Abstract
ABSTRACT This article discusses the representation of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, in Ukrainian official discourse, media, and mass culture. A new stage in the war with Russia that has been ongoing since 2014, the invasion prompted a search for a new political and cultural vocabulary. If the Ukrainian state at first tended to use familiar Soviet models, mass culture responded with powerful memes, slogans, and images that mobilized the public in defence of Ukraine. The Zelens′kyi administration soon recognized the importance of modern mass culture and switched to borrowing successful symbols from it. In some cases, state institutions put potentially popular materials on social media to see whether they would work well and then re-appropriated them once they entered popular culture. Ultimately, it has been the test of popular culture that has determined the success or failure of official rhetoric.
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