Source: PostPravda.info 18.03.2025
Why do Ukrainians draw on J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagery from The Lord of the Rings to depict Russia and its soldiers, rather than references from zombie or vampire films and series? Is this connected to aesthetic intuition, the existential experience of war, or value orientations? These questions are addressed in another article by Nikolai Karpitsky for the Dictionary of War, a project developed by the PostPravda.info editorial team.
Mordor
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mordor is a land in the southeast of Middle-earth, ruled by the Dark Lord Sauron. It is a barren land covered in volcanic ash, inhospitable to life. However, the orcs who inhabit it feel completely at home there and seek to turn all other lands into the same kind of wasteland. Their very purpose in life is to serve Sauron and to spread his power, killing and dying for that cause.
In contemporary culture, Mordor has come to symbolise inhuman dictatorship and slavery. The overvalued idea of domination allegedly turns people into orcs incapable of independent thought, driven by instincts of servility, aggression, and hatred toward others. It was Russians themselves who first began calling their country Mordor, those who found the strength not to hide behind comforting illusions. Most Russians fail to notice the horror of the authorities’ irrational violence, shielded by psychological defence mechanisms that sustain an illusion of normality. Fear and a sense of helplessness in the face of the authorities’ arbitrariness are displaced by faith in their benevolence and the rightness of their actions. However, when horror shatters this illusion, Russia’s dark side emerges — its inhumanity, irrationality, and the unpredictability of evil. This is what they call Mordor.
Mordor through the Eyes of Ukrainians
The association of Mordor with Russia has nothing to do with propaganda or ideology. No one imposed this notion or tried to provide it with a theoretical justification. Russians themselves began to see their country as Mordor, shaped by their own existential experience. Such an association did not exist among Ukrainians until 2014. However, after Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in 2014, Ukrainians came to see Russia as an existential threat and also began calling it Mordor.
Ukrainians see their country as their home — a place that may have many problems, but ones that can be solved. However, the presence of Mordor changes one’s sense of living space: part of the home is swallowed by chaos, making life there impossible. In the heart of Ukraine, life went on as usual, but the closer one came to the front line with the orc horde, the stronger the sense of chaos and the breath of death became. With the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, this breath spread across the entire country and there were no safe places left
The most terrifying thing about facing an existential threat is the enemy’s irrational motivation, which makes any agreement impossible. If Putin were seeking political influence or material gain, his actions could be rationally explained, and a compromise might be possible. It is this illusion of rationality that Western leaders cling to, hoping to negotiate peace. However, Putin proclaimed an utterly irrational goal — the destruction of Ukrainian identity — calling it ‘denazification’. As long as Ukrainians continue to identify as Ukrainians, they remain enemies to be destroyed. Thus, the motivation behind the attack on Ukraine is fused with a necrophilic drive for destruction. That is why Ukrainians perceive the Russian invasion as a horde of orcs with whom no negotiation is possible, and the war with Russia as a war of annihilation waged not only against the Ukrainian army but against all Ukrainians.
Why Tolkien?
Ukrainians draw on the imagery of Tolkien’s epic to describe Russia and its army because, first, the depiction of war in his universe mirrors the existential experience of Russia’s war against Ukraine; and second, the moral stance of Tolkien’s heroes aligns with that of Ukraine’s defenders. In his trilogy, Mordor’s aggression unfolds not only on the material but also on the spiritual level, and any trace of moral relativism leads to defeat. In resisting Russian aggression, Ukrainians regard a clear distinction between good and evil, as depicted by Tolkien, as fundamentally important. Any attempt to interpret good in relativistic terms leads to the justification of Russian narratives, in particular, to equating the victim with the aggressor.
The film adaptation of Tolkien’s epic helped popularise its imagery. However, far more films, TV series, and anime have been made about zombies and vampires — figures associated not only with the necrophilic orientation of the Russian authorities but even with the symbols of Russian military units, ‘Z’ and ‘V.’ The Russian command ruthlessly expends its manpower in senseless, suicidal assaults, as if that manpower were not living at all, while the soldiers themselves meekly go to their deaths in such attacks, as if they were zombies. However, the adherents of aggressive Russian imperial ideology are associated with orcs rather than with zombies or vampires. This stems from an aesthetic rejection of death symbolism in Ukrainian cultural consciousness, which refuses to project it even onto enemies. Although orcs embody evil, they are still living beings, unlike zombies and vampires. Mordor is neither the afterlife nor a realm of the dead; it is the embodiment of evil on earth. Therefore, it must also be fought in our own reality. While Russia glorifies death, Ukraine glorifies the struggle for life. This difference is reflected in the way Russians and Ukrainians fight.
