Vojna na Ukrajine vo svetle sekuritizácie ruskej kultúry
War in Ukraine in the light of the Russian cultural securitization

Summary/Abstract: In the national security strategic documents, Russian Federation pays a great deal of attention to culture. The main aim of this “cultural turn” in the national security seems to be an attempt to establish a common “identity of the nations of Russian Federation” that share “traditional spiritual-moral and cultural-historical values”. Such an identity serves as a foundation of the Russian “cultural sovereignty” that makes the state sovereignty possible. For that reason, the cultural identity of Russia has to be protected. The threat to the cultural sovereignty is the threat to the state. These are official arguments for securitization of the Russian cultural identity that appear in the documents about national security. The present paper argues that the Russian Federation's officially stated reasons for invasion to Ukraine are based on such a logic. The paper employs the actantial model of A.-J. Greimas to explain how the Russian Federation sees its own role, the role of Ukraine and the West in the current events. Actantial model is applied in the analysis of Vladimir Putin's speech from 24th February 2022, in which he publicly informed about the invasion. The main significance of the paper is in revealing the process, by which the war is envisioned in the official Russian narrative as a conflict between Russia and the West.

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