The Technology of Communicative Resistance in Wartime: The Example of Ukraine in 2022

The war in Ukraine, which broke out in 2014 and entered the full-scale stage in 2022, has its own long history, mythology and symbolism. As we know, the presence of an external enemy brings people together and actively consolidates the masses, and this is exactly what is happening in Ukraine. Starting from February 2022, the Ukrainian state and the broad mass of Ukrainian people unequivocally chose a position of resistance to Russian invasion, Russian propaganda and manipulative communicative technologies that are happening in parallel with the physical war itself.

In a conflict situation, communication can be used by conflicting parties, if not for the purposes of diplomacy, then in order to increase their own power or reduce the power of the enemy. Watching the informal communicative space in Ukraine in 2022, we can discover a special element that has appeared and could be named the technology of communicative resistance. We analyse its nature and conclude that the main two factors – the development of institutions and networks of civil society actors, and the development of mass communication technologies in Ukraine – make it possible to effectively confront the enemy in communicative fields during the wartime.