Actors, Actorness, and the Missing Bloc: Indian Media Narratives of Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage and the European Union

The article forms part of the transnational UKR-HER project on representation of Ukraine’s cultural and historical heritage in the Global South media. It analyses how leading Indian Englishlanguage newspapers, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, and The Telegraph portray Ukraine’s cultural and historical heritage in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. The article advances an innovative framework that integrates ontological security with media narrative analysis examining how media narratives both challenge and re-enforce India’s ontological security position that frames the war as either a European ‘problem’ or a proxy war between the West and Russia. The article suggests that cultural and historical heritage can be a profound marker of national agency and has implications for how the war is communicated to a foreign audience, in particular, the portrayals of Russia and Ukraine as two parties directly involved in the war, and the European Union as a key actor in the preservation of Ukraine’s cultural and historical heritage.