A man, cigarette jammed into his mouth, carries a land mine off a road. A woman teases a tank driver with threats of witchcraft. A coastguard responds to the threat of bombardment with the now infamous line “Russian warship, fuck off”. The people in these viral videos, as in many others that have emerged from Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s barbaric invasion, are doing the same three things: they are showing incredible courage in defending their homeland, they are speaking Russian, and they are swearing.
Taken separately, there is nothing surprising in these things. Of course people swear in wartime and the fact that many Ukrainians, especially in the east and south, speak Russian has long been a talking point for armchair experts. What underinformed Ukraine-watchers, with Vladimir Putin foremost among them, failed to anticipate is that speaking Russian in no way guarantees support for the Russian state. But the combination of these three things – resistance, Russian and expletives – and their prominence in the coverage of the war is itself significant. Obscenity might seem a trivial sidenote in such a horrific conflict, but understanding it is a way of understanding language, and language has played a big part both in Moscow’s professed motivations for this invasion and in Kyiv’s defiant response.
