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14 - Children’s Agency and Co-construction of Everyday Militarism(s): Representations and Realities of War in Ukrainian Children’s Art, 2014–2022
- Edited by J. Marshall Beier, McMaster University, Ontario, Helen Berents, Griffith University, Queensland
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- Book:
- Children, Childhoods, and Global Politics
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 09 November 2023, pp 193-209
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Summary
Introduction
The Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 stunned the world with its brutal, targeted violence against civilians. Systematic war crimes by the Russian military have not spared children, who featured prominently as objects of violence in global media coverage (Falk, 2022). As children have been killed, trafficked, wounded, and maimed, this vulnerable group also comprises significant portions of the worst refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) crisis in Europe since World War II (Vierlinger, 2022). While many analysts trace how Russia’s war against Ukraine is fundamentally changing the global geopolitical order, we note that this war is likewise profoundly shaping the youngest generation of Europe’s largest country in ways that are still unfolding.
However, as we explore in this chapter, children’s intersections and interactions with this war and its resultant militarism began nearly a decade ago. Although the current escalation has intensified the themes we explore in this chapter, we have elected to restrict our focus to 2014–2022 to explore how these latent realities shaped Ukrainian children and young adults today – including Ukraine’s youngest soldiers who were in elementary school when this war began. The current war began when the Russian Federation annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and sparked armed conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Under the pretext of a separatist conflict, the Russian government funnelled military, financial, and political support to proxy forces, leading to protracted conflict that received muted global attention (Dunn and Bobick, 2014; Galeotti, 2016; Government of the Netherlands, 2018; Marten, 2019; Hook, 2020; Troianovski, 2021).
Even before February 2022, the United Nations estimated that at least 14,000 lives had been lost, 1.6 million IDPs driven from their homes, and approximately 30,000 people wounded (International Crisis Group [ICG], 2022). In 2020, the United Nations Children’s Agency, UNICEF, estimated that the war had ‘deeply affected’ 580,000 children near the eastern frontlines and in areas controlled by Russia’s proxy forces, with 200,000 children requiring urgent psychosocial support, another 200,000 driven from their homes, and a fifth of conflict zone schools damaged by kinetic violence like shelling, causing widespread disruption of education (UNICEF, 2020).
Narrative Convergences and Clashes: German, Israeli, and Ukrainian Constellations of Holocaust Memory through Babi Yar Commemorations
- Edited by William C. Donahue, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Martha B. Helfer, Rutgers University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Nexus
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 21 March 2023, pp 79-100
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Summary
In 1941, more than one hundred thousand people were murdered by the German Wehrmacht (army), supported by some Ukrainian collaborators, including Ukrainian auxiliary policemen. With nearly thirty-four thousand Jews murdered, this event would constitute the largest single Nazi shooting of Jewish victims in the Soviet Union. Referencing these complex historical events, their contested legacy, and later attempts to commemorate them, this essay explains how German, Israeli, and Ukrainian state actors have engaged in Babi Yar memorialization practices as a way of interacting with the Holocaust legacy more broadly. The discussion is grounded in discourse analysis of the three nations’ presidents and their participation in the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Babi Yar events in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2016. These speeches illustrate a modern development in regional Holocaust memorialization discourse; namely, the way in which representative German, Israeli, and Ukrainian narratives clash while at the same time partially overlapping.
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1961More than fifty years have passed since Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko penned his poignant tribute to Babi Yar (alternatively spelled in Ukrainian Babyn Yar). At the time of his writing, this rumination was provocative for more than just its underlying accusation. Kyiv—site of the Nazi murder of some thirty-four thousand Jews—was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and still firmly embedded within the Soviet Union. Any discussion of Ukraine's largest mass gravesite was one of the many forbidden topics of the day. In the wake of the Babi Yar executions, Soviet leaders followed a familiar pattern of repression, scrubbing references to the singling out of Jews—who prior to the German occupation in June 1941 had comprised approximately 20 percent of Kyiv's population— in the official documentation of these events. When Yevtushenko was moved to write the above poem in 1961 after observing city officials dumping garbage into the ravine where victims’ remains were interred, Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev personally condemned his poem as historically erroneous and immature. This same year, however, marked yet another tragedy that would have lasting consequences for the legacy of Babi Yar: a burst dam claimed the lives of nearly one hundred fifty people and washed World War II–era human remains into Kyiv's residential areas.