Signifying the present in links to the past: memory organizations react to the February 24, 2022, Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine

How do actors make sense of disruptive events through historical references? This article examines how Polish, German, and Ukrainian memory organizations responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, by mobilizing the past to imbue this event with meaning. Drawing on 740,720 tweets from 139 memory organizations, I apply a computational hermeneutics approach to analyze historical references, their narrative forms, and the networks of actors promoting these mnemonic interpretations. I identify four modes of eventful references to the past—analogy, continuity, contextual reference, and rectification. While Polish actors frame the invasion through both Soviet and Nazi terror, German organizations focus on the Nazi past and avoid direct historical analogies. These differences reflect enduring domestic memory cultures, which, I argue, are reactivated in the immediate aftermath of a disruptive event. The analysis offers novel insights into how digital memory environments structure meaning-making. As a contribution to eventful cultural sociology and memory studies, it demonstrates how actors’ reliance on preexisting memory frameworks in response to present crises also contains the seeds of new historical interpretations.