Security Threats and Public Perception by Elizaveta Gaufman

Author:Elizaveta Gaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

President Putin’s name was used in the pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian contexts. This indicates that both sides perceive President Putin as a personification of the conflict. Pro-Ukrainian commentators drew parallels between Putin and Hitler while ascribing fascism to him—a technique that has long been tested in the Russian opposition discourse, where Putin is often called ‘Putler’ and the pro-Kremlin organizations, especially ‘Nashi’ (‘Ours’), ‘Young Guard of United Russia’, are frequently referred to as Putin-Jugend (Lurkmore 2014). Pro-Ukrainian commentators have also used the word ‘Rashism’ (conflation of ‘Russia’ and ‘fascism’) to emphasize the aggressive intentions of Russia. Another word that is often used by ‘militia men of Novorossia’ is karatel (punisher). This word is also borrowed from the Great Patriotic War vocabulary and was often used in combination with Schutzstaffel (‘SS’) in military reports and, later, to describe Nazi brutalities in occupied territories (Maksimov and Karyshev 1987). This usage creates additional discursive parallels with fascism.

The words ‘ukry’, ‘ukropy’, ‘ukropiteki’, ‘ukrofashisty’ are also quite frequently used by a number of pro-Russian bloggers, but because of the variance of the use of these terms it is difficult to see them on the word cloud visualization. These kinds of terms are often employed in anti-Maidan groups or in the military reports of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, as well as other anti-American/anti-Western VKontakte communities. A number of ‘epithets’ about the supporters of Euromaidan are related to the modification of the word ‘Maidan’ (‘maidanutye’—fucked in the head with Maidan; ‘maidauny’—conflation of Maidan and Down syndrome), or a modification of the word ‘svidomye’ (former Soviet nickname of Ukrainian Nationalists), which in blogs often turns into ‘svidomity’, an attempt to create an association with ‘sodomites’. A similar technique is used, for example, in Russian conservative circles, where the words ‘tolerasty’ or ‘liberast’ (conflation with the word ‘pederast’). Such linguistic constructions are linked through word formation and refer the reader not only to the sexual abnormality and lack of masculinity of the pro-Ukrainian ideologues, but to the inherent deviance of the Ukrainian ideology.

As noted by Yakovlev (Yakovlev 2014), pro-Russian commentators from Ukraine usually rally online in public groups on social networks (Vkontakte.​com [VK], Facebook) commonly referred to as ‘Anti-Maidan’, that is, indicating their non-alignment with the Euromaidan movement. Russians who support the separatists in the unrecognized republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are not necessarily united in ‘Anti-Maidan’ groups: a majority of the statements in favour of Russian military involvement in Ukraine and support for opolchency (pro-Russian militia) is expressed in right-wing/nationalist groups, anti-American groups, not to mention the page ‘Reports from the militia of New Russia’, which at the time of this writing, had more than 500,000 subscribers. Cartoons and posters related to the Ukrainian crisis, for the most part, play up the theme of World War II and Nazism and/or conspiracy discourse on the role of the USA in the organization of Euromaidan.

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