“Death to Muscovites!”: Perceptions of Russian Civilians in Wartime Kyiv

This thesis investigates how Ukrainian civilians define the “enemy” within the everyday Russian civilian sphere in the wake of the 2022 full-scale invasion. Ukrainian political rhetoric has often portrayed the Russian public as a homogenous collective complicit in the invasion, frequently making statements to the effect that “there are no good Russians”. Drawing on interviews conducted in Kyiv in the spring of 2025, my research sets out to assess whether this image of Russian civilians as a “total enemy” has been internalized into the collective imagination of Ukrainian civilians. The research engages closely with the theoretical frameworks developed by Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina, who apply social identity theory to protracted conflict contexts. Against the grain of much previous enmity research, I used the individual expression of enmity as my primary unit of analysis, before observing trends in individual expression which are crystallised into collective enmity. I also drew on the work of Herbert Kelman and Daniel Bar-Tal, whose work has explored the “sociopsychological infrastructure” surrounding enmity (Bar-Tal, 2009 : 1430), and how this infrastructure shapes national identity consolidation. While there were clear trends towards totalizing enmity expressed by my respondents, they made clear structural and moral differentiations in their depictions of Russian society. One of the primary takeaways from my research was the ambivalence expressed both between and within the responses of my respondents, which primarily seemed to be centred around the Russian totalitarian political context, and the lack of agency of Russian civilians. This research does not seek to make objective assessments of the Russian civilian population, it is focussed on Ukrainian perceptions of this population.