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OAFabricating Victims and Perpetrators in Occupied Ukraine: Savur-Mohyla and the 1943-2014 Parallel
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1, mrt. 2026, p. 163 - 186
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- 01 mrt. 2026
Samenvatting
The memorial complex of Savur-Mohyla was constructed in 1963 to honour the Soviet soldiers who fell during the “Great Patriotic War.” In 2014, the hill became a contested site of memory between Ukraine and the selfproclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR). Since August of that year, pro-Russian authorities have controlled the site, casting the Ukrainian army as the “ultimate perpetrator” and portraying the “Russian people of Donbas” as the “absolute victims” resisting Kyiv’s so-called “fascist invasion.” This paper argues that the ontological categories of “absolute victim” and “ultimate perpetrator” were neither randomly constructed nor fabricated ex novo. Instead, the occupying authorities reconstructed the Savur-Mohyla memorial to draw a direct parallel between the events of 2014 and those of 1943, when the Red Army liberated Donbas from Nazi Germany. This research qualitatively analyses a corpus of 271 articles and speeches on Savur-Mohyla produced by DPR authorities between 2014 and 2022. The objective is to demonstrate how pro-Russian authorities in occupied Donetsk used the memory of the Great Patriotic War as the means for shaping the notions of “absolute victims” and “ultimate perpetrators.”