ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the assumption that within all the brutality and disregard for human life that characterized the war in Ukraine, within geostrategic and economic rationalities of warfare, was imbricated a project of belonging. It examines how a state-promoted project of belonging can be challenged, resisted and negotiated. The chapter explores the notions of spectacle and specter as ways to conceptualize the role of (in)visibility in politics of belonging in the context of war. It also identifies two specific sites of contestation: how the dominant narrative or "violent cartography" producing Ukraine as a legitimate target of violence was played upon by internet satire, and how the dominant spectacle of war, rendering some subjects hypervisible and others invisible, was contested by the exposure of photographs of graves of Russian soldiers who had died in Ukraine despite Russia's official non-involvement in the war.
