The poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), whom Russians consider their national “Shakespear,” received little attention outside of his country until Russia placed his name onto the banner of its genocidal war against Ukraine. Responding to Ukraine’s petition from February 27, 2022, to impose cultural sanctions on Russian Federation, PEN Center Germany association of writers famously declared that “The Enemy is Putin, not Pushkin” in its press release from March 6, 2022. The press release set in motion a powerful media campaign against “canceling” Pushkin, which many naïvely connect to Pushkinopad: the removal of Pushkin’s monuments in Ukraine in response to the Russian aggression.

Based on her 2022 pilot study of 107 Ukrainian respondents to the questionnaire about their attitudes to Pushkin between 2014 and 2022, Olena Zotova combines it with an overview of Ukrainian, Russian, and international media around the same period to argue that the campaign to “protect” Pushkin is part of Russia’s information warfare against Ukraine and had been in the making ten years prior to the full-scale invasion. Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice helps Zotova explain the mechanisms that fuel said campaign to this day.