international importance, such as the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve and Kinburn Spit Regional Landscape Park (Biedarieva 2024). Gaia-24 records the fragmentation brought about by the ruination and reflects on the “post-apocalyptic” visions of Russia’s neocolonialism as an infinitely more aggressive legacy of the Soviet colonial project. The syncretic polarization relies here on a distinction between the belief in the transforming impact of the Anthropocene shared by imperial and colonial Soviet worldview and the acceptance of the immanent belonging to the landscape, however modified it may be by the war. This division between two polarities relies upon the emerging belief in Ukraine’s regenerative capacity as a reflection of its rootedness in its natural resources and the ways of resistance as a territorial expression. This simultaneous acknowledgment of the historical plurality and the natural diversity of the landscape bears the scars of neocolonial aggression. The expulsion of the epistemology of violence here lies in the construction of an alternative knowledge—that of the possibility of reconstruction but also of immanence and regeneration. Comprised of classical and contemporary music pieces, featuring nudity and violent representations, but also scenes of collectivity and unity on the stage, the opera builds a new narrative upon fragments and rises from a ruin which it uses as a polyphonic setting for the construction of a livable reality after the catastrophe. Nudity in the opera, as in the work of Lysovenko, appears as symbolic of new life, the erasure of boundaries with the natural environment, and the rehumanization and reintegration of the living into the context of permanent and incessant development. These statements proposed by the opera resonate within the decolonial “bodyand geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006), which is embodied and intertwined with the resistance movement. The opera subverts and dismantles the ambicolonial affect and the ambicolonial jouissance through a construction of discourse that deprives desire of its destructive power, turning it instead into a regenerative impulse. The epistemology of violence changes to that of regeneration in this demolished ambicoloniality, as the catastrophe turns into a triumph of life over death; the reflected death drive and desire for power convert into the return of sensibility—similar to that sought in the decolonial aesthesis (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2015) The ways of resisting Russian

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polymorphous coloniality are in the embeddedness into the landscape, becoming one with it, despite any tragic transformations that this landscape experiences. The simultaneous detachment from the colonizer’s symbolic space (or multiplicity of spaces as borderlands, as discussed before), where the reenactment of violence through hybridity is possible, is the symbolic move toward a decolonial release. In his poem “When So Much is Taken Away” (2022), Serhiy Zhadan points out the intangible quality of ruination and loss and the ways of overcoming it through the acknowledgment of the presence of the epistemology of violence in every person’s life: When so much is taken away something is always given in return. Something useful, like the experience of sudden parting. Where else could you learn about how suddenly the thread can break, how suddenly the confused heart can stop? Pain. Pain and hope can return your lost sense of this world. (Zhadan 2023 [2022], 5)1

The return of sensation as the first step to reconstruction through comprehension of the ruin goes in line with the decolonial aesthesis. Tlostanova proposes that decolonial aesthesis “originates in the affective experience of those who have never been given a voice before and who also often have been (mis)-represented and appropriated” (Tlostanova 2018, 29). She discusses it as an effective “suppression of the geo-historical dimensions of affects,” turning instead to their delinked, sensible forms (Tlostanova 2018, 29). This capacity of feeling while being unaffected by colonialism is expressed in the incorporated, bodily resistance—to the trauma, but also to the hatred produced by this trauma. It is also expressed in language as one of the markers of corporeality as identity. The demolishing ambicoloniality changes the language from its discrete form that permits describing things as they are or were, either in 1  І щось обов’язково дається взамін, / коли відбирається так багато. / Щось надається, наче раптовий досвід прощання. / Адже звідки ти міг дізнатись про те, як обривається нитка, / і як зупиняється посеред часу розгублене серце? / Біль. / Біль і надія повертають тобі втрачене відчуття цього світу. Translated from Ukrainian  by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.

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their current status of ruins or in the past, to the projection of ways they ought to be, transforming the epistemology of violence into the epistemology of regeneration. In Russia, where war is the ultimate means for the preservation of dissolving ambicoloniality, artificial breaching of the filtering border, and keeping its profound adherence to the Ukrainian symbolic power, the decolonial release will come with the dissolution of affect and the acknowledgment of the internal, now-suppressed diversity and the necessity of decentralization and reestablishment of communication within Russia’s own territory. However, the first condition for this reconnection and plurality, utopian, given Russia’s current circumstances, is the removal of the current genocidal government which bases its rule on explicit terror. The restoration of heterogeneity is, therefore, seen as the restoration of power and agency, which does not need to resort to internal repression and neocolonial violence in order to maintain its status.

7.4   The Final Dissolution of Ambicoloniality? The desirability and simultaneous unreachability of the horizon of a decolonial release prompt an essential question of whether the final dissolution of ambicoloniality is similarly impossible, even if closely approachable. If the ambivalent split between “two Ukraines” (Riabchuk 2000, 2024) has been successfully overcome, not least because the political system that supported the rupture compromised itself, the affective entanglement between Ukraine and Russia, which spans centuries, is more difficult to resolve. The dissolution of ambicoloniality presupposes the reworking and reversal of the four standpoints of ambicoloniality: filtering, appropriation, affect, and transgression. While the filtering of Russian influences into Ukraine is resolved with Ukraine’s detachment from Russian informational and cultural spheres and the related disentanglement of knowledge, with the resulting limitation of Russian cultural impact in Ukraine, the fact that the vision of Ukraine in Russia has long existed within the alternative framing provided by Russia’s polymorphous propaganda makes filtering unnecessary for the further process of ambicolonial affection to proceed. The filtering, as a mechanism of diachronic colonization going both ways, has become irrelevant with the onset of the violent war that brought in other tools of impact. Russia’s affection, exaggerated to its current status by propaganda, is no longer directed to Ukraine as such, but to the “imaginary Ukraine” (similar to “imaginary Europe” or “imaginary Russia” as a

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symbolic colonizer) (Chakrabarty 2000). The demolition of the Russian ambicolonial entanglement fully rests on its neocolonial imaginarium and depends on the final demolition of the war machine that fuels it. This war machine incorporates Putin’s regime but also goes beyond its power—to the inverted historical paradigms, distorted historicism, and collective lack of agency within the hollow dominating state structure that characterizes Russian society today. The second strand of ambicoloniality, Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian culture, has been challenged on a symbolic level, with Ukraine reclaiming rights for the artistic and cultural production that it was denied for decades. However, the reversal of the physical appropriation of Ukrainian cultural and historical artifacts by Russia seems a more difficult task. An important step on this track was Ukraine’s victory in the legal case and the return of the Scythian treasures from Crimea that found shelter in the Netherlands, where they were originally on an exhibition tour, in 2014.2 However, only the Russian Museum of History and the State Hermitage Museum reportedly hold more than 100,000 archeological artifacts brought from Ukraine throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not counting the items looted during Russia’s war.3 Meanwhile, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg hold the invaluable frescoes of the Mykhailovsky Monastery in Kyiv, which was razed to the ground by the Soviets in 1936. The repatriation of cultural artifacts is an indispensable part of ambicolonial disentanglement, enabling the reterritorialization of historicized epistemology, turning it from a disputed source of ambivalence and historical trauma into a building block of decolonial knowledge, which draws a nonhierarchical connection between the past and the present. The third strand of ambicoloniality, affect, has been discussed with much attention in this book. Affect rationalizes jouissance in its death drive and colonial desire, converting them into violent actions with destructive impacts. The affective buildup of Russia’s war against Ukraine has been 2  “Scythian Gold Of Crimea Returns To Ukraine From The Netherlands After Court Decision,” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, November 23, 2023. Available online at: https://www.rferl.org/a/crimea-scythian-gold-returned-ukraine-dutch-courts-russia/32701639.html. 3  “The Stolen Treasures. The 110,000 Artifacts from Ukraine Found in Two Russian Museums,” Texty.org.ua, September 19, 2023. Available online at: https://texty.org. ua/d/2023/stolen_heritage/en/.

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accumulating for centuries. However, it was the polymorphous colonial rhetoric of contemporary Russia that gave it its murderous form. Dissolving this affect is a task of Ukrainian decolonization efforts in both their swift and slow forms. The full dismantling of it depends, however, on the disassembling of Russia’s affective necropolitics, led by the death drive and hybrid colonial desire. Perhaps the most vulnerable point of the process of disentanglement is Russia’s inability to become disaffected with Ukraine until Russia fully reinstates its agency and self-worth, eliminating the need to view itself through the eyes of the Other. The void of Russia’s symbolic power—which represents the void of political and collective agency— underpins this affect in the first place. The only event capable of filling this void would be a swift change, an epistemological turn rooted in resistance, that seeks not dissensus but a radical emancipatory break from the obsolete totalitarian regime. However, building strong momentum for collectivity and solidarity is an almost impossible task for a country as internally colonized and divided by numerous abyssal lines as Russia. The fourth strand of ambicoloniality, transgression, necessitates the restoration of state borders and the return of the status quo disrupted by the neocolonial war. Ukraine will reemerge from this war with more agency, defying the center–periphery model in both its Western and Eastern orientations. This will contribute to reshaping the region’s morphology of domination or fully dismantling it, along with the already-obsolete notion of the “post-Soviet space” that underpins this morphology. Michel Foucault highlighted the profound interdependence between limit and transgression. In asking, “Toward what is the transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward that limit and those elements it contains?” he concludes that it is impossible to draw a dichotomy between transgression and limit; instead, he describes their relationship as a “spiral” dynamic (Foucault 1977, 34–35). This vision of the recurrent logic of interaction within border transgressions brings forward diachronic colonization, wherein the synchronic neocolonial attempt of Russia in Ukraine is yet another spiral turn, albeit with a larger and more violent amplitude of impact. Repeated Russian transgression of the merging/dividing borderline reinforces the ambicoloniality channel, even as it is simultaneously directed against it. Disrupting this process requires the complete dismantling of the embedded necropolitical structure; without this, victories on the military frontline will be only temporary measures to contain the aggressor.

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Restoring agency by severing affective connections disrupts the ambicolonial channel and reduces the permeability of the ambicolonial filter. It also fosters the reterritorialization of this filter, defined geographically as a shared border, and restores its divisive function. Russia’s internal necropolitics is not limited to repression; it stifles the freedom to produce knowledge as the “soul” of society and undermines its capacity to exercise power; its external projection, in the meantime, triggers a call for action and solidarity. The dismantling of ambicoloniality would mean shifting the vectors of impact, both regionally and globally, and the withdrawal of Russia’s position as a “Militianer” (Prigov 1991 [1978]) overseeing East and West,  with a concurrent decline in its influence within the morphology of power.

7.5   Regeneration After the Ruin: Displacement Fostering Internal Hybridization This book has accepted that we are profoundly hybrid beings: being human inherently involves carrying a hybrid identity, oscillating between different cultural conventions, systems of beliefs, and ways of perceiving oneself in society. Moreover, being human in an increasingly globalized world necessitates not only binary (Self/Other) hybridity but also a profoundly multifaceted personality, sensitive to intersecting and intercommunicating cultural currents. Erasing hybridity, even if this hybridity causes profound pain, would entail resorting to centralization and highly questionable notions of “purity”—a point highlighted by Bauman in his detailed analysis of ambivalence and its indispensable role in a pluralist society (Bauman 1993, 154). A society striving toward decolonial disentanglement and pursuing liberation through decentralization, “unequal equality” (Skovoroda 1973 [1772]), collective action, and agonism driven by syncretic polarization relies more on dynamic development than societies in either stable growth or stagnation. The solution to the problem of healing the wound and breaking away from narratives filled with powerless desire for domination and following affective dynamics of possession lies in replacing exchange with exchange and hybridity with hybridity. The development of internal hybridity is a process that has already begun naturally in Ukraine. Displacement and dispossession provided the initial impetus for this process, while solidarity and collective resistance solidified its primary goal: that of amplifying the process of knowing through communication and acceptance of

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differences. Here, I agree with Gerasimov, who sees potential in what he calls a “new type” of hybridity when he proposes that “dynamic hybridity not only offers a practical political solution for a heterogeneous and multifaceted society, but also opens new horizons for European and North American societies, where the original promise of multiculturalism and affirmative action did not live up to the original high expectations” (Gerasimov 2014, 35). Further, I outline how the renewed hybridity, disentangled from colonial influences and fostered by the post-Maidan decolonial turn, may manifest in Ukrainian society and culture. Internal hybridization is an exchange that has been paradoxically fostered by war displacement and then by internal—and external—solidarity. The basis for internal hybridization is wartime dispossession and migrations, resulting in the further de-regionalization and decentralization of Ukrainian culture and an increase in the polyphony of voices, stories, and languages in which these stories are told. This hybrid dynamic merges the private and public spheres and relies on individual movement and the structural development of cultural institutions—from small-scale grassroots initiatives to nongovernmental institutions to public institutes. In tumultuous and horrifying 2022, Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov in his war diary pointed out particular optimism regarding the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war: Today, this abstract concept of a future “after the war” or “after victory,” as we prefer to say, inspires not only cultural figures, writers, and musicians but makes all Ukrainians speak about their plans. Ukrainian politicians are talking now about projects to restore the country destroyed by Russia. They can already state the specific amounts of money that will be needed for building materials. They are already counting on volunteers from many countries who may want to come and work on the reconstruction of Ukraine. Some European architects have suggested creating projects for the renewal of destroyed cities, such as Mariupol or Chernihiv. (Kurkov 2022, 01.05.2022, Par. 13)

Two years later, at the time of writing this book, Ukraine’s victory, the necessary condition for realizing such ambitious plans, has still not come. However, the conceptual vision of how and where these recovery processes should take place remains subject to recurrent discussions proposing modifications and amendments to the plans as the situation develops.

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What remains unchangeable is the sense of liberty and regeneration that has replaced the ambicolonial fixity and is gradually replacing the epistemology of violence as transitional knowledge, looking toward the future while acknowledging the loss. Ukrainian cultural institutions along with individual intellectuals and artists have been at the core of this process since its outset. Now, their role has changed to that of mediators of a new hybridity,  which connects identities rather than dividing them and goes beyond regional distinctions to reunify the previously fragmented parts of society. Internal displacement has provided decisive conditions for such an exchange and for overcoming postcolonial hybridity since 2014. Kateryna Zarembo describes the destiny of the Donetsk National University, which since the 1990s struggled to be named after one of its prominent alumni— dissident poet Vasyl Stus, who died in a Soviet prison in the Russian Perm Krai in 1985 (Zarembo 2022, 47–52). The figure of Stus can be considered an iconic example of syncretic polarization: as Zarembo points out, in the context of independent Ukraine he was viewed as a hero, whereas in the post-Soviet, postcolonial paradigm he was labeled “people’s enemy”— a notion remnant of the Soviet Gulag era.4 In 2014, following the occupation of Donetsk, the university was forced to relocate. Its new campus was moved to Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, the hometown of Stus. In 2016, the university was officially renamed after the poet—a radical act of expelling oppressive colonial epistemology and dismantling its hybrid subject, something inconceivable in pre-2014 Donetsk. Ironically, the consequences of the occupation facilitated the renaming of the university, as it was argued that renaming would clarify which institution was the legitimate one, given that the so-called Donetsk National University, which has no affiliation with the original one in exile, continues to operate in the illegitimate “Donetsk People’s Republic” (Zarembo 2022, 47–52). The name change was a not only a powerful symbolic break with the imitator institution but also with the ambivalent environment that hinders change and seeks to preserve the oppressive colonial status quo. Yet the agency of the Donbas exited this buffer zone of uncertainty when numerous cultural producers, filmmakers, artists, writers, and intellectuals were forced to flee 4  The Gulag was dismantled in 1960, yet its practices continued until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The most prominent examples of political prisoners beyond the Gulag were film director Sergei Parajanov, who was imprisoned in 1973, and poet Vasyl Stus, who was imprisoned in 1980.

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and settled in different regions of Ukraine. There, they advocated for the visibility of the region and worked to restore epistemic justice, for years overshadowed by both Russian colonial impact and the region’s internal isolation. This reterritorialization, reconstruction, and reinterpretation of one place within another took decentralized and diverse forms. In 2017, filmmaker Piotr Armianovski created a short film Me and Mariupol, in which he attempted to reconstruct his hometown, Donetsk, occupied by Russia, in the scenery of then relatively peaceful Mariupol, yet where the explosions from the frontline were heard every day. The projection of one location onto another is reflected in the filmmaker’s nostalgic narration, where he compares the two cities through his attachment to the past, talks to its people, and shows the dystopian and marginal realities and post-Soviet distortions of the city’s peripheral position, as well as its inner beauty and freedom, visible to the artist through the lens of nostalgia. “The sea [in Mariupol] reminds me of the vast steppe outside Donetsk,” says Armianovski as he slowly submerges into the dark, muddy waters of the Azov Sea5 (Armianovski 2017, 00:09:15). The relocation of memory to locations that actualize it through similarities and nostalgia is an essential part of exchanging affective elements of knowledge that unite and support. This affection, as rootedness in place, grows stronger than any ambicolonial affect and becomes a powerful means of overcoming it. The reconstruction of one’s past in new conditions is an essential part of decentering knowledge while maintaining attachment to a past that has been  irreversibly lost. Both  the Mariupol seashore and Donetsk steppes are now occupied and carry an even stronger sense of loss due to the extensive ruination and deaths that occurred there. Ukrainian institutions seek to preserve this affective connection. The Crimean House in Kyiv became an outpost of Crimean Tatar culture after many inhabitants of Crimea were forced to flee the peninsula due to repressions. Created in 2014, as the first official cultural representation of Crimean Tatars in mainland Ukraine, the Crimean House has provided support to filmmakers, writers, theater directors, and artists, among others, who left the peninsula. In 2018, the organization supported a performance Grass Breaks Through Soil directed by Halyna Dzhykayeva, which 5  Сейчас море напоминает мне широкую степь недалеко от Донецка. Translation from Russian is mine.

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was dedicated to the repressions and tortures in occupied Crimea. The performance referred to the relevant reports of Amnesty International and the human rights defense organization CrimeaSOS, as well as featured contemporary Crimean Tatar poetry and music. The performance setting used a particular type of stone, shell rock, which performers used as props for interaction. In Ukraine, this stone is found mainly in Crimea, and it was used as accessible building materials after members of the Crimean Tatar community began returning from deportation  in the 1990s. This stone, therefore, symbolizes double displacement:  the initial loss of a home due to Soviet repression and its subsequent loss because of the Russian occupation. This double displacement fostered a particular affection toward Crimean territory among Crimean Tatars, who call it “sacred” because they “have no other Motherland” (Aliev 2019, 219). The second deterritorialization and displacement to other Ukrainian regions, however, prompted further Crimean Tatar integration into Ukrainian society and increased their visibility in culture, politics, and social spheres, thereby following the logic of integration and disintegration as interconnected processes proposed by Snyder (Snyder 2015). Integration and disintegration, if applied locally, mark the dynamics of reestablishing epistemic justice, if not on the territory currently occupied by Russia, then in both the history and present of Ukrainian society.

7.6  Internal Hybridity as Circulation of Knowledge Internal hybridity manifests as the circulation and exchange of knowledge, along with the simultaneous process of substituting the epistemes expelled in the process of syncretic polarization. In this way, the modification of the fusion from its colonial form is ensured. This process has a temporal dimension, and under peaceful conditions of slow decolonization, it becomes diachronic. However, war aggression fosters its synchronicity through displacement, de/reintegration, and de/reterritorialization. The circulation of knowledge is rooted in collective solidarities and is largely fostered by institutional networks and private collective initiatives. It relies on the decentralization and transformation of institutions that form the foundation for both wartime resilience and decolonial change.

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The emergence of volunteer groups that aim to support wartime resistance to the Russian invasion and minimize the negative impact of aggression is one example of supportive networks that directly address the epistemology of violence, transforming it into an epistemology of regeneration by accumulating societal knowledge of survival and resilience in a time of crisis. Volunteer organizations and initiatives, as a direct legacy of Euromaidan’s decolonial turn to agency, foster a profound connection between the frontline, zones affected by Russia’s violence, and the relatively safe locations that provide shelter and support. The inclusive quality of such initiatives reestablishes and expands the sense of community. Artist Olia Mykhailiuk worked as a volunteer in the town of Irpin after its release from the Russian invasion in the spring of 2022. Beyond providing humanitarian aid to numerous inhabitants of the town whose houses were destroyed, she initiated a volunteer project to help replant damaged and burnt gardens. In Ukraine, many people, especially those who have retired, depend on the crops that they grow in the land lots near their houses, and it is for them both an essential part of culture and a necessary means of living. She explored the collective power in fostering regeneration, exchange, and re-empowerment for those affected by violence. In her documentary film Irpin: Chronicles of Revival (2023), Mykhailiuk looks at the revival of the city following the destruction and numerous deaths, making parallels between reconstruction and natural regeneration. The inhabitants of Irpin speak on camera about their gardens, show the plants they take care of, and share their losses of relatives and friends that occurred because of the Russian aggression. For example, in the episode “Pani Tania,” the interviewee begins her narration by sharing her memories of the forest that surrounded the town in the past and further talks about her garden from which she lives. At some moment in her monologue, she tells about her grandson Dima, who died from shelling and was buried in her garden for several weeks during the Russian occupation of the area (Mykhailiuk 2023, 00:25:00–00:25:30). The story continues with her proudly giving a detailed tour of the vegetables and flowers growing in the same garden. The trauma of the loss interweaves with the hope of revival that her garden gave to her. Internal hybridity is formed by the circulation of such knowledge, deeply rooted in loss, yet oriented at regeneration as a collective healing process. Book publishing also plays an important role in the symbolic regenerative reconnection, overcoming regionalism and war-caused fragmentation. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the book industry has

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been under pointed attack by Russia. On February 23, 2024, the major printing facility in Kharkiv, “Factor-Druk,” was destroyed by bombardment, leaving 7 dead and 16 injured, and hundreds of thousands of books burnt. The printing facility accounted for nearly 40 percent of book production in Ukraine, working with dozens of publishers.6 This is not the first time a typography has been burnt in eastern Ukraine, showing, as in the case of the museum house of Skovoroda and several other destroyed Ukrainian museums and archives, the importance of preservation of knowledge, also understood by the colonizer who aims at its destruction. Paradoxically, despite the destruction of resources and economic decline, book publishing in Ukraine has been steadily functioning since 2022, due to the need to reflect upon changing reality and exchange knowledge.7 Book publishing fosters internal hybridity and enables the translation processes to occur within the collaboration limits. It challenges the established ambicolonial perspective  by  expanding narratives, stories, and histories that enter the field of mass circulation. This provides an example of internal hybridity that, despite traumatic circumstances, synthesizes new, constructive fusions. The Crimean House holds the annual literary contest The Crimean Figs, which examplifies these new hybrid dynamics. The winning entries—prose, poetry, and translations—are published as an eponymous volume that gives an in-­ depth view of Crimean Tatar literature and culture  (Aliev and Levkova 2019). While fostering an intensive dialogue between Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar language speakers, the volume has certain zones of untranslatability. The absence of translation of several texts between Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian signifies an incomplete merging of cultures, a rupture in hybridity, and a still-present lack of exchange, which results in absent subjects of knowledge (although not in a colonial sense) as an acceptable solution supported by both sides. It is a sign of solidarity and equality but also it marks particular omissions in the narrative. This case demonstrates a need for further internal hybridization as opposed to postcolonial hybridity. 6  Dominic Culverwell, “What Will Russia’s Attack on Kharkiv Printing House Mean for Ukraine’s Publishing Industry?,” Kyiv Independent, May 28, 2024. Available online at: https://kyivindependent.com/russias-attack-on-kharkiv-printing-house-puts-publishingindustry-at-risk/. 7  “Ukraine’s Book Business during War: Ukrainians Want to Read Their Own, but Russia May Enter the Market Again,” Rubryka, October 26, 2023. Available online at: https:// rubryka.com/en/article/knyzhkovyj-biznes-v-ukrayini/.

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Internal hybridity is rooted in collaboration, yet the “incomplete” essence of every hybridity requires further impulses for productive development and the filling of ruptures in identity with new knowledge. To discuss these gaps in translation, I return to Mouffe’s vision of agonism as an expression of democratic pluralism in institutional development (Mouffe 2013). This can be seen as one aspect of the proposed model of internal hybridization, where differences are not suppressed, dialogue might turn polemic, and the dialectics of the last postcolonial durée has been overcome. Here, the existence of Ukrainian postrevolutionary and wartime solidarity prompts an important question: How long can such intensive solidarity based on swift decolonization last? The agonistic development alongside collaborative exchange works as a protective mechanism, where a certain degree of untranslatability and what Mouffe calls “conflictual consensus” would provide stability of exchange and guarantee diversity in development (Mouffe 2013, 8). Such an agonistic approach repeats the logic of postcolonial hybridity, with pronounced space between the Self and the Other, the colonizer and colonized. Yet in internal hybridity this space is one of consolidation, a buffer that prevents the re-­ regionalization of the 1990s model while protecting the system from full confluence and the erasure of local identities. Diversity inevitably creates tensions through the enunciation of differences. This agonistic stance can build the basis for new ways of exchange, building on what Maria Sonevytsky has argued: “agonistic democracy” was present in Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and contributed to Ukrainian society’s continuous definition of “what Ukraine was, is, and will be in the future” (Sonevytsky 2022, 28). The future that has arrived has provided new decolonial understandings within the epistemology of violence and, subsequently, the developing epistemology of regeneration. Agonistic dynamics largely rely on the circulation of knowledge: expressed in both in switching and perplexing linguistic channels, as well as in the recording and reflection of history-in-the-making. The circulation of knowledge within restored agency and beyond the dissolving ambicolonial field is essential for producing new unities. These are not based on outdated notions of ethnic and political identities but on a vision of fluid and adaptable exchange that incorporates diverse elements and creates a new syncretic formation. This formation complies with the new epistemology while mitigating possible tensions through either establishing collaborative limits or bringing in agonistic dynamics. This includes maintaining the new hybrid subject of desire that, in the case of the disentangled epistemology,  is the desire for equality, liberty

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(including creativity), and the rule of law. The polyphony of languages spoken in this internal hybridization process is essential for dynamic exchange and symbolic interconnection. The collective epistemological production maintains the multiple crossing lines of hybridity, which become unifying  rather than dividing, forming a new pluralist collectivity.

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CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

This book was born out of a necessity to deal with trauma—a personal trauma of estrangement from the homeland because of the unjust war ravaging it; a collective trauma of witnessing previously unimaginable atrocities and the deaths of those near and far alike; and a historical trauma of colonial belonging and invisibility, of the denial of agency, and of the lack of presence and subjectivity. This book will not resolve these traumas, nor will it ease the pain of loss and destruction. However, I hope that as an action of resistance, as an attempt to reclaim the long-sought agency of the Ukrainian subject, lost for centuries in the ambicolonial entanglement and consumed by colonial desire, it will restore justice in at least one important field: the theory that has overlooked Ukraine for far too long. The main preoccupations and concerns of current theory from Ukraine are profoundly philosophical, as they aim, first of all, to establish a new epistemology—and to understand what this new knowledge is and what it means for the forthcoming generations. This war will be over, sooner or later, but, for Ukraine, the main result of this war would be the achievement of agency, which the heartfelt collective resistance to the invasion has already brought. Its price is the blood of hundreds of thousands, tears of children losing their parents and parents losing their children, homes in rubble, suffering and grief, shouts of the survivors permeating the air— but not fear. Fear has no place where determination has planted its seeds.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0_8

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Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance has deprived the domain of ambicoloniality of its habitual terrain of fear. Ukrainian decolonial turn has further dismantled the affect as the basis of ambicolonial reenactment. On the soil of undecidability, it has reestablished the primary goal once sought by the long-perished generations of Ukrainian intellectuals of the past, those destroyed by the totalitarian hand of the Russian empire and the Soviet post-empire. This goal is the pursuit of agency with its capacity to give a voice and visibility to those who long suffered forced silence and imposed obliteration. The concept of ambicoloniality that I introduced in this book reveals the inherent strength of Ukrainian culture and society, while also connoting its historical tragedy. The profound hybridity of Ukraine’s and Russia’s situations has created a condition ruled by colonial affect and the colonizer’s desire for possession, which is, at the same time, the desire for appropriation and belonging. The capacity for affecting and being affected in the “borderless” war led by the neighbor’s jouissance is outstanding, and the resulting neocolonial aggression exceeds the limits set by any traditional warfare. In a way, this book is also the outcome of an affect. The necessity of writing it to rationalize the feelings of resentment, sorrow, and disillusionment and to act upon them represents a type of affective dynamics. All of us—affected and affecting, carriers of hybridity, conduits of ambicoloniality—need a release. In this book, I introduced my vision of the reasons for the ambicolonial entanglement—and the respective ways to disentangle knowledge as the cornerstone for the regeneration of society and the restoration of epistemic justice, without causing further harm or losing essential elements of one’s identity and agency. “Syncretic polarization” was one of the most difficult terms to define, as the blending has gone so far for the centuries of domination that, as this book has shown, the extraction—or expulsion—of knowledge marked with colonial belonging and its replacement with disentangled epistemology has become a challenge, with an intrinsic risk of radicalization and the creation of false dichotomies. The process of syncretic polarization is ongoing across varied systems of beliefs and modes of representation and splits them according to their acceptability in the new, wartime world, where extreme colonial violence is present again and its epistemology has been formed. The process of internal hybridity in this proposed model aims at filling the void created by the extraction and expulsion of narratives and knowledges through syncretic polarization and balancing the

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polyphonic yet emancipated contexts. It is one way viewed as the solution to the centuries-long colonial belonging—and the symbolic colonial possession. The “splitting” of cultural proximity and subversion of the filtering quality of the ambicolonial frontier without affecting diversity is only possible if there is an alternative of an equal (or exceeding) transformative power. Overcoming polymorphous ambicoloniality of Russia is a complicated task, as we deal with an ever-changing subject that has a hundred faces borrowed from Russia’s own complex history and subaltern cultures that historically suffered from Russian colonialism. Fighting this colonial Hydra face-to-face is a nearly impossible task, yet its weakness lies in the void that sits deep inside the totalitarian militarized structure of its war machinery. This void may crumble under the weight of colonial desire overwhelming the power holders and the colonial affects that, guided by jouissance, turn from being weapons of war to weapons of self-destruction. In this process, Russia’s self-colonization turns into full-fledged ambicoloniality, where the suicidal state is driven by an affect incessantly produced by its war machine and risks collapsing because of the internalized and rationalized necessity of adherence and affiliation with its subject of hybrid colonial desire. In terms of anti-colonial resistance, it is essential to identify the main modes of impact and their main ambicolonial channels, to break the communication chain that enables Russia’s reconquest through violence and desire. This process has received in Ukraine the general name of “decolonization,” although it is rather a set of simultaneous heterogeneous actions aimed at disentanglement from the colonial impact in social, cultural, and political fields. Both swift and slow decolonization forms refer to the decolonial situation and postcolonial condition, respectively, and are associated with synchronic and diachronic forms of colonization—whether occurring in the present or the recent past. The “swift” decolonization ongoing in Ukraine is key to the expulsion of conflicting postcolonial epistemologies within the general field of hybridity; this includes the epistemology of defensive nationalism, of marginalization (as a rigid center–periphery colonial vision), and of historical trauma. The decolonial disentangled epistemology emerging in their place links the new disaffected knowledge of violence with a stance on regeneration, as a process that is marked by simultaneous recovery of agency and indifference to the colonial impacts. Such an approach dismantles the focus on the political and ethnic identities pursued by the postcolonial theory, detaches from the ambicolonial

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filtering function of the shared border, and disarms hybridity by turning it from its postcolonial form to an introspective internal hybridity, which marks the unity and exchange within a polylogue and mediates tensions through an agonistic lens. Such an approach, which has already been manifested in Ukraine’s institutional development, subverts the multivectorality sought by the neocolonial aggressor in the reproduction of the morphology of domination. It also grants an exit from the oppressive structure of global coloniality, as a turn to the local context and “horizontal” history-in-the-making (which currently undertakes a form of history-­ in-­ resistance). The internal hybridity effectively withdraws from an ambicolonial relationship and closes the ambicolonial channels of the intermittent signaling of domination and accountability. Affective entanglement in the conditions of violent war presents a particular threat, which leads to death and ruination. The end of the neocolonial aggression will manifest the end of Putin’s regime but not of the war machine that is intertwined with it; therefore, Ukrainian cycles of anti-­ colonial struggle and decolonial disentanglement may return cyclically. The decolonial release is a utopian construct, a mere horizon of possibility that marks the full dissolution of ambivalence; yet the full dismantling of fusion, a complete dehybridization is not only impossible but also profoundly harmful, as history is not reversible. The only claim that could be made toward it is the return of what has been appropriated and the recognition and transposition of its symbolic weight from the oppressor to the oppressed. The theory of ambicoloniality presented in this book works for the case when the shared border with the recurrent colonizer presents a filter of mutual influences and affections. It shifts attention from the question of identity to the question of agency as a standpoint value in the contemporary world, and simultaneously as the necessary condition for epistemic justice to be realized. The ambicolonial theory is the key to understanding the complex dynamics in the region, which is profoundly rooted in ambivalence. The ambicolonial perspective consciously avoids looking beyond the mutuality of colonial relationships, to discursively exit the multivectorality of power embedded in the morphology of domination. This theory considers that viewing contested sovereign territories as “in-between” spaces (e.g., as interimperial entities), even in a decolonial context, deprives them of agency as the cornerstone for the capacity for both state-building and epistemological production as interlinked processes. Ambicoloniality draws agency as life from its subjects, deeply impacting both sides engaged

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in the interaction. When a violent war is launched, it exhausts the more affectionate side of it; while the resilience and reservation of the other side produce the opposite effect: the one-sided dismantling of ambicoloniality as a process of recovery of agency. The opposite side, resting on the void of agency, imposes more and more aggressive actions in the hope of restoring the power hierarchy, yet the more the violence is ongoing, paradoxically, the more it shatters the foundations of ambicoloniality. The struggle for agency is not the same as the struggle for power, even if there are similarities between the two. Power relies on structure and hierarchy, while agency relies on collectivity and equality/diversity—in a way, it challenges hierarchies. The enunciation of agency, therefore, is a process of emancipation not only from the colonial impulses but also from the limitations holding down the democratic processes in a particular local context. It is a localized, nearly intimate process, even if the results of liberation are largely visible from the outside, going beyond the zone of ambicolonial entanglement. The epistemological production, as accumulation and creation of knowledge of history-in-the-making, is part of the pursuit of agency. In the case of Ukraine, the epistemology of violence that formed in the aftermath of the state violence against Euromaidan, and particularly the beginning of Russia’s cruel war, disrupted the order of life beyond the habitual postcolonial transformation and slow decolonization—and brought about the question of the close connection between personal and public spheres as sources of strength and decision-making in a decolonial change. The epistemology of violence that permits acknowledgment of the value of the losses and rehumanizes individual victims of the war, who died as a result of Russia’s atrocity, turns to the understanding of the value of individual resistance and, concurrently, of collective unity in the creation of new history that breaks with ubiquitous concept of identity and turns to empowerment through restoration of agency.

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Index1

A Absolute knowledge, 104, 117 Abyssal line, 15, 43, 74–76, 82–84, 87, 111, 138, 139, 153, 194, 205 Affect, 35, 36, 47, 75, 107, 112, 113, 119, 125, 143, 145–149, 151, 153, 154, 168, 177, 179, 181, 185, 191, 195, 196, 198, 201–205, 209, 218, 219 Affirmative humanities, 16 After the war, 24, 193, 207 Agency, 6, 8, 21–23, 27, 35, 37, 51, 53, 55, 58, 70, 71, 76, 99, 102, 103, 110, 111, 113, 116, 118–120, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 143–145, 148, 153, 165, 169–173, 178, 179, 184, 194, 197, 198, 203–205, 208, 211, 213, 217–221 Agonism, 177, 206, 213

Aksyonov, Vasily, 182 Albrecht, Monica, 28, 29 Aliev, Alim, 210, 212 Ambicolonial affection, 63, 71, 76, 112, 121n12, 153, 180, 203 Ambicolonial channel, 115, 177, 192, 219, 220 Ambicolonial desire, 90, 121, 140, 155, 177, 178, 198 Ambicolonial drive, 75, 76, 163–168 Ambicolonial elements, 75, 83 Ambicolonial filter, 154 Ambicoloniality, 4, 20, 21, 23, 24, 54, 63–94, 103, 104, 109, 114, 118, 120, 128, 142, 153, 165, 168, 172, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 184, 187, 191, 192, 194, 195, 199, 201–206, 218–221 Ambicolonial theory, 220

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025 S. Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-74077-0

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236 

INDEX

Ambiguous, 21, 31, 45, 68, 73, 100, 113, 145, 165, 180, 191 Ambivalence, 3, 16, 19, 21, 22, 40, 42, 45, 46, 51, 52, 56, 57, 68, 79, 80, 94, 97–104, 106, 113, 123, 149, 152, 164, 165, 172, 180–182, 184, 186, 196, 197, 204, 206, 220 Ambivalence, dissolution of, 52, 68, 103, 149, 196, 220 Anachronicity, 8, 145 Andrukhovych, Yuri, 51, 66, 163, 180 Annexation, 28, 169 Annus, Epp, 29, 170 Anti-colonialism, 4, 19, 27–58 Anti-colonial resistance, 19, 20, 22, 23, 32, 36–38, 42, 45, 47–49, 52, 57, 64, 65, 73, 86, 87, 107, 144, 148, 197, 200, 218, 219 Anti-colonial struggle, 2–4, 14, 15, 28, 45–53, 66, 73, 81, 220 Anti-imperialist, 6, 16, 29, 64, 65 Anti-Maidan, 105 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 54, 126, 146, 195 Appropriation, 16, 21, 43, 71, 72, 74, 88–94, 107, 111, 112, 119, 121, 124, 171, 176, 187, 196, 203, 204, 218 Archive, 2, 212 Arendt, Hannah, 33, 139–141, 169 Armianovski, Piotr, 169, 209 Aseyev, Stanislav, 44, 58 Atrocity, 2, 3, 8, 22, 23, 38, 44, 57, 82, 87, 136–138, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154–157, 159, 166, 172, 178, 193, 194, 217, 221 Authoritarian regime, 102 B Badiou, Alain, 102, 128, 172 Baltic countries, 29, 184

Bauman, Zygmunt, 103, 104, 118, 149, 196, 197, 206 Belorusets, Yevgenia, 52, 56–58, 157–159 Bhabha, Homi K., 10, 12, 36, 37, 40, 46, 53, 68, 100, 123, 182, 195 Bolotnaya Square, 113 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 72 Borderland, 54, 58, 126, 145, 195, 196, 202 Borderless war, 144, 152, 218 Borderline, 18, 23, 44, 53–58, 74, 77, 84, 115, 126, 146, 192, 194, 199, 205 Border thinking, 6, 45 Breadbasket, 29, 126, 165 Brodsky, Joseph, 75, 76, 91, 170 Bucha, 136, 137, 156, 157 Burliuk, David, 92, 93 Butler, Judith, 140, 150, 152, 179 C Capitalism, 12, 13 Center and periphery, 46 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 116, 119, 167, 204 Chekh, Artem, 153, 154 Chernetsky, Vitaly, 3, 11, 12, 14, 15, 34, 163 Chernov, Mstyslav, 154, 155 Civil society, 103, 112, 114, 116, 180 Cold War, 5, 6, 12, 30, 64, 78, 80 Colonial belonging, 1, 64, 82, 174, 217–219 Colonial difference, 18, 30, 32, 34, 140, 145 Colonial domination, 6, 9, 28, 37, 38, 42, 46, 72, 73, 82, 84, 87, 88, 117, 122, 125, 145 Colonial entanglement, 2, 8, 14, 28, 31, 36, 67, 122, 144, 149

INDEX 

Colonial expansion, 3, 11, 27, 79 Colonialism, 1–3, 5, 7–13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 27–29, 31, 36, 39, 42, 46, 47, 52, 53, 64, 65, 68, 69, 77, 83, 114, 117, 119, 173–177, 179, 182, 194, 197, 198, 202, 219 Coloniality of power, 6, 21 Colonial matrix of power, 9, 12, 30, 33, 53, 63, 69, 71, 76, 78, 80, 100, 169, 172, 192, 194 Colonial mimicry, 6, 31, 65, 83, 143, 172, 192 Colonial/postcolonial/decolonial, 9 Colonial relationship, 3, 13, 47, 63, 69, 74, 83, 220 Colonial war, 5, 31, 142, 180 Colonization, 10, 11, 13, 15, 42, 71–73, 81, 120, 124, 142, 168, 198, 203, 205, 219 Colony, 3, 4, 7, 8, 18, 27–30, 64, 70, 119 Constitutive injurability, 140 Contested history, 2, 14, 65, 73 Cossack, 39, 174 Crimea, 72, 128n13 Crimean Peninsula, 185, 187, 200 Crimean Tatars, 182–184, 209, 210, 212 Cultural appropriation, 4, 15 Cultural hybridity, 27, 37, 40 Cultural legacy, 21, 43–45, 74, 109, 121 Cultural processes, 9, 14, 54 Cultural proximity, 47, 48, 51, 83, 88, 128, 129, 145, 148, 174, 196, 219 D Decolonial, 1–6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19–24, 28, 30–32, 36, 40, 41,

237

43–49, 51–54, 57, 58, 65, 68–70, 77, 81, 82, 87, 99, 104, 107, 108, 110–113, 115–120, 123, 124, 126, 130, 147, 149, 153, 157, 159, 170, 177, 180, 186, 192–199, 204, 206, 210, 213, 219–221 aesthesis, 6, 201, 202 processes, 2, 14, 19, 22–24, 28, 37–38, 42, 45, 47–53, 64, 68, 73, 87, 99, 106, 117, 120, 129, 130, 152 release, 4, 5, 9, 16, 19, 32, 34, 46, 51, 82, 88, 104, 111, 116, 120, 138, 151, 153, 165, 181, 194–199, 202, 203, 220 sublime, 197, 198 theory, 1, 4–6, 10, 12, 18, 23, 103, 110, 130, 196 turn, 18, 22, 103, 111, 114, 120, 130, 138, 149, 152, 165, 207, 211, 218 Decoloniality, 37, 47, 57, 69, 107, 135, 194, 196 Decolonization, 2, 14–17, 19, 38, 46, 48, 52, 73, 77, 84, 106, 124, 139, 159, 176, 181, 198, 205, 210, 213, 219, 221 Defensive nationalism, 107, 108, 114, 115, 117, 123, 219 Deleuze, Gilles, 143, 144, 146, 147, 166, 168, 169, 172, 180, 193 Derrida, Jacques, 53, 100 Desire, 3, 23, 31–33, 35, 38, 64, 65, 71, 76, 80, 81, 90, 103, 107, 113, 118, 121, 140, 142, 145, 155, 163–187, 196, 198, 201, 204–206, 213, 217–219 Diachronic colonization, 71–73, 168, 203, 205

238 

INDEX

Dichotomy, 11, 24, 65, 69, 78, 83, 84, 100, 149, 166, 171, 177, 194, 199, 205, 218 Disassociation, 113 Dispossession, 140, 142, 151, 152, 155, 178, 181, 206, 207 Dissensus, 113, 115 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 173 Domańska, Ewa, 16 Donbas, 36, 42, 53–58, 72, 83, 85, 137, 153, 164, 208 Donetsk, 2, 44, 50, 54–56, 58, 90, 99, 124, 135–137, 169, 208, 209 Donetsk People’s Republic, 58 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 30, 31 Double consciousness, 10, 20, 27–32, 64, 70, 76, 81, 176 Durée, 99, 107, 113, 118, 213 E Empty signifier, 80, 82 End of history, 149, 197 Epistemic injustice, 1, 191 Epistemic violence, 7, 15, 43, 173 Epistemological delinking, 23, 120 Epistemological production, 6, 14, 15, 19, 36, 37, 100, 129, 214, 220, 221 Epistemology, 5, 6, 10, 11, 15–19, 24, 33, 34, 36, 45, 46, 49, 52, 74, 76, 87, 94, 99, 100, 105, 107, 109–116, 119, 120, 123, 124, 135, 138, 148–159, 166, 177–181, 191–193, 195, 199, 204, 208, 213, 217–219 of powerlessness, 33, 34, 142 of regeneration, 181, 203, 211, 213 of violence, 23, 33, 66, 135–138, 142, 147, 149–154, 173, 177–179, 181, 183, 187, 199, 201–203, 208, 211, 213, 221

Etkind, Alexander, 11, 167, 170, 171 Eurasia, 10, 77, 79, 80 Eurocentricity, 109, 115–120 Euromaidan Revolution, 22, 50, 51, 99, 103, 106–108, 112, 113, 119, 123, 124, 135, 149, 163, 180 Europe, 30, 36, 77, 78, 91, 103, 115–119, 126, 171 Expansive nationalism, 107, 122 Expulsion of epistemologies, 120–124, 201 External colonization, 10, 11, 28 F Fanon, Frantz, 14, 17, 31, 42, 105, 106, 148 Filtering, 4, 18, 21, 53, 54, 56, 71, 74, 77, 78, 82, 84, 121, 123, 192, 203, 219, 220 First World, 12 Fold and unfold, 47, 56, 71, 76, 81, 108, 193 Foreclosure of affect, 172, 173, 177 Foucault, Michel, 205 Fragmentation, 15, 110, 122, 126, 127, 144, 149–152, 192, 199, 201, 211 Fricker, Miranda, 102 Full-scale invasion, 2, 3, 6, 14, 15, 21, 22, 28, 33, 40, 50, 51, 57, 69, 74, 86, 99, 103, 124, 136, 137, 143, 153, 169, 178, 183, 211 G Gandhi, Leela, 163, 165, 166 Gandhi, Mahatma, 111, 139 García Canclini, Néstor, 37, 38, 118, 196

INDEX 

Geo- and body politics of knowledge, 6 Geographical proximity, 4, 72 Gerasimov, Ilya, 100, 101, 111, 207 Global North, 9, 10, 15 Global South, 5, 7–10, 15, 100, 146 Groys, Boris, 34, 43 Gruzinski, Serge, 38 Grygoriv, Roman, 149, 199, 200 Guattari, Félix, 143, 144, 146, 147, 166, 168, 169, 172, 180 Gumenyuk, Natalia, 182, 183 H Hagen, Mark von, 13, 79, 80 Harding, Luke, 180 Hegemony, 33, 35, 65 Historical memory, 3, 98, 120 Historical trauma, 3, 16, 52, 99, 109, 124, 148, 149, 185, 204, 219 History-in-making, 149 Hohol, Mykola, 42–45, 56, 175 Holodomor, 98 Horbachov, Dmytro, 91, 92 Horizontal art history, 130 Hrytsak, Yaroslav, 4, 5, 50 Hundorova, Tamara, 3, 4, 11, 13, 15, 17, 42, 43, 46, 56 Hybrid identities, 105, 118, 119, 130, 206 Hybridity, 2, 3, 7, 16, 19, 21, 22, 27, 31, 36–45, 48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 63, 68, 70, 72, 74, 77, 82–84, 87, 99, 100, 104, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 118, 123, 126, 129, 146–149, 165, 170, 182, 187, 194, 196, 202, 206–208, 218–220 Hybridization, 18, 37–39, 41, 43, 49, 68, 70, 100, 115, 118, 123, 146, 165, 174, 199, 206–210, 212–214

239

Hybrid space, 106, 123 Hybrid subject of desire, 163–168, 187, 196, 213 I Identity, 2, 11, 13, 21–24, 32, 35, 37, 40, 50, 54–56, 58, 77, 84, 85, 88, 97–130, 147–150, 152, 169, 171, 180, 185, 194–198, 202, 208, 213, 218–221 Identity power, 102, 115 Imperial differences, 4, 30, 32, 34, 142 Imperialism, 75, 76, 172 Injurability, 140, 142, 148, 179 Internal colonization, 11 Internal displacement, 136, 208 Internal hybridity, 2, 16, 24, 41, 42, 104, 177, 206, 210–214, 218, 220 Irpin, 136, 137, 157, 158, 211 Izolyatsia, 44, 58 J Jouissance, 23, 71, 73, 165–168, 177, 192, 201, 204, 218, 219 K Kabakov, Ilya, 43, 170, 171 Kadyrova, Zhanna, 86, 87, 185, 186 Kakhidze, Alevtina, 128, 129, 156, 157, 169 Kakhovka Hydroelectrical Station, 199 Kamennoy, Taras, 85 Kharkiv, 15, 85, 89, 104, 108, 136, 212 Kherson, 137, 138, 199, 200 Khokhly, 75, 76, 91 Khromeychuk, Olesya, 147, 149

240 

INDEX

Kiossev, Alexander, 20, 32–35, 70, 175 Knowledge, 10, 11, 17–19, 33, 34, 45–47, 49, 51, 52, 74, 75, 98, 99, 104, 109–113, 115, 117–120, 122, 123, 135, 138, 142, 147–149, 151–155, 157, 163, 177, 178, 181, 186, 192, 194–201, 203, 204, 206, 209–214, 217–219, 221 and power, 12, 28 production, 11, 38, 42, 45, 74, 82, 110, 111, 115, 117, 120, 149, 154, 176, 199 Kravchuk, Leonid, 29 Kuchma, Leonid, 48, 56, 97 Kuindzhi, Arkhyp, 89–91 Kulikovska, Maria, 128n13, 184, 185 Kurkov, Andrey, 207 Kyivan Rus, 19, 119, 121, 140 L Lacan, Jacques, 23, 71, 165–168 Laclau, Ernesto, 100, 110, 112 Latin America, 5, 12, 47, 69, 70 Liberal socialism, 108 Linguistic markers, 87 Location of culture, 14 Luhansk, 2, 54, 55, 99, 124, 135, 150, 169 Lysovenko, Kateryna, 194, 195, 201 M Maidan protests, 108, 165 Malevich, Kazimir, 43, 92 Marginalization, 56, 81, 123, 165, 219 Mariupol, 44, 45, 89–91, 90n7, 124, 136, 138, 154, 157, 180, 191, 207, 209

Massumi, Brian, 169, 172 Matsenko, Mykola, 163, 163n1, 164, 174 Mbembe, Achille, 68, 99, 113, 142, 143, 146, 152 Memory, 2, 17, 18, 51, 53, 64, 119, 120, 148, 151, 153, 155, 181, 185, 193, 209, 211 Methodology, 7, 14, 154 Metonymic gap, 88 Mignolo, Walter, 4, 6, 18, 30, 45, 70, 109, 110, 201 Mirror image, 12, 15 Modernity, 5, 15, 29, 38, 69, 70, 103, 110, 119, 165, 170, 171, 177 Modernity/Coloniality group, 69, 192 Morphology of domination, 63, 76, 80, 100, 107, 108, 122, 154, 172, 192, 194, 205, 220 Mouffe, Chantal, 100, 107, 108, 110, 112, 117, 177, 213 Movchan, Danylo, 140 Multipolarity, 6 Multivectoral model, 28 Mykhailiuk, Olia, 137, 186, 211 Mykhed, Oleksandr, 86, 153, 178, 179 N Nakonechna, Lada, 40, 41 Narrative, 2–4, 14, 16–19, 22, 23, 31, 34, 37, 41, 45, 47, 48, 52–54, 56, 64, 65, 67–69, 72, 73, 79, 82, 84, 88, 97, 98, 110, 121n12, 123–130, 141, 142, 147–149, 157, 170, 177, 179, 198, 201, 206, 212, 218 Necropolitics, 68, 142, 143, 145, 146, 152, 154, 176, 194, 205, 206 Necropower, 143, 145, 176

INDEX 

Neocolonial, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16, 20, 23, 28, 32, 36, 38, 45, 53, 57, 64, 65, 73, 76, 87, 90, 100, 108, 117, 118, 138–144, 157, 166, 169–171, 174, 176, 177, 180, 192, 193, 196, 197, 201, 203–205, 218, 220 Neocolonialism, 6, 7, 9, 73, 76, 144, 177, 193, 201 Neocolonial war, 7, 13, 19, 37, 71, 107, 122, 142, 205 New theory, 4, 6 Non-violent resistance, 139 Norman, Kristina, 128, 129 North–South divide, 7 O Occidentalism, 31 Occupation, 2, 27, 28, 35, 36, 50, 53, 54, 56–58, 99, 124, 126, 128n13, 137, 153, 156, 159, 169, 180, 182–184, 186, 187, 208, 210, 211 Oppressed knowledge, 10, 45, 74 Orange Revolution, 17, 22, 98, 108, 109, 119, 123 Orientalism, 13, 81 Othering, 29, 42, 49, 55, 56, 68, 83, 98, 110, 115, 145, 146, 170, 175 P Participatory democracy, 22, 99, 108, 123 Pavlyshyn, Marko, 4, 14, 15, 46, 197 Pelevin, Viktor, 81 Peripheral position, 33, 209 Piotrowski, Piotr, 130, 184 Plokhy, Serhii, 8, 9, 13, 29, 36, 39, 80, 84, 85, 115, 116, 121, 126, 145, 184

241

Pluralist democracy, 107 Polymorphism, 11, 65, 68, 80, 176 Polymorphous coloniality, 63–69, 121n12, 143, 144, 172, 192, 202 Polyphonic, 107, 111, 112, 117, 130, 201, 219 Portnov, Andrii, 48, 97, 98 Postcolonial, 1–8, 10–12, 14–17, 20–23, 28, 31, 38, 40, 41, 44–47, 49–51, 54, 56, 65, 68, 79, 80, 84, 87, 97–104, 109, 112–114, 118, 124, 130, 142–144, 146, 149, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171, 180, 182, 185, 186, 197, 208, 213, 219, 220 ambivalence, 19, 22, 40, 45, 46, 56, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106, 123, 181, 182 condition, 3, 9, 10, 12, 16, 19, 36, 38, 40, 42, 48, 50, 57, 73, 77, 82, 87, 98, 99, 108, 111, 113, 117, 124, 143, 145, 152, 170, 180, 199, 219 contemporary, 7, 9 hybridity, 2, 3, 16, 19, 24, 36, 37, 40–42, 45, 50, 56, 99, 104, 106, 109, 112, 123, 129, 196, 208, 212, 213 recombination, 2, 4, 18, 37, 43 theory, 1, 4, 5, 8, 12, 88, 115, 219 transformation, 2, 14, 28, 66, 73, 82, 84, 104, 107, 221 Postcolonialism, 4, 8, 14, 46, 47 Postmodernism, 163n1, 165, 166 Postnational democracy, 7 Post-socialist, 12, 50 Post-Soviet space, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12, 17, 27, 28, 56, 65, 68, 70, 79, 102, 109, 170, 197, 205 Power hierarchy, 20, 23, 30, 33, 46, 58, 64, 69, 76, 83, 129, 166, 167, 221

242 

INDEX

Powerlessness, 33, 34, 100, 139–142, 154, 155, 171, 193, 194 Propaganda, 2, 8, 10, 20–23, 31, 39, 40, 50–52, 64, 65, 68, 69, 77, 79, 81, 85, 119, 139, 144, 145, 166, 172, 179, 192, 196, 203 Q Quijano, Aníbal, 9, 69 R Rafeyenko, Volodymyr, 51 Ralko, Vlada, 66, 67, 124–126 Razumeiko, Illia, 149, 199, 200 Reconquest, 8, 73, 103, 117, 129, 168, 169, 176, 219 Reconstruction, 17, 23, 24, 80, 105, 106, 145, 163n1, 181, 184, 187, 191–214 Regeneration, 24, 138, 181, 192, 199, 201, 203, 206–211, 213, 218, 219 Reidentification, 17, 85, 102 Reterritorialization, 206 Revolution of Dignity, 110, 116, 126 Riabchuk, Mykola, 3, 98, 203 Roytburd, Oleksandr, 15, 126, 127 Russian colonialism, 1, 3, 5, 11, 13, 39, 68, 114, 119, 173, 174, 179, 197, 219 Russian culture, 3, 19, 35, 88, 166 Russian language, 40, 50–52, 58, 81, 83, 84, 98, 136, 179 Russianness, 140, 148 Russian society, 66, 97, 171, 172, 177, 204 Russian World, 115 Russia’s war against Ukraine, 8, 43, 99, 102, 142, 145, 204 Russophone, 51, 52, 82–88, 98, 180

S Schramm, Wilbur, 82 Second-rate empire, 20, 27–31, 33, 34, 78, 79, 140, 145 Second World, 12, 163 Self-colonization, 20, 22, 27–58, 70, 180, 187, 219 Self-destructive, 20, 76, 103, 139 Self/Other, 54, 175, 206 Settler colonialism, 18, 29, 182 Shkandrij, Myroslav, 3, 92, 107n5, 173, 174 Shore, Marci, 113, 116 Silencing, 2, 107, 153 Skovoroda, Hryhory, 104, 105, 108, 121–122n12, 206, 212 Skovorodynivka, 108 Slavic people, 35, 174 Slow decolonization, 124, 210, 219, 221 Snyder, Timothy, 13, 47, 103, 117, 118, 146, 171, 172 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, 35, 36, 121, 174 Sorokin, Vladimir, 166, 167 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 6, 10, 12, 15, 74, 111, 139 Soviet Union, 2, 5, 7, 12, 13, 17, 20, 29, 33, 46, 50, 51, 55, 65, 66, 72, 80, 109, 118, 164, 173, 174, 182, 197, 208n4, 213 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 27, 79, 80, 172, 176, 177 Status quo, 44, 68, 83, 87, 103, 113, 205, 208 Stiazhkina, Olena, 85 Subaltern, 7, 10, 11, 13–16, 28–30, 37, 42, 43, 46, 48, 49, 57, 71, 73, 74, 76, 80, 88, 91, 98, 103, 109, 118, 120, 123, 164, 166, 176, 191, 196, 219

INDEX 

Symbolic alignment, 35 Symbolic dispossession, 140 Symbolic dominance, 32 Synchronic colonization, 71, 73, 124, 168 Syncretic hybridization, 18 Syncretic polarization, 22, 38, 39, 47–53, 58, 73, 82, 87, 88, 100, 114, 117–124, 146–149, 177, 195, 199–203, 206, 208, 210, 218 Syncretism, 21, 38, 39, 47–49, 68, 70, 72, 73, 120, 148, 174, 182 T Theoretical framework, 4, 16 Third World, 7, 12, 13 Thompson, Ewa, 3, 4, 107 Thrift, Nigel, 168 Tistol, Oleh, 163, 163n1, 164, 174, 175, 186 Tlostanova, Madina, 3, 4, 10, 20, 29, 30, 32, 34, 45, 79, 109, 113, 140, 145, 194, 197, 201, 202 Transgression, 23, 74–77, 84, 102, 154, 165–168, 196, 203, 205 Transitional culture, 17–19 Trans-local solidarity, 7 Transmission, 82 Troitsky, Vlad, 44, 149 Two Ukraines, 98, 164, 203 U Ukraine and Russia, 3, 5, 7, 10, 21, 24, 29, 31, 39, 44, 67, 70, 74, 82, 83, 88, 118, 173, 174, 184, 203 Ukraine’s resilience, 1 Ukrainian culture, 2, 3, 14–16, 38, 54, 120, 151, 204, 207, 218 Ukrainian language, 49–51, 58, 74, 81, 85, 87, 180, 181

243

Ukrainian society, 1, 2, 16, 19, 22, 40, 49, 84, 85, 98, 103, 104, 110, 112, 124, 129, 135, 146, 149–152, 155, 156, 179, 183, 194, 207, 210, 213 Undecidability, 100, 102, 103, 218 Unequal equality, 104, 107, 129, 206 V Visibility, 9, 14–17, 48, 57, 58, 87, 88, 102, 107, 123, 130, 146, 209, 210, 218 Void, 16, 17, 41, 48, 49, 88, 100, 102, 112, 119, 128, 142, 145, 153, 171, 172, 177, 196, 205, 218, 219, 221 W War, 1–3, 5–11, 13, 16–20, 22–24, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 45–47, 49, 51–54, 56, 58, 65, 66, 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 79–81, 84, 85, 88, 90, 99, 102, 107, 109, 119, 122, 135–159, 166–171, 178–180, 183, 184, 192, 193, 196, 198, 199, 201, 203–205, 207, 210, 217–221 crime, 22, 23, 66, 82, 87, 137, 143, 154, 156 machine, 142, 146, 166, 179, 193, 204, 219, 220 violence, 68, 141, 152, 178 Wartime Ukraine, 4, 5, 19, 37, 47, 157 West, 9, 11, 12, 15, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 64, 77, 78, 81, 115, 123, 136, 206 West–East relationality, 28 Western-centricity, 65, 146, 194 Wynnyckyj, Mychailo, 99, 108, 115, 116

244 

INDEX

Y Yakimchuk, Lyuba, 150, 151 Yanukovych, Viktor, 16, 50, 81, 100, 106, 121, 122, 124, 128, 146, 165 Yushchenko, Viktor, 98

Z Zero-point epistemology, 17–19, 110, 195 Zhadan, Serhiy, 152, 153, 202 Žižek, Slavoj, 104, 114, 118, 197 Zvyagintseva, Anna, 101, 102