The ongoing military conflict in Eastern Ukraine has triggered a scholarly debate on the nature of contemporary wars. Scholars and journalists have provided various explanations to the outbreak of the violence in the Donbas. In this context, they labeled the conflict in different ways ranging from “Ukrainian civil war” to “Russia’s war against Ukraine”. Yet in contrast to previous studies, this paper suggests to analyze the perception of the local actors involved in the armed conflict and their visions of conflict resolution. More specifically, the paper studies how the Ukrainian political actors in Kyiv make sense of the war in the Donbas by drawing analogies to historical events. It is argued that the examination of what exactly the Ukrainian political actors mean with such analogies sheds light on the political actors’ conception of the nature of the war in Eastern Ukraine. The paper draws on the insights of metaphor analysis employed in Interpretive Policy Analysis, Sociology, Linguistics, and International Relations. The paper would suit the panel on interpretive designs.
