The Fakes of Sexual Narrative in the Information Warfare

Abstract

The proposed article is based on the report presented at the conference “The Days of Science at NaUKMA” on January 26, 2022, just one month before the Russian invasion. Back then it seemed impossible. The active phase of the previous military confrontation ended in 2015 and it transformed into a positional and hybrid warfare. Since then, some representatives of Ukrainian scientific community, under the guise of “science without politics,” continued to cooperate with Russia, from publishing their research in Russian journals to holding joint conferences and more. The author of the article, despite the rejection, did not see this as an intention but rather a misunderstanding of the objective reality. Therefore, the purpose of the report was to prove that hybrid warfare is a covert but real war in the context of post-truth.Post-truth as a mode of meanings functioning is a shift of boundaries between the real and the imaginary; it does not equal lie but rather is negligence, indifference to the truth, which entails uncertainty of positions and substitutions of concepts. Fake, on the other hand, is a specific form of misinformation which has accompanied hybrid warfare. However, on February 24, 2022, the war took the form of an open escalation, the planning of which was denied by Russia in accordance with the genre of hybrid warfare with its cortege of fakes.The choice of the topic focused on the sexual narrative is relevant, in particular due to the public joke of Russian President Putin towards Ukrainian President Zelensky at a press conference in Moscow on February 8, 2022, directly related to rape, which became widely known in the media. As it turned out later, it was not a joke but a certain affirmation, an intention of thinking, which turned into mass rapes of Ukrainian women and children by Russian soldiers in the new stage of Russia’s war against Ukraine.