Вуличне мистецтво та інтернет-меми як наративи ідентичності опору: гібридна візуальна комунікація у прифронтових містах України (весна 2022)

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in February 2022 profoundly transformed the country’s cultural, informational, and symbolic landscape, turning urban space into a site of visual and symbolic resistance. This article examined how street art, symbolic civic practices, and digital visual culture in frontline Ukrainian cities during the spring of 2022 function as interconnected forms of symbolic resistance and collective resilience within a hybrid visual communication network linking urban and digital spaces. The study employed an interdisciplinary approach combining semiotic analysis, discourse analysis, visual anthropology, and digital culture studies. The empirical material included murals, graffiti, symbolic interventions, and internet memes documented between February and October 2022 in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, and Zaporizhzhia. The findings demonstrated that, under wartime conditions, war-damaged urban spaces acquired renewed symbolic meanings, while murals, the micro-interventions of the Yellow Ribbon Movement, and digital memes form a hybrid visual communication network. Murals and graffiti transformed damaged buildings and public spaces into communicative surfaces, through which narratives of national identity, collective memory, and resilience were articulated. The Yellow Ribbon Movement demonstrated how decentralised symbolic interventions sustain civic solidarity and affirm Ukrainian identity in temporarily occupied territories. Digital memes functioned as adaptive communicative tools that reframed fear through humour and irony, while countering disinformation and engaging international audiences. Together, these visual practices constituted a distributed semiotic system that reinforced cultural resistance, social cohesion, and symbolic resilience under wartime conditions