Anatomy of the conflict: transformation of Russo-Ukrainian relations in visual culture (1954-2025)

The purpose of the study is to trace the memorial transformation of the image of Ukrainian-Russian relations in the visual culture of Ukraine: from the Soviet "fraternal" narrative to the modern antagonistic discourse. Methodology. The study is based on an interdisciplinary approach, which includes cultural anthropology, memory studies and discourse analysis. The work uses a wide corpus of visual sources (sculpture, photography, cinema, posters, caricatures, memes, social media content) to analyze semantic shifts in the visual representation of Russia and Ukraine, as well as the specifics of their relations. The novelty lies in the comprehensive and long-term analysis of visual culture as the main field of the Ukrainian-Russian mnemonic struggle. Conclusions. The study confirms the transformation from the “fraternal” image to the “neighborhood” one in the 1990s–2000s and, ultimately, to the emergence of the “enemy” and “aggressor” metaphors in Ukraine after 2014 and 2022. Ukrainian media consistently attempted to form a powerful visual counternarrative, but this process was complicated by inherited conceptual paradigms and the absence of a visual template of the “enemy” from the Soviet era. In general, contemporary Russian memory politics, while reinforcing the Soviet metanarrative of “one people,” simultaneously aimed to construct Ukrainians as a marginalized “Other.”