Ambicoloniality and war: Ukraine’s symbolic battle

ambicoloniality and – From democratic theory’s limits to Russia’s attempt to rewrite Ukrainian heritage, recent cultural debate traces how war attacks not only bodies but historical memory. New books and essays—covering ambicoloniality, an “imagined Orient,” and posthumous prose—sh

On a day that should have belonged to ordinary life, Ukraine’s cultural critics keep returning to the same brutal question: what happens to a people when war moves beyond territory and into memory.

In Krytyka. political scientist Ivan Gomza and sociologist Volodymyr Shelukhin argue that democratic peace theory is too comfortable with its own neatness. Gomza dismantles the thesis that democracies do not fight one another. insisting that it is liberal democracies—embedded in norms of mutual respect and institutional constraint—that tend toward peace. not democracies as such. Shelukhin and Gomza also point to how war distorts democratic life in real time: civil liberties often erode under the pressure of constant military conflict. Yet they allow for a second. uncomfortable possibility—war can also accelerate democratisation. as seen with women’s enfranchisement after the First World War.

That tension sharpens when they turn to Ukraine’s present. Major indexes often rate Ukraine as an unconsolidated or hybrid democracy precisely because martial law has suspended elections. Gomza and Shelukhin call this a methodological absurdity. The picture they draw instead is of wartime Ukraine as a place where state institutions and civil society interact with “remarkable resilience.” Mobilisation of resources through horizontal networks. they argue. shows defence is no longer solely a state affair. What ultimately matters. Gomza concludes. is which actors shape the process; “Regimes do not degenerate alone; elites and citizens choose directions.”.

The same battlefield logic—who gets to define reality, who is forced to endure it—sits at the heart of Yana Prymachenko’s review of Svitlana Biedarieva’s 2025 book Ambicoloniality and War: The Russian-Ukrainian Case.

Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, Prymachenko writes, did not simply operate through conquest and then separation. It unfolded as a centuries-long, gradual absorption of Ukrainian lands that produced mutual symbolic dependence. The coloniser, Biedarieva argues, drew so deeply on the colonised culture that it could no longer distinguish interior from exterior. Moving beyond the binary of coloniser and colonised, Biedarieva’s concept of ambicoloniality names a process rather than a label.

Prymachenko places the book inside a long Ukrainian intellectual tradition that tried to name colonial asymmetry long before “ambicoloniality” became an academic keyword. From Vasyl Shakhrai’s 1918 critique of Bolshevik nationality policy to Ivan Dziuba’s dissident Marxism. the attempts to name the asymmetry were met with repression rather than argument. The outcome, as Prymachenko frames it, confirmed the colonial character of the relationship.

Biedarieva’s central move is psychoanalytic. Russia’s desire for Ukraine. she suggests. functions in a register that combines Eros and Thanatos: the compulsion to possess the object of desire shades into a compulsion to destroy it. “This structural ambivalence produces an affective logic of desire and violence. ” Prymachenko quotes from the book. and that logic culminates in attempts to appropriate Ukrainian historical and symbolic resources.

After the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Prymachenko says. Russia actively sought to appropriate Ukraine’s historical heritage by erasing Kyiv’s foundational role in Orthodox Slavic history. Moscow. she writes. weaponized the history of Crimea—where Prince Volodymyr was baptized—to claim a direct spiritual lineage from Byzantium. In the full-scale invasion. this escalated into what Achille Mbembe has referred to as “necropolitics”: systematic physical. social. and symbolic destruction aimed at dismantling Ukrainian subjecthood entirely.

Prymachenko also returns to a turning point closer to lived experience than doctrine. The Euromaidan, she writes, was a point of no return, shattering the communicative model on which ambicolonial relations depended. The review adds a specific accusation: Russian scholars have long deployed the concept of internal colonisation to dissolve the Holodomor into an all-Union famine. Biedarieva’s framework unmasks what this move leaves intact—a hierarchy between the imperial centre and the colonised periphery. even when the label suggests otherwise.

In the same cultural issue, another contribution—Mykola Riabchuk’s personal essay originally published in Japanese—tracks a different kind of colonial pressure: not the violence of the present invasion, but the ideological closures of Soviet life.

In the sealed Soviet society of the 1970s. Riabchuk writes of a “circle of cultural dissenters” who found in Asian literature and philosophy a resource that ideology could not colonise. Persian Sufi poetry. Japanese haiku. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: these became “our Bible. our Quran and our Short Course in Marxism–Leninism.” The essay’s point is stark. This “imagined Orient” filled an ontological gap—providing existential bearings that neither official communist ideology nor the state-controlled Orthodox Church could offer.

Then the essay pivots to 2024, when Riabchuk resided at Hokkaido University and discovered that imagination does not stay safely fictional. Ambulance sirens, he reports, sounded uncannily close to air-raid warnings. At a suburban train station. a stranger—unable to explain the route in words—ran ahead through tunnels and up stairwells to point out the correct platform. Riabchuk treats these small surprises as more than travel anecdotes. His method is curiosity: “I discovered all these wonders entirely by chance. being a specialist in neither cinema nor literature nor even history; what drove me was pure curiosity – a desire to understand this land and its people better.”.

The essay closes with a diplomatic argument that reads like a plea. Japan, Riabchuk notes, is Ukraine’s seventh-largest donor. The contribution is underreported in Ukrainian media because it carries no military component. Cultural diplomacy, he insists, must go both ways: a handful of Ukrainian books on Amazon Japan is not enough. Political emancipation must be accompanied by cultural and epistemological liberation. “Our ancient journeys to the East are acquiring unexpected forms and contents. Lets not stop.”.

And if Biedarieva’s ambicoloniality shows how domination tries to claim a people’s past, Vitalii Zhezhera’s editorial project shows what happens when that past is re-read through language—especially language that carries the traces of empire.

Zhezhera, editor-in-chief of theatre journal Ukrainskyi Teatr, takes up three posthumously published prose volumes by the late Ukrainian literary scholar, folklorist, and writer Stanislav Rosovetsky (1945—2002).

Among the books, the novel A Brutal Kyivan Romance stands out for its prophecy: written in 2012, two years before Euromaidan, it contains tanks on Pechersk and cruise missiles flying in from the East. But Zhezhera says the main interest lies in Rosovetsky’s language.

Rosovetsky was bilingual, grew up in a Russian-speaking environment, and trained in Russian philology. All three books. Zhezhera writes. carry “a significant residue of Russian lexical and syntactic interference.” The editorial decision is not to treat that residue as an artistic failure. Zhezhera reframes it as an assertion of creative identity. “It seems that Rosovetsky wrote his fiction rapidly. giving himself no time to search for the right words or turns of phrase: he used whatever was at hand and edited later. if he got round to it.”.

That process, Zhezhera argues, let Rosovetsky forget about the framework of philology and stay connected to the language environment of his youth. It is a return “drawing from a well of vernacular that lives in the soul.”

Taken together, these pieces point to a single, relentless through-line. War is not only an invasion of land; it is an attempt to fix what Ukrainians are allowed to remember. speak. and imagine. In the most pessimistic accounts. that pressure arrives through appropriation of historical heritage. through erasure of Kyiv’s role in Orthodox Slavic history. and through the weaponization of Crimea’s baptismal narrative. In the more stubborn accounts. it is resisted through resilience in wartime civil society. through cultural curiosity that refuses ideological containment. and through literature that turns linguistic hybridity into evidence of lived identity.

The details differ—martial law and suspended elections on one page. a “circle of cultural dissenters” seeking an Orient on another. posthumous prose volumes revisited through bilingual interference—but the stakes stay the same. Elites and citizens choose directions, Gomza says. In the cultural record Prymachenko reviews, Biedarieva names structural ambivalence that pushes desire toward violence. Riabchuk asks that “our ancient journeys to the East” not be interrupted. Zhezhera finds a vernacular well. Each. in its own register. pushes back against an empire that wants the inner and outer world to remain distinguishable only on its terms.

Review by Kseniya Kharchenko

Ukraine culture ambicoloniality Svitlana Biedarieva Krytyka Ivan Gomza Volodymyr Shelukhin Euromaidan Holodomor Crimea necropolitics Mykola Riabchuk Hokkaido University Ukrainskyi Teatr Stanislav Rosovetsky cultural diplomacy Japan Ukraine donor