Lina Klymenko

In International Relations (IR) scholarship, there is a body of literature that advances our understanding of how certain events that are deeply anchored in a society’s collective memory can be invoked by policymakers as an analogy to current events in their justification of foreign and security policy. By taking the example of Ukraine’s current resistance to Russia’s aggression, Lina Klymenko’s project investigates how the Ukrainian political leadership in Kyiv makes sense of the war by using specific language expressed through historical analogies. It is argued that the use of historical analogies should not be regarded as ‘decorative’ rhetorical devices, but rather as an embodiment of the political actors’ conceptual system. The exploration of political language of the Ukrainian policy makers helps to comprehend the Ukrainian standpoint in the war.