The Russo-Ukrainian confrontation began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and, de facto, part of Donbas. Although military operations have been ongoing in eastern Ukraine since then, a certain part of the Ukrainian population tried “not to notice” them, distance themselves from these events, and emphasise their political indifference. This escapist public position was undoubtedly harmful to the state and, ultimately, to those who held it. After all, in 2022, Russian military aggression escalated into the full-scale war, and it became clear that no one in the country could remain on the sidelines. The destructive social impact of apolitical attitudes and disregard for military operations in Donbas has been the subject of artistic depiction in many works by Ukrainian writers. It is most vividly portrayed in the novels The Orphanage (2017) by Serhiy Zhadan, Mondegreen (Songs about Death and Love) (2019) by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, Behind Your Back (2019) by Haska Shyyan, and Khaziayin (The boss, 2024) by Markiyan Kamysh. The protagonists of these works have an individualistic worldview. Immersed in their personal problems, they are unable to realise the threatening potential of the early stages of military aggression, hope that the war will not affect them personally, and are outraged when they are asked to take any active action. However, in this way, they unwittingly fuel the already launched mechanism of violence, acting as “implicated subjects” (Michael Rothberg). In the end, the protagonists of the novels Behind Your Back and Khaziayin, choosing a passive escapist position, lose everything that is valuable to them. In contrast, the protagonists of The Orphanage and Mondegreen (Songs about Death and Love) change their views on their role in society, and thanks to this, they manage to work through their own psychological traumas. The aim of this paper is to analyse the worldview-shaping function of contemporary Ukrainian fiction works, which are characterised by the protagonist's unwillingness to acknowledge the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. The main methodological framework of the study is Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” and Astrid Erll’s interpretation of the role of remediation and premediation in shaping cultural memory about collective trauma. Special attention is paid to the artistic interpretation by the writers of the first stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war (2014-2022) as a period of the formation of ideas of resistance and resilience in Ukrainian society, which manifested themselves so vividly in the second, full-scale stage of the war (since February 24, 2022).

In wartime contexts, uncertainty is not merely a cognitive or psychological state, but a communicative condition produced, circulated, and contested through mediated practices. This paper outlines the role of participatory media practices operates as arenas where institutional narratives of war and peace intersect with grassroots visions centered on justice, accountability, and dignity. Drawing on mediatization theory (Krotz, 2007; Hepp & Krotz, 2014), cultural studies of popular culture (Fiske, 1989; Storey, 2018), and social media logic (van Dijck & Poell, 2013), uncertainty is conceptualized as a socially constructed and media-dependent phenomenon emerging in relation to public events. War is approached as a public event that restructures everyday life and media reality, generating layered uncertainties across temporal, emotional, spatial, and normative dimensions. Long-term monitoring of social media discussions (2022–2025, n = 1 mio) shows that uncertainty is actualized through recurring orientation questions such as “What is happening?”, “What does this mean for me?”, and “What comes next?”. These imaginaries are mediated through cultural memory, narratives, and symbols, articulating meanings of uncertainty in war realities (Mozolevska, 2023). By 2025, a major shift in political mainstream discourse – from defence against war to negotiations about peace – revealed that peace remains a more uncertain, fragmented, and contested concept than war itself. Peace is articulated in Social Media through competing cultural imaginaries, ranging from authoritarian (“rusky mir”), pragmatic transactional logics (“peace deal”), to normative or deontological principles of justice (“just peace”). These dynamics resonate with Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation, where incompatible systemic logics produce structural uncertainty rather than shared meaning (Luhmann, 1995), and with Reckwitz’s diagnosis of late-modern contingency and crisis (Reckwitz, 2017; 2021). Following Nanz (2019/2020) suggestion, formal legal definitions alone cannot stabilize shared understandings of peace without participatory translation into culturally resonant forms (Nanz, 2019). Empirically, the paper draws on the project “Peace Meaning Streaming: Communication of Resistance in the Ukrainian War Context” and present results of qualitative case study of meme communication surrounding peace negotiations associated with Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (the “Oval Office” frame; n = 120). Memes are conceptualized as material–semiotic figurations that actively produce and contest political meaning (Meis & Johais, 2023) or operate as instruments in memetic warfare defending truth (Munk, 2025). Meme as participatory media practices do not eliminate uncertainty but provide provisional interpretive frameworks through which societies negotiate and envision alternative futures, offering low threshold, engaging avenues for navigating uncertainty and expressing civic values.

The inhuman atrocities of the Russian occupants during spring 2022 in Irpin, Bucha, and other towns of the Kyiv region and Ukraine, and their horrifying evidence shocked the world. Despite the return of survivors to their homes and the daily life in these places, the memory of the genocide is strong, and the wound is still open. As well, after their reoccupation, these towns have become often visited by the international delegations, foreign visitors and the Ukrainian people aiming to see and to realize the reasons and the consequences of the Russian military aggression happening in Europe in the XXI century and the bravery of the Ukrainian people who defend Ukraine. There is a strong dichotomy between the tragic reality of the war and the entertainment essence of tourism. In many cases, in the post-conflict stage, the sites that preserve the memory of the war become tourist attractions in the framework of the process of resiliency and recovery in post-disaster and post-conflict contexts (Gaki & Koufodontis, 2022) and ‘normalizing’ sites which are the arenas of lasting hostilities and traumas (Naef & Ploner, 2016). The recent events feel darker than those from the distant past (Lennon & Foley, 2000). Due to this, preserving, interpreting, and presenting the memory of the war and human tragedies, as well as recovery and restoration efforts during the ongoing war, are even more challenging. While previous research has examined various aspects of tourism recovery and restoring the country's and destination's attractive image after the war, with a particular focus on how the memory of the war is presented or replaced with more positive and politically neutral associations, we are here interested in how the memory related to genocide, massacre, and occupation that took place within recent times, and is remembered by witnesses, becomes a part of the town landscape and is transformed into statements of resilience and seeds for recovery during the on-going war. This paper aims to explore ways for preserving, interpreting, and presenting the memory of war to the public (i.e., international) in tourism contexts during the ongoing war, also from the perspective of ethical boundaries both analysing the existing policies on national, regional and local levels and the approaches evolved by the tourist guides in the situations of their interaction with visitors and residents. There are much more uncertainties and questions in this issue, than answers or recommendations, and this research aims to contribute to respectful memory preservation policies and the reconstruction in Ukraine.

Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has generated a profound rupture of established narrative, linguistic, and mnemonic frameworks. In conditions of ongoing violence and radical uncertainty, literature and cultural texts do not merely reflect social reality but operate as active sites of meaning-making, where new cognitive frames, temporalities, and ethical coordinates are explored. This paper examines how uncertainty is narrated, linguistically processed, and culturally negotiated in contemporary Ukrainian wartime literature and cultural production (2022–2025). Drawing on literary analysis, memory studies, and discourse theory, it conceptualizes wartime writing as a pre-mnemonic zone—a space in which meanings emerge prior to their stabilization within canonized memory, institutional narratives, or historical interpretation. The analysis focuses on a range of genres, including wartime diaries, poetry, song lyrics, and hybrid literary forms characterized by fragmentation, unfinished narratives, and semantic instability. These texts articulate uncertainty not simply as a deficit or breakdown of meaning, but as a productive epistemic condition that enables new narrative strategies, modes of testimony, and ethical positions under conditions of extreme crisis. By foregrounding literature and cultural production as arenas of epistemic and mnemonic experimentation, the paper contributes to broader interdisciplinary debates on (un)certainty in times of war and crisis. It argues that contemporary Ukrainian wartime literature provides crucial insights into how societies confront radical uncertainty through cultural practices that mediate experience, sustain meaning-making, and preserve ethical reflection in situations where stable interpretive frameworks are no longer available. In doing so, the paper situates Ukrainian war writing within wider discussions of memory, trauma, and cultural response to violence in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.