Russian aggression in Donechchyna as told by the witnesses: documenting projects

Abstract

The research is aimed at identifying and analyzing documentation projects that collect oral testimonies, photos, video materials about the events and experiences of the RussianUkrainian war on the territory of the Donetsk region. The research framework included projects initiated by historians, ethnographers, sociologists and those that can be used in the future in historical science to reproduce the events of the war and their experience by contemporaries. Documentary projects of law enforcement authorities and human rights organizations aimed at documenting the crimes of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine, as well as documentary initiatives of journalists, whose purpose is to draw attention to and highlight the tragedies of Russian military aggression against Ukraine, remained outside its borders. During the work on the material, general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, and description were used. Oral history methods were used to analyze and determine the informational potential of projects focusing on documenting the stories of soldiers, volunteers, and forcibly displaced people. The research is built on the principles of scientificity and complexity, which allows to identify documentation projects, characterize their methodology and determine the information potential for further scientific research.
Since 2015, the documentation of oral testimonies of war events has been carried out by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. After the start of the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the number of documentation projects increased. The vast majority of them geographically cover the entire territory of Ukraine. At the same time, the projects «Historical and cultural heritage of Donetsk region: documentation of losses and prospects for recovery», «Mariupol Drama Theater Spatial Archive» are local in nature and focused on recreated events of the war, the destruction of the historical and cultural heritage of Donetsk region. Identification, analysis, dissemination of information about existing documentation projects is important. In the conditions of the Russian Federation’s total destruction of everything Ukrainian, they record the tragic events of the war, the practices of survival in wartime conditions, the destruction of cultural and historical heritage. The materials collected within the projects can become sources for historical science.