Culture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State’s destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front. At their most extreme, wars are about eradicating a people’s cultural memory altogether, wiping them from the slate as if they had never been.
That Vladimir Putin should have prefaced his invasion with a speech falsely framing Ukraine as essentially Russian is on the one hand a spurious justification for invasion, and on the other an attempt to seize, simplify and own a complex historical narrative about the two intertwined but distinct nations.
