CONTEXTUAL-SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIATION OF INTERGROUP ATTRIBUTES «SOVIET» AND «EUROPEAN» IN THE PRISM OF ETHNO-NATIONAL PERCEPTION OF UKRAINIANS

Abstract

The article presents the results of a psychosemantic study of the peculiarities of the interethnic perception of Ukrainians after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of the territory of Ukraine. During the hybrid war, the Russians actively used the concepts of the historical kinship of Ukrainians and Russians within the limits of Soviet history, pointed to the cultural kinship of the Slavic peoples and the differences in traditional values between Ukrainians and European peoples. In the process of preparing for the military invasion, the narratives of the cultural closeness of Ukrainians and Russians were contrasted with the narratives of the «Banderivites», «Galicians», who represented the part of Ukrainian society that was integrated into the European cultural environment. The study used the procedure of J. Kelly's semantic differential and factor-semantic modeling. Based on the results of the research, it was found that it is characteristic for Ukrainians to use the «European» construct in the process of interethnic perception in combination with other personal characteristics that relate to the specifics of socioeconomic interaction. The attribute «Soviet» is not used by the researched, Russia is not identified with the Soviet Union, at the level of the mass consciousness of Ukrainians, Russia and the Soviet Union are distinct national groups that have no common features. According to the results of the research, we can state that in the prism of the interethnic perception of Ukrainians, there is a tendency to differentiate other national groups according to the principle «European – not European», and the attributes «Soviet», «Russian» turned out to be completely unsustainable for the search for a certain group affinity. In the context of informational and psychological confrontation, any attempt to use the ideas of ethnic, cultural, historical affinity between Ukrainians and Russians will have no results.