Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine: the cultural infrastructure of rule

Focusing on areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions occupied by Russia since 2014, this article examines occupation as a cultural infrastructure assembled through heraldry, monuments, popular music, cinema, education policy, school materials, and literature. It shows how these media share a repertoire that stages conquest as “reunification” and dependence as local sovereignty, recasting violence as anti-fascist defence and historical restoration. Flags and coats of arms perform sovereignty while tethering the “people’s republics” to Russia; monuments, songs, and films collapse war into Soviet memory of the Great Patriotic War; educational orders and curricula connect childhood socialization to patriotic ritual, military preparedness, restricted vocational horizons, and state-approved history; and literature moralizes occupation through sacrifice, ancestry, and sacred suffering. The article also traces the post-2022 absorption of separatist repertoires into a centralized imperial war culture. Drawing on theories of memory politics, restorative nostalgia, necropolitics, and colonial mimicry, it argues that rule operates less through persuasion than through saturation across everyday institutions. Analyzing production, circulation, and institutional design rather than presuming reception, the article concludes that this apparatus seeks to make empire appear familiar, morally necessary, and inevitable, even as its very repetitiveness reveals normalization to be coercive and incomplete.