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War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine

From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. This landscape consists of tens of thousands of monuments, mostly in small towns and villages, commemorating the Second World War and other conflicts, including Ukraine’s resistance against Russia since 2014. The Russians have destroyed some of these memorials, renovated others, and built new monuments amid continued fighting. They also used war memorials in countless propaganda photos and videos aimed for a domestic audience and largely escaping Western attention. Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine, by Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk, explores these themes based on unique Ukrainian and Russian sources, including fieldwork in the occupied parts of Ukraine. It also conceptualizes the role of material heritage in territorial claims and introduces the concept of the “monumentscape” and a collective biography of monuments.

The book was published in 2025 by Central European University Press, now an imprint of Amsterdam University Press. It is available in open access thanks to the Austrian Science Fund FWF and can be downloaded for free from the following repositories: OAPEN, FWF E-Books, JStor, DeGruyter Brill, Academia.edu. The print version is available for purchase through Amsterdam University Press and all major booksellers.

This page collects our related scholarly publications, essays, interviews, and public talks in Ukrainian, English, German, and Russian.

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Interviews

Videos of our lectures and book discussions