Memory Laws in Russia and Ukraine

The report provides an overview of memory laws in Russia and Ukraine. The current Russia’s war against Ukraine highlights the mobilization of historical memory for a military conflict. Russian official rationale for full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was enshrined in the quasi-historical argumentation drawing from ‘historical memory’. In contrast, Ukrainians present the current warfare as a step in a continuous struggle against Russian imperialism. It is against this backdrop that the report analyses how politics of memory in both nations has nurtured distinct legal frameworks on memory governance codified in memory laws over time. It examines and explains several variations in law-making on historical memory between two countries: (a) the variation in the ideational profiles (content) of the memory legislation; (b) the variation in the punitive constellations of the memory legislation – that is in the intended ‘punitiveness’ of Russian and Ukrainian memory laws; (c) the variation in socio-legal consequences of punitive memory laws as measured vis-à-vis ECHR law, and in practice by national law enforcement and courts. Among findings of the report, the repressive and non-repressive character of laws, the differing mechanisms of law-making in Russia and Ukraine, respectively, are highlighted.