Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes Ukrainian wartime tractor memes as a popular interpretive lens for critiquing Russian colonialism past and present. Rereading these memes through Ukrainian historical and environmental contexts, I argue that they gesture to an agro-futurist politics of repair.

Paper long abstract:

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, a viral video showed a tractor pulling a tank through empty fields, chased by a man attempting to recover his vehicle. “Ukrainian farmer steals Russian tank from right under the nose of the Russians who occupied it,” the YouTube subtitle read. As similar videos proliferated, their popularity gave rise to a fast-growing gallery of social media memes playfully promoting “Ukraine’s Farmed Forces,” and later, an official tractor postage stamp. This paper argues that Ukrainian tractor memes remix visual and textual elements of everyday life during war, offering an interpretive lens for unfolding events that contextualizes the current conflict in two important ways. As a visual storytelling medium, these memes register civilian resistance against Russian occupation—which has deliberately targeted food system infrastructure—by reappropriating and inverting a long history of Russian cultural repertoires that have othered Ukrainians as backward peasants and restive rural Nationalists, and subjected them to expropriation of agricultural resources and mass forced famine. The battle-adjacent tractor is also emblematic of the environmental devastation of the war: the rapid circulation of internet memes contrasts with the slow violence of what is increasingly identified as ecocide in Ukraine, while gesturing to the future healing of soil and society through farming. This rereading of a seemingly flippant meme leads us to reconsider Russia’s war of aggression as, in part, an agricultural war with deep historical roots. It also offers grounds for reimagining an agro-futurist politics of environmental repair.