ABSTRACT
The concept “Russian World” (Russkiy mir) has been a staple of Russian foreign policy since 2007. There are two main interpretations of this notion: one of them stipulates affinity to Russian language and culture and the other is more focused on a geopolitical/civilizational narrative. Despite the seemingly solely cultural aims of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, its agenda is also to a large extent political and often exclusionary with its ethnodoxic understanding of Russianness. While Russian authorities try to pedal the religious commonalities between Russia and Ukraine, social network users do not seem to buy this argument. Data from the popular Russian social network VKontakte shows that Orthodoxy is not considered as a relevant factor in Russian-Ukrainian reconciliation. Moreover, while restrictions on religious freedom since the Pussy Riot trial point to the neoconservative turn of the Russian government, social network users see the geopolitical resurgence of Russian great power identity as more important than its religious aspect. Both types of rhetoric, however, consider Ukraine as a Russian satellite, whether for geopolitical or spiritual reasons. This chapter analyses the discrepancies between the governmental and grass-roots understandings of the Russian World in the context of the war in Ukraine using the posts from the Antimaidan group on the Russian social media website Vkontakte.
