On Images and Objects of Russia’s War against Ukraine: An Introduction
By Miglė Bareikytė, Natasha Klimenko and Viktoriya Sereda
This text is an excerpt of the introduction to “Images and Objects of Russia’s War against Ukraine”, edited by Bareikytė, Klimenko and Sereda. In November 2025, the volume was published open-access in the series “Forum Transregionale Studien – Dossiers” at transcript publishing house. It is the second of three dossiers emerging from the research group “Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, Memory”.
“The war of images is perhaps one of the major events of the end of the twentieth century”, writes Serge Gruzinski in the introduction to his book, Images at War.[1] The same year the book was published, 2001, two planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. “Like no media event before, 9/11 became a shared point of reference for a global public, notwithstanding the different interpretations and positions it called forth”, reflected a panel discussion at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2011.[2]
And yet, beginning around this point (the late 2000s–early 2010s), with the proliferation of multiple social media platforms, developing in parallel with easy-to-use recording devices and increasing access to smartphones and the internet, most, if not all, major world events and conflicts have been documented and shared from a plurality of sources as they took place, creating the feeling of real-time and fragmented temporalities.[3] For instance, the Arab Spring, starting in Tunisia in December 2010, spread via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) not only through connective action[4] but also its documentation. Similarly, the Syrian Archive (now part of the umbrella organisation Mnemonic) was founded in 2014 to collect documentation from the Syrian protests and the ensuing civil war.[5] Meanwhile, during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv, starting in November 2013, social and legacy media platforms spread images and videos of the events including livestreams.[6] Darker trends also emerged, such as the extremist group ISIS’s use of social media to circulate ideological and violent content.[7]

In the third decade of the 21st century, these tendencies are escalating. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has swiftly spread through both social and traditional media. Data, including visual data, about the war rapidly expanded through digital infrastructures on a global scale. Media journalist Kyle Chayka has even called this “the first TikTok war”, pointing to the dispersion of records of the war across new platforms.[8] Visual evidence has been used to show the experiences of the war, or, in cases of Russian propaganda and disinformation, to dispute and obfuscate them.[9]
Tensions between the digital and material have also appeared. On Instagram, for example, the Ukrainian art historian Asia Bazdyrieva documented the first months of the war in photographs taken on her phone and through screenshots of a diary recorded on her notes app. On 15 April 2022, she wrote, “I was numb when a fancy art magazine published a piece where a person from the west said that this is ‘a simulacra [sic!] of a war’ ‘it is way too mediated’ it is ‘a war that has not happened’”.[10] Two days earlier, on 13 April, Dean Kissick had written in Spike: “The simulacra of war grow weirder and weirder. War feels like a video game when you’re watching, as I am, artillery strikes filmed by drones in the sky then posted with an upbeat hypnagogic pop soundtrack; a vaporwave song for a vaporwave war”.[11] Such debates recall Susan Sontag’s critique of Jean Baudrillard and the hyper-constructivist perspectives on war mediation. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag wrote:
[W]ho claims to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exist now; it seems to be something of a French specialty […]. It is common to say that war, like everything else that appears to be real, is mediatique […]. It is often asserted that “the West” has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle […]. To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment.[12]
Beyond the direct experience of pain and destruction during wars, suffering has been constructed through various media technologies for those who have not been in the direct conflict zones. The representation of the experience of war – war witnessing – has changed and corresponded to the development of various media technologies, as Susan Sontag,[13] John Ellis,[14] Lilie Chouliaraki,[15] Stuart Allan,[16] or Wendy Kozol[17] have pointed out. The witnessing of wars, including Russia’s war against Ukraine, and its research – which we continue with the contributions to this volume – have been carried out by scholars, activists, cultural workers, and journalists[18] and have intensified in the present moment where multiple wars coincide with increased access to and consumption of digital technologies and platforms.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion and more than two years after it, multiple conflicts and wars have been extensively recorded, and those records dispersed across social media.[19] Wars are physical and painful; their representations are pulled into the feeds of distant social media users and direct witnesses, and social media influencers, cultural producers, scholars, journalists, and unrelated bystanders contribute to the discourses around these wars. For over a year and a half, this has also and particularly been the case with Israel’s war in Gaza.[20] Yet, as Chayka suggests, social media has changed drastically since Russia’s February 2022 invasion: “Now the same platforms appear to be making conflicts hazier rather than clearer”, as their algorithms have changed and facilitated mislabelling and disinformation.[21] Meanwhile, with the spread of widely available generative AI technologies and the misuse of contemporary media environments for strategic disinformation by authoritarian regimes like Russia,[22] the future of visualising war and conflict zones seems poised for more confusion and uncertainty.[23]
We therefore find ourselves, on the one hand, in a situation where historical media such as paintings, photographs, television reports, and films, and contemporary platform media – such as TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube – shape current forms of war experience, representation, documentation, and archiving. On the other hand, representations of suffering are challenged by practices of strategic disinformation. Contemporary environments of war witnessing, especially in the digital realm, are paradoxical: they are chaotic and ambiguous, but at the same time they aim to create an informative debate.
These digital practices, however, have mostly been preceded by material ones: destruction, murder, ideological attacks, and other forms of oppression. The war in Ukraine not only results in death and injury but also strikes on material culture, civilian infrastructures, and other spatial formations. These processes correspond to Russia’s rhetoric and actions: the Russian regime denies Ukrainian sovereignty and its identity and culture, and targets not only ‘military’ infrastructure but also civilian and cultural sites.[24]
[…]
The four sections of this edited volume – Witnessing and its Limits, Materialities of Archiving and Art, Politics of Infrastructures, and Problematising Legacies – examine the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine in an engaged, embedded, and critical way. Their overall aim is to analyse – without turning away from – the difficult and painful environments that have emerged in Ukraine in the aftermath of various legacies of violence, including Russia’s full-scale invasion. Through this gesture, they not only resist the occupying forces but contribute to the production of knowledge and set new narratives from and about Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe.
The full version of the text is available via open access.
Notes
[1] Serge Gruzinski, “Introduction”, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019), Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001, 2.
[2] Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Forum Transregionale Studien, and Stiftung Zukunft Berlin, “The Power of Images”, panel with Luca Giuliani, James Der Derian, Ibrahim Helal, Sinan Antoon, Tom Holert, and Cristina Nord, from the conference Ten Years of 9/11, 28–29 May 2011, https://www.hkw.de/media/texte/pdf/2011_2/programm_3/10jahre911/zehn_jahre_9_11.pdf [accessed: 16.08.2024].
[3] Miglė Bareikytė and Yarden Skop, “Archiving the Present. Critical Data Practices During Russia’s War in Ukraine”, Sociologica 16/2, special issue Memory under Fire: Data Practices During Russia’s War in Ukraine, 2022, 199–215, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15361 [accessed: 18.08.2024].
[4] Lance W. Bennet and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”, Information, Communication & Society 12/5, 2012, 739–768, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661 [accessed: 19.08.2024].
[5] Dia Kayyali, “Digital Memory, Evidence, and Social Media: Lessons Learned from Syria”, Sociologica 16/2, special issue Memory under Fire: Data Practices During Russia’s War in Ukraine, 2022, 253–259, https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/15383/14820 [accessed: 16.08.2024].
[6] Tetyana Bohdanova, “Unexpected Revolution: The Role of Social Media in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Uprising”, European View 13/1, 2014, 133–142, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12290-014-0296-4 [accessed: 16.08.2024]; and Megan MacDuffee Metzger and Joshua A. Tucker, “Social Media and EuroMaidan: A Review Essay”, Slavic Review 76/1, 169–191, https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2017.16 [accessed: 16.08.2024].
[7] See, for example: Jarred Prier, “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare”, Strategic Studies Quarterly 11/4, 2017, 50–85.
[8] Kyle Chayka, “Watching the World’s ‘First TikTok War’”, The New Yorker, 03 March 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war
[accessed: 16.08.2024].
[9] For example, see: Reality Check and BBC Monitoring, “Bucha killings: Satellite image of bodies site contradicts Russian claims”, BBC, 11 April 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/60981238 [accessed: 16.08.2024]; and Marianna Spring, “Marianna Vyshemirsky: ‘My picture was used to spread lies about the war’”, BBC, 17 May 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-61412773 [accessed: 16.08.2022].
[10] @asiabazdyrieva (Äsän), “Numb”, Instagram post, 15 April 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CcYmZhWttpW/ [accessed: 18.08.2024].
[11] Dean Kissick, “The Downward Spiral Did Not Take Place”, Spike, 13 April 2022, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/the-downward-spiral-did-not-take-place [accessed: 18.08.2024].
[12] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Picador, 2017, 140–141.
[13] Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
[14] John Ellis, “Mundane Witness”, in: Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (eds.), Media Witnessing, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 73–88.
[15] Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2006; and Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
[16] Stuart Allan, Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis, Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
[17] Wendy Kozol, Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
[18] For scholars, cultural workers, and journalists beyond this volume who work specifically on Ukraine and whose work has inspired us, see: Felix Ackermann, Asya Bazdyrieva, Vasili Cherepanyn, Olha Honchar, Mykola Makhortykh, Natalia Otrishchenko, Ihor Poshyvailo, and Daria Tsymbalyuk. See also the organisations and initiatives: Bellingcat, Mnemonic, Civic Resilience Initiative, The Reckoning Project, Lviv Center for Urban History, Forensic Architecture, Center for Spatial Technologies, and many others.
[19] See, for example, wars in Syria, Yemen, and Gaza, among others.
[20] For an initial discussion, see, for example: Kyle Chayka, “How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News”, The New Yorker, 17 October 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-social-media-abdicated-responsibility-for-the-news [accessed: 18.08.2024]. For opinion pieces by academics blogging on the topic, see, for example: Lee Edwards, “Reflecting on media coverage of the war in Israel and Gaza”, Media@LSE, 20 December 2023, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2023/12/20/reflecting-on-media-coverage-of-the-war-in-israel-and-gaza/ [accessed: 18.08.2024]; and Adrian Daub, “All Eyes on Insta: On the dark side of worries about ‘fake news’, ‘disinformation’ and AI”, Dreams in the Which House, Substack, 03 June 2024, https://adriandaub.substack.com/p/all-eyes-on-insta [accessed: 18.08.2024]. Finally, for early-stage data-analysis projects, see, for example: The Israel–Hamas war on YouTube and TikTok, Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint, University of Amsterdam, 8–12 January 2024, https://www.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WinterSchool2024IsraelHamasWar [accessed: 18.08.2024].
[21] Chayka, “How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News”.
[22] Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, New York City: PublicAffairs, 2015.
[23] Mykola Makhortyk and Miglė Bareikytė, “AI visions: Representing Russia’s war against Ukraine for Humans and Machines”, in: Digital Wars, edited volume, upcoming.
[24] For example, see: Timothy Snyder, “The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War”, The New Yorker, 28 April 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/the-war-in-ukraine-is-a-colonial-war [accessed: 18.08.2024]; and Natasha Klimenko, “Pulling Meaning Out of Matter: Reformations of Ukrainian Cultural Heritage”, post: notes on art in a global context, 24 August 2022, https://post.moma.org/pulling-meaning-out-of-matter-reformations-of-ukrainian-cultural-heritage/ [accessed: 18.08.2024].
About the Authors
Miglė Bareikytė holds the Chair of Digital Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where she is a dual member of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences and the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS). She has been researching digitalisation for many years, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2022, she has been investigating media and data practices, digital war witnessing on Telegram messenger, and AI imaginaries during Russia’s war against Ukraine in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Siegen, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, the University of Bern, and beyond. In addition, Bareikytė’s research extends to the study of historical and contemporary disinformation practices and conflicts in platform economies.
Natasha Klimenko is a doctoral candidate at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded graduate school Global Intellectual History held at the Free University Berlin and Humboldt-University Berlin. She is also affiliated with the Osteuropa-Institut of the Free University. Her PhD project looks at the entangled art histories of Soviet Uzbekistan in the interwar period, with a focus on modernist art practices, conceptual transfers, identity formation, and the role of institutions. Beyond this, Klimenko researches and writes about historical and contemporary art, culture, and
media in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She also works as a copyeditor and translator for nonfiction and academic publication projects. Previously, she was a Science Communication Coordinator for the Prisma Ukraïna program at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.
Viktoriya Sereda is a sociologist, the head coordinator of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS), founded in 2023, and the senior academic advisor to the research group Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, Memory. She initiated and directed the project from 2022 to 2023 at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Currently she also holds a position of a professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since 2020, she has also been a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciencies of Ukraine and a professor at the Department of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2021, she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Basel. From 2011 to 2017, she led the sociological team on the project Region, Nation and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine, organised by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. In 2016/2017 and 2019/2020 she was a research fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, where she developed a digital atlas of social changes in Ukraine after Euromaidan.
Citation: Miglė Bareikytė, Natasha Klimenko and Viktoriya Sereda, On Images and Objects of Russia’s War against Ukraine: An Introduction, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 02.12.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/62977
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (December 2, 2025). On Images and Objects of Russia’s War against Ukraine: An Introduction. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved December 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/159ay



