Preservation and Representation of National Cultural Heritage by Archival and Library Institutions in the Context of Russia’s War Against Ukraine (2022–2025)

The purpose of the research is to identify the cause-and-effect relationships between the role of archival and library institutions in shaping identity and preserving national memory, and the policy of the Russian Federation aimed at destroying «places of memory» and «places of knowledge». The research methodology. To implement the basic principles substantiated in the works of Pierre Nora and Christian Jacob in the context of the socio-cultural space of Ukraine during the war, methods of theoretical and empirical levels of cognition were applied. The scientific novelty of the research consists in revealing a positive tendency: the growing scale of digitization of documents and the modernization of databases within archival and library institutions. This development enables the preservation of cultural heritage under conditions of Russia's deliberate destruction of these institutions as integral elements of a symbolic system of objects, signs, and artifacts through which knowledge, memory, and tradition are institutionalized. Conclusions. It has been established that the policy of the Russian Federation is deliberately aimed at destroying archival and library institutions across Ukraine. The study demonstrates that the digitization of archival and library collections is one of the key strategies for the preservation of cultural heritage during wartime. It also contributes to the creation of a single access point to digital information resources through the Inter-Archive Search Portal «Archium» and the information-retrieval database «Ukrainian Martyrology of the 20th Century», which makes it possible to partially overcome the gaps in sociocultural tradition caused by wartime destruction. The prospects for further research lie in exploring whether virtual space can replace «sites of memory» and «sites of knowledge» in the process of identity formation