Battles for History. ‘Combats Pour l’histoire’ as the Elements of Russian Information Warfare. Ukrainian Case

Information warfare against Ukraine has deep roots in Russia’s imperial past and has started years before 2013. Manipulations with history became one of the less apparent manifestations and long-termed strategies. One of the key objectives is to prove that the Ukrainian state is fake and has no right to exist and has no historical legitimation. That is why we hear that Ukrainians were created by ‘Austro-Hungarian Headquarters’ or that ‘Crimea was just a present in 1954’. The other goal is to use a painful past to play on contradictions between the EU states. So, intentions to use anti-Semitism as a factor of discredit Poland and Ukraine and attempts to revise the history of WWII has become the elements of Putin’s New History Policy. In our paper, we will show the roots and patterns of Russian history policy in the early twenty-first century, and we will analyse the changes in it during the last few years.