NEOPAGANS IN UKRAINE AS A "SOURCE OF CONFLICT": ACCORDING TO INTERNET MEDIA

Virtual media like television or other types of media influence the audience from year to year more and more powerful. The role of social networks as a source of information and its interpretation is growing especially rapidly. Modern pagans (neo-pagans) in Ukraine represent a small part of religiously oriented citizens of Ukraine. However, they are also present in the information virtual space. And not only in their social groups and pagan sites. Quite often, representatives of the pagan movement of Ukraine and their worldview and lifestyle became the objects of news related to conflict situations. Typically, in virtual media, information was conveyed through the prism of “pagans and others”. Thus, voluntarily or involuntarily, there is the perception of the pagans in Ukraine and the pagan movement as a whole is somehow exotic, extravagant, sometimes dangerous and even hostile. Although paganism is not widely known in Ukraine, it is also not informationally isolated. For the majority of the population of Ukraine, paganism is more associated with “Ivan Kupala”, jumping over a fire and spectacular historical reconstructions. However, the media covers not only holidays and interesting rituals, but also conflict situations related one way or another with the rejection of the pagans and their worldview. I focused only on the most resonant cases, which received quite noticeable and lengthy coverage in the Internet media. Among them: the destruction (burning, logging, dousing) of the shrines of the pagans. Such cases became especially resonant on Khortytsya island in Zaporizhzhia, where one of the centers of the pagan movement of Ukraine, the Ruske Pravoslavne Kolo, was deployed. The acts of vandalism and religious hatred also took place in the other cities of Ukraine. Among the most high-profile cases is the destruction of a wooden statue of Perun and a stone sculpture of Svitovid (a copy of the Zbruchansky idol) in Kyiv. Also publicized was the case of the taking away by social services of children from pagan parents in Buki willage in the Zhytomyr region and their return through the court. Relations between pagans, Ukrainian Greek Catholics, and the local population of the Gusyatinsky district in the Ternopil region were difficult, too. Stormy discussions on social networks caused the burial of the pagan who died in the war, Marian Nayda.