How are narratives sacralised? Russian dogma on the war in Ukraine

The article analyses how the Russian official representation of the war in Ukraine has been sacralised and then applied to the identity-building strategy. Sacralisation is considered a way to legitimise politics by attributing transcendental meaning and significance to it. This paper suggests a framework for identifying the use of sacralisation techniques and discusses the potential applications of the sacralised war narrative lying beyond the justification of war. It is shown that the Russian representation of the war, once sacralised, has codified the ideological leitmotifs of the last decades. It has built a holistic and comprehensive cognitive schema grounded in pre-constructed identity beliefs and ideas. The state of war allowed the establishment of this framework in a top-down way. Thus, the article claims that discursive sacralisation not only justifies warfare but can also intensify identity politics.