Personal Epistemology on the War in Eastern Ukraine in 2021: Constructing and Deconstructing Knowledge

I enact the personal epistemology standpoint to illustrate how my ontology and personal experience transformed my knowledge about the war in eastern Ukraine. Guiding the reader through my visual and bodily interaction with the war zone, I illustrate the construction and deconstruction of my perception of the object of knowledge—the war—and the knowledge itself. The researcher is thus placed at the heart of the research. This article advances the value of the world–mind monism stance in knowledge production and legitimizes the self as a source of knowledge in International Relations research.

countries' geographic proximity made the Latvian society vigilant to happenings in Ukraine.
I was distant from the war zone, and did not know anyone from Ukraine; therefore the media were my primary source of information.I come from a Latvian-speaking family.My dad is Latvian, and my mom is a fluently Latvian-speaking Belarusian, who gained Latvian citizenship in the 1990s; and we have always preferred the Latvian media.My perceptions about global ongoings were primarily framed by the Latvian Public Broadcasting, comprising Latvian Television, www.lsm.lvnews portal, and Latvian Radio.They advanced a few key narratives about the war in Ukraine.This very much fell under the official Latvian state position about the Russian invasion.To me, they signaled that Ukraine sought a Euro-Atlantic integration and struggled against Russian influence on its geopolitical course.Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and then waged a full-fledged war in the Donbas region to prevent Ukraine's breakaway from their presumed joint trajectory.Russia had seized extensive territories in eastern Ukraine and established the two quasi-states they called the Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) and the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR).The military standoff in eastern Ukraine has been continuing since 2014 with varying intensity, and the war had brought suffering to people, but the situation around August 2021 was fairly stable.All this is probably common knowledge now.
As they usually are, the Latvian Public Broadcasting messages were fact-oriented and laconic, and the supplementing aesthetics were expressionless to me. 1 The conflict discourse was constructed along strategic lines, and I had built my understanding accordingly.The armed confrontation in Ukraine was an impersonal geopolitical crisis in a distant location, one managed by highprofile policymakers.
My vision would likely sound reasonable for the Latvian-speaking part of the population in Latvia; but the truth perception for its Russian speakers differed significantly.The latter language group often repeated Russian state narratives transmitted via media (B erziņa 2016).My husband, Anrijs, comes from a semi-Russian-speaking family, and his parents consume mainly Russian media content.As a result his mom (a wonderful woman) frequently cites Russian television arguments when discussing regional politics.The PBK television channel provided the Baltic countries with Russian state content and was among the most influential media in Latvia until its closure in 2021 (KANTAR 2020).It appealed particularly, of course, to the Russian-speaking audience; for notably, 37.7 percent of the population are Russian-language users in Latvia (Ofici al as Statistikas Port als 2019).The split in public perceptions along ethnolinguistic lines stretches far beyond Ukraine's crisis, though (And z ans 2022; Djatkovica, 2023).
Owing to professional needs and family circumstances I occasionally watched Russian television too.It presented an alternative reality about the war, both in content and visually.The storyline provided the audience with the ready event connotations designed according to the Russian state's position-it was Ukraine that was to blame for the long-lasting conflict.People stories, showing their pain, grief, or happiness, were regularly presented, and vocal visualizations amplified messages.The weekly news program "Vesty nedeli c Dmitriem Kisilevym" from May 25, 2014 perfectly exemplifies how I saw the conflict from the Russian perspective.Covering the presidential race in Ukraine and the situation in Donbas the program anchor explained: In Sloviansk, the president is not being elected today.Heavy artillery shelling is taking place in the city.The Ukrainian army fires badly, [they] didn't learn … They charge and fire [a Russian word paljit is used] in the direction of the city center … Either they hit a house, or a hospital or kill some civilians … 2 Compelling as the Russian perspectives were, they failed to convince me of their correctness.Confronted with these contradictory realities, I preferred to go along with the Latvian one.I knew Russian propaganda was at its height, but assumed that Latvian narratives were incomplete too.I had established my understanding, and yet questions remained about the reality of the actual war.I hoped to find the answer during the mission.

METHODOLOGY
I embark on this research to investigate how my ontology and personal epistemology changed my knowledge about the war in eastern Ukraine.Guiding the reader through my visual and bodily interaction with the war zone, I will illustrate the construction and deconstruction of my perception of the object of knowledge-the war-and the knowledge itself.I thus become the central research object of this article.It attempts to shed light on whether the objective war reality exists and what happens to information contradicting our pre-conceived truths, among other questions.
The knowledge pursued through an individual's engagement with the world is a proposition of the world-mind monism ontology (Jackson 2016).Understanding the truth from an insider's perspective and acknowledging the knower's involvement in the construction of the known is its guiding premise.On the contrary, the explanatory approach (Hollis and Smith 1991), embedded in the world-mind dualism, separates individual perceptions from the outside world.In the latter, knowledge is right or wrong relative to the object of inquiry, and may be determined by applying the right "toolkit."Although epistemological and methodological variations in understanding what exists have been regarded as possible (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994), the ontological worldmind dualism and its research techniques upheld by positivist thinkers have dominated International Relations research.The traditional and authoritative paradigm has been keeping the researcher away from the research object (Krieger 1991;Brigg and Bleiker 2010;Denzin 1997;Sparkes 2002).I will enact a personal epistemology standpoint to challenge this premise and pick up on the debate about the nature of the truth and the pathways to knowledge.The discussion has not lived up to the needs of International Relations research among the younger generation of researchers (Jackson 2016, 26).This article, then, is based on my field observations as well as my notes, interview records, photographs, and videos made during the mission.It was organized by a German and a Ukrainian NGO, as part of a project funded by the German federal government.The mission took place between September 6 and 15, 2021 in the Ukraine-controlled territories of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblast.A seven-person group, we inspected settlements on the so-called contact line, where troops of the two conflicting sides meet at a distance that fluctuates from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers, and we interviewed interlocutors there.Our group included participants from Germany, Ukraine, Czechia, Poland, Latvia, and Russia.The mission aimed to assess security, humanitarian, and human rights conditions in the Ukraine-controlled war zones.We engaged with shelling victims, active citizens, representatives of local administrations, military personnel, aid NGO representatives, journalists, and others.The organizer NGOs selected the missions' interlocutors.Only people that consented to share their stories publicly were interviewed, and their insights were displayed in the followup materials, such as the public report, op-eds, media commentaries, and others.
Inspired by the personal and embodied writing of Carolyn Ellis (Ellis 1993) and Ruth Behar (Behar 1997), I will use the reflexive autoethnography method (Ellis and Bochner 2000).Sharing my thoughts, feelings, emotions, and moral dilemmas should help transcend my experiences for the reader and invite further reflections.I will apply emotional recall (Ellis 1993) and self-interception (Ellis and Bochner 2000) to evoke my memories and audio, as well as video-records to reconstruct conversations.The photographs shown here are the author's property and were approved for public use by the mission organizers upon its termination.

HUMANIZING GEOPOLITICS FROM AN AESTHETIC DISTANCE
It was the evening of September 7, and the first day of the mission was coming to an end.Our Ukrainian team leaders, Yevgeny and Konstantin (we called them Zhenya and Kostya), proposed stopping at Novoselivka Druha on our way from Niu-York to an overnight place in Avdiivka (yes indeed, there is a town named Niu-York in the Donetsk Oblast).Zhenya used to live in Luhansk, while Kostya was from Kyiv originally.Despite the ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine agreed upon in July 2020, another shelling had killed an elderly man and injured his wife in Novoselivka Druha; so we planned to see the shelled site.The village is located around 30 km from Donetsk, and controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
Before turning off the surprisingly smooth but deserted four-lane highway to Novoselivka Druha, we stopped at a military control post for the permit check.This permission validation later became our routine as we usually worked close to the contact line.Deemed insecure, these territories were restricted to external visitors.
I was carelessly gazing around from the car while waiting when I was told this was the highway to Donetsk."Is it the same Donetsk I heard about on TV?" I thought, inspecting the blocked road closely.I was intrigued.It was impossible to go any further: wooden and concrete barriers separated Ukraine-controlled from non-controlled territories.At some point, my thoughts returned to the UEFA championship in 2012 hosted by Donetsk, and I couldn't grasp how this same city had turned into a prohibited zone.The contrast felt awkward and surreal.I was looking at two similar yet so different parts of one road.
The longer we waited, the more unpleasant similarities emerged.I was reminded of a familiar view back in Latvia which I recognized in this landscape too: the Donetsk highway looked just like the road I regularly saw when driving from Riga, Latvia's capital, to Daugavpils.That, the second largest city in Latvia, is where my grandparents live, and I spent many school holidays there.My parents met at Daugavpils University, and I dated Anrijs in this city too.Gazing down the road was becoming almost physically painful.
Just like Donetsk, Daugavpils is ethnically heterogeneous, a Russianspeaking city in south-east Latvia holding mixed political sentiments.It is where Latvia borders both Russia and Belarus.I recalled a BBC film playing out a scenario of a war between Russia and NATO, triggered by unrest in Tallinn and Daugavpils (Range 2016)."Could the same tragedy happen to my dear Daugavpils and Latvia?Could a similar construction on the Daugavpils highway forever separate me from my grandparents?"-Iwhispered to myself and could not help but tear up.But I did not want to show my vulnerability to Zhenya, so I turned aside; yet the Donetsk highway image was fixed in my memory.The sudden closeness of the conflict was frightening (Figure 1).Dusk was already falling as we approached the tiny hamlet of Novoselivka Druha.I was sitting in the front seat next to Zhenya in a Nissan Patriot, surrounded by a view of the flat countryside.As we got off the highway Zhenya speeded up unexpectedly.He was driving much too fast, given the loose surface, I thought.Two other colleagues were in the back seats, and the rest of the team followed in a minivan."Be fast when we get to the point: it's not safe here after sunset," he said in a worried tone.I was told to unbuckle my seatbelt in case we had to jump out of the car fast.He explained that the occupied territories lay right next to us on the right, and separatists might fire should we look suspicious.I learned from Zhenya that moving cars at nighttime tend to be perceived as military, usually those of fire spotters.
I was staring out of the right window and, to me, controlled and noncontrolled lands looked alike.It looked like there was nothing worrisome in the field and the forest at its end, so I struggled to connect Zhenya's words with the peaceful and picturesque scene outside, and saw no danger.After a while, however, Zhenya passed his concerns on to me.It was his driving manner, quick and frequent glances aside, that altered my understanding of the surroundings.In my mind, the proximity of the conflict changed unexpectedly.

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We parked next to three heavily damaged buildings-the only houses on the only street-and one of them was totally devastated.Its porch and roof looked blown off.I learned that Ukrainian soldiers had lived here until a couple of weeks before, and were severely injured during heavy shelling.People, no matter whether civilian or military, had left the house in a hurry: camouflage trousers lay on the floor.As I came closer I noticed some books and bedsheets.
Then I saw unpacked plastic bottled water under the rubble.It was a watershed.In my lovely apartment in Riga, where I felt safe and sound, I had similar eight-packs of drinking water on my kitchen table.We regularly bought it with Anrijs in the local supermarket.I did not want to touch anything and felt like in a cemetery, dizzy."The people here are just like us," I recall thinking, completely shocked."Their clothes are very much the same: they live in quite similar houses.They eat and drink just like we do.But they suffer and die here while we keep on going as usual."The closeness of human suffering was too much for me to bear, and I left the house (Figure 2).
My interaction with specific objects from an aesthetic distance created their unique meanings in my historical contexts and the surrounding setting.Visual engagement with the Donetsk highway and the bottled water echoed the lives of people in the war zone in my own life.Just as images of refugees in situations familiar to their hosts help people to relate to the tragedies of others, what I saw allowed me to identify with the war and its affected people (Lydon 2022).Ordinary sights connected me with the war and thus humanized the geopolitical crisis.Had anyone else gone through the same visual experience, one would likely have ended up with different knowledge or without any deeper insights.In this way, my rationalized understanding of the conflict, Personal Epistemology on the War in Ukraine in 2021 313 shaped by the media, led me to a new level of knowledge, and it resembled how Carol Cohn presents perceptions about nuclear weapons among military experts-people tend to think of horrendous destruction the way it is talked about (Cohn 1987).

NOT BELONGING TO MYSELF, OR BODILY KNOWLEDGE IN THE WAR ZONE
On the sunny morning of September 8, we departed from the Coke and Chemical Plant's dormitory in Avdiivka for Opytne.I grabbed a bun (bulochka) for breakfast in a local boulangerie and settled down in my front seat, when Zhenya playfully suggested, "Today, you will see what life is like on the front line."The village is situated not far from Yasynuvata, another non-controlled city in the Donetsk Oblast.Opytne has been under crossfire since 2014 because of its closeness to the contact line.
When we arrived three elderly residents were sitting on a bench by a threestory apartment building.We were on Nachalnaya 21a Street.
Zhenya: "You are not happy today, are you?"The youngest lady: "It's because we are ill.I just got home from surgery.Look at the granny," she pointed to the oldest one in this group.The oldest lady: "I need a walking stick."She was using a tree branch to support herself.Zhenya: "You were smiling when we met before." The youngest lady: "Smiles were for the camera." The man: "You will show them [i.e.camera audience], and they will think-їv nfr dtctkj ;bnb [their life is fun]," he laughed self-ironically.
That man had a wonderful sense of humor.He and the youngest lady offered to show us around.First, we went to the basement.I saw a labyrinth of furnished rooms and smelt mold."We sheltered here during heavy shelling in 2014 and 2015.We may have to go down again if shelling continues as now," said the youngest lady.
In the yard, the elders demonstrated a home-made brick oven that they use for cooking.Their gas and electricity supply was cut off in 2014.Electricity had been restored this year, but drinking water was still unavailable.People here depended heavily on humanitarian aid, even for such essentials as water, food, or clothes.A weekly minimarket on wheels (avtolavka) was the only nearby shop.
They rarely left the village, for security reasons and a lack of public transport.Everyone who tried to enter or leave Opytne had to cross the infamous Doroga zhizhi ("road of life").This once busy highway connecting Avdiivka and Yasynuvata was now a battlefield between the two conflicting sides.On our way to Opytne and going back, I saw bits of metal on the road and the ruins of the Donetsk airport.It stood there majestically, like a ghost ship or a mirage in a desert.The flat surroundings, with little vegetation, made us and everyone else on this road an easy target.I felt exposed, almost naked, driving along there.I was completely dependent on someone else's mercy; I did not belong to myself, and neither did the elderly folk of Opytne.
During our tour I walked along with the old man; his company seemed comforting in this grim spot.He was joking all the time as we inspected an apartment in the neighboring two-story building that had been hit by a shell.

Personal Epistemology on the War in Ukraine in 2021 315
How can he still be humorous?I was occupied more with the man than with the disaster in the living room.
Kostya: "Could you tell us more about this shelling instance?What time did it happen?What was the sound?Was it a machine gun or small arms?"But the man made another ironic remark: "Do you think we are standing here and investigating gun sounds?"His humor seemed to be a coping strategy.So many dimensions of life, even basic biological needs, were subordinated to others-of aiding NGOs, Ukrainian authorities, and others.Above all, pro-Russian combatants controlled his life and death.Laughter was one of the few activities subjected to his own will.The link between humor, the ability to cope with stress, and a sense of life control has been found to be important (Martin et al. 1993).ÃÃÃ On September 12, I awoke at 9:30 a.m. in an upper bunk bed in Severodonetsk.The mission's Ukrainian organizer NGO had a freshly renovated office apartment there.I had scarcely opened my eyes when a sudden anxiety descended on me.My body clearly did not want this day to start.The group, including me, had agreed to spend the next night in Zolote-4, a village right on the contact line.The locals told us about nightly shelling, which was exactly why we had agreed to go.
We were about to leave the apartment when I noticed body armor and helmets prepared for us by the exit door."Oh gosh, we are taking these along for the first time.Things must be serious," a voice in my head said.I stood there like one hit by lightning.This armor was going to break down an invisible fence protecting me from the direct effects of the war.We had so far been outsiders watching the conflict from a fairly safe distance, and now we were to become insiders, vulnerable and mortal just like everyone else there on the front line.Might I be killed?Will dying hurt?A shrapnel injury must be painful as hell, right?What would happen to my parents and grandparent if they heard of my death?Dozens of questions floated in my head.Why are you doing this, Evija?Unpleasant questions popped up too.Will your death help anyone in Ukraine?Was this mission really about Ukraine at all? or has it always been about your career ambitions, which you often put ahead of your family and, this time, your very life?My heart was racing.I was no longer sure I had made the right choice in joining this mission, but now it was too late to turn back.
We arrived in Zolote-4 at twilight and settled down in a residential area some 500 meters from a Ukrainian army position.It was a nice, modestly furnished house with a gorgeous apple and pear tree garden.The owners had left a while ago after artillery fire had slammed into the neighboring building in their joint yard and the house has been vacant ever since.
At 7:52 p.m. a string of "tuf tuf tuf … " sounds interrupted our lively dinner chat in the garden.We paused and listened quietly.I heard a machine-gun for the first time in my life.The contrast between the absolute silence and the shelling was horrific; and not just for me but for everyone, even those who had heard the sound before and knew what to make of it.The tension was rising; but we got used to the rhythmical sound after a while, and the friendly evening talking continued.Although the shelling episodes were repeated they seemed far enough off not to bother us too much.The sound was coming from the non-Ukrainian-controlled territories, and we heard no retaliation.A Ukrainian soldier earlier that day admitted they were forbidden to fire back.
At around 10 p.m. the shelling paused and we went to bed, crossing our fingers that the night would be calm.Kostya encouraged me to pick a sleepingplace first since I was the only lady in the men's group.I was able to choose the best hotel room and my favorite seat in the car, which I did not mind at all in these circumstances.My sleeping place was by the wall, and I kept my running shoes ready for a quick departure.
Around 3 a.m., I was awoken by blasts nearby."No, no.Not again, please," I cried.It was artillery, as I later learned.My heart was racing, and a cold shiver ran down my spine."Explosions are too close.What do I do?Should I wake the others up?"I thought frantically.And I was completely alone."Should I scream?Where will we go?We can't drive at night: they will think we are military."It was a feeling of total helplessness.I couldn't escape this nightmare, and nobody could help me.Exhausted and desperate, I prayed: "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you … ."Shelling stopped, and a heavy silence ensued in Zolotoe-4.Anticipating the next firing episode was almost physically painful.At 6:30 a.m., a mortar mine exploded some 200 m from our house: it woke my fellow teammate and me.I did not care who was in conflict with whom anymore and why, any peace was better than this.The mortar mine blast was perhaps the scariest sound I had heard (Figure 3).
The feeling of closeness to death in this particular case and two other situations left traumatic effects on my body.After returning to Latvia I had sleeping disorders for a long time, and I still cannot stand the sound of fireworks.
My visual experience and personal contact with the elders in Opytne expanded the objective features of the conflict for me, such as the de facto nonexistent ceasefire and the abysmal humanitarian conditions.Meanwhile, my bodily experience reshaped my understanding of the nature of war profoundly.The body memory challenged the way I thought of the military approach in foreign policy problem-solving terms, just as the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki had reassessed nuclear deterrence (Tomonaga 2019).In fact many of those victims fronted the first movements for a nuclear-free world in the aftermath.Their political activism stemmed from biological and biopolitical experiences (Ronni 2012).
Interestingly my traumatic sensory knowledge led to counterintuitive outcomes.It did not result in pacifist inclinations; on the contrary, it encouraged me to facilitate political and military support for Ukraine by raising public awareness.This was a pursuit of justice, not peace.For me, the defeat of Russia in Ukraine could be the way to prevent an unlikely yet possibly similar war on Latvian soil.

THE "RUSSIAN WORLD" BIOPOLITICS, THROUGH THE EYES OF A SILENT OBSERVER
On September 14, we arrived at the checkpoint at Stanyta Luhanskaya.What reminded me of a busy international transit zone between the two countries was an outdoor corridor connecting the Ukrainian-controlled and LNR parts of Ukraine.LNR and DNR authorities had closed all but two crossing-places and had imposed tough restrictions on those coming and going.Taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, LNR and DNR authorities had gradually separated their inhabitants from Ukraine geographically, psychologically, and physically.
I was taking pictures in the transit zone at the LNR doorstep when a lady in her 40s, heading quickly to the LNR checkpoint, said to me: "I don't know if they will let me in.My papers are not ready."For every time people wished to visit LNR they had to prove their eligibility to do so.From the passersby, I learned that unless the purpose of the visit met a few formal criteria people were denied entrance.Visitors' legal and biological connection to LNR was a determinant.Residents of Luhansk Oblast could enter, first and foremost.A special commission assessed permissions for those educated or treated in LNR and people who cared for close family members in the occupied territories.The ethnolinguistic filter permitted access to LNR for the support program for the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine and for Donbas reunification participants.Visitors of any other kind were not welcome in.
Leaving the occupied territories was equally problematic."A visit once in thirty days" applied, among other rules, to people going out.Some people admitted that even fulfilling the formal criteria did not guarantee one permission to enter or leave LNR.Visitors had to be short-listed, and if not guards turned them back, no matter how far they might have traveled.Not only were geographical distances between people imposed but even the most intimate physiological and biological relationships, such as those between family members, were controlled.
Seniors were the main ones crossing in both directions.I saw many exhausted elderly people struggling to get through the kilometer-long stretch from one checkpoint to another, carrying huge bags in the southern heat.You could see the hardship on their faces, and I felt sincerely sorry for them.A Ukrainian guard lady told me a story about a husband who did not make it on time to say farewell to his dying wife because of the "a visit once in thirty days" law.She told me there were many personal tragedies like this behind the restrictions.I sympathized with these people but could not help; I was a powerless, silent observer there.
I kept taking photos though.Gazing at the bridge to LNR in my camera, I noticed a metaphorical landscape, defining the "Russian World" concept so well for me.The brutal long metal construction with a Russian flag prototype flying symbolized the inhuman pathway toward Russia's territorial, cultural, and mental governance.Armed guards brusquely greeted people corresponding to certain political and biological criteria; others were dehumanized, even killed if necessary.Poor infrastructure, total control, and economic hardship characterized life beyond the checkpoint.Once you were in, you were cut off from what were more attractive Ukrainian and Western realities, and it was impossible to leave the "Russian World" without bloodshed (Figure 4).The process I observed at Stanyta Luhanskaya was the crafting of the "Russian World" social strata, an act to foster life with specific features, while at the same time disallowing the wrong, even dangerous type of life existing in the Ukraine-controlled territories, to the point of death (Foucault 1978, 138).This proposition was underpinned by two processes, that is, the extermination of outsiders and, in this particular case, the purification of insiders.The focal point for the licensed killing was contrasting the apprehended specific lives in LNR and the unapprehended lives outside.If the latter groups did not deserve to live, their death was no loss (Butler 2009, 4).Determining who deserves to live and who does not, LNR or Russia more broadly was demonstrating its power over life and death.
The act of purification stretched beyond physical liquidation.A new "Russian World" identity was crafted for the insider class of people.By hampering interactions between the two conflicting zones the LNR was artificially boosting internal communication.The restricted transmission of information, values, and attitudes was aimed at shaping the "Russian World" population's ideological profile while filtering out alternative thinking.The principle of superiority for the insider caste was exercised through the words and deeds of Russian-backed separatists, including the killing of outsiders living on Ukraine-controlled territory.
Reduction of contact and segregation of people were instrumentalized to create a certain collective memory.In biopolitics, this is a means for manipulating popular beliefs about friends and enemies that are applied to mobilize societal support for mass destruction (Ronni 2012, 205).If we extrapolate Russian biopolitics to the broader context of the war, the invasion of Ukraine and the mobilization of the public both in Russia and partially in Donbas too was pursued on behalf of the living necessity, an existential need (Foucault 1978, 137) to protect the "Russian World" strata of society.

HANDLING THE CONTRADICTING REALITIES: THE IDEALISTIC VS. THE REALISTIC IMAGE OF THE UKRAINIAN ARMY
On September 5, Galina, 3 a retired math teacher, greeted us warmly at her house on the outskirts of Toreck, a coal-mining city, and offered to show us around.She was the first interlocutor we had met during the mission.After her husband's death from cancer, "I became a volunteer for Ukraine," she cheerfully explained.Galina had been devotedly helping the Ukrainian army since the beginning of the invasion in 2014 and had become a local symbol of civil resistance.
Galina: "I gave away my car to the boys when I started helping.I had an Opel Omega.They did not have anything but needed everything.I brought clothes and shoes.My husband had many uniforms: he was a senior police inspector," she said excitedly.Galina: "I made borsch and pirozhki and took them to the boys myself, around 40 to 60 liters per day.I hadn't cooked that much in my whole life as I did during the war," she laughed.She was an incredibly energetic and positively minded woman.
Personal Epistemology on the War in Ukraine in 2021 321 Galina: "My dear boys, I believe, I believe in you.Just please take care of Ukraine and yourselves," she said in an uplifting tone, as if praying fervently.
To me, Galina embodied motherly tenderness and internal strength.I felt proud of the boys myself, listening to her story and her inspirational way of telling it.I had imagined the Ukrainian army precisely this way."They will never give away territories of Ukraine," I thought, watching the smiling Galina in her modestly furnished but cozy kitchen.Flags from different countries hung on the wall behind her.She had supporters across the world.The war was her lifestyle, and her determination to resist was incredible. ÃÃÃ The visit to Avdiivka days later, on September 8, challenged and unpleasantly complicated my perception of the war.We arrived at the nine-story apartment building complex at the crossroads leading to the separatistcontrolled Donetsk and Yasinuvata.They were 10 km away, according to a traffic sign.There were half a dozen buildings; all were severely damaged, and some were missing window glass.Kostya explained that the devasted constructions had suffered targeted tank strikes years ago.They were located parallel to nearby non-controlled territory combatant positions, and so the buildings were targeted regularly these days, just as Avdiivaka was in general.(In October 2023 this was the site of a brutal battle which left Russia with huge losses of men and equipment -Editor) Yet some of the buildings appeared to be inhabited.As we approached I noticed a white-painted Ukrainian coat of arms on the entrance of one and instinctively linked that sign to Ukrainian army support.I was a great fan of the Ukrainian army myself, and so seeing that people think the same way here felt nice.In my pre-conceived reality, Ukrainian troops were the brave defenders of their country; they had an exceptional reputation.Great was my surprise to find a different type of sign on the third floor.A red handwritten text on white paper attached to the apartment door said Zhivut ljudi ("People live here"), while the sign on the neighboring apartment wall stated: Zhivut ljudi.Nichego net, prosba-nelamatj ("People live here.We have nothing here; a kind request-do not break down the door").I could not catch the underlying meaning."Obviously people live here.Why does anyone have to write it down?"I was confused.
Seconds later a young woman with a dog appeared on the staircase, so I asked her about the signs."The army lives in this house.They take our apartments when they feel like it, especially those uninhabited ones," she told me, annoyed.The lady claimed that the army I had imagined as conducting noble endeavors had left a mess behind."They leave dirt, broken furniture, and utility bills for the people who return home from an absence"; she kept on destroying my understandings."Furthermore, they store ammunition and weapons in apartments.But you know, we have children here.We don't want them in our house," she cried.These new facts were alarming.Her feeling of frustration and disgust gradually overwhelmed me.Latvia did not discuss misconduct in Ukraine's army, while Russia did.I did not know where to put the issues that I now faced in my knowledge system; I was seriously distressed (Figure 5).

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On September 11, I noticed a petite young girl wearing the Ukrainian army uniform standing in a queue at the minimarket in Zolote-1.That village lay right on the front line.She picked up an ice cream and waited for her turn with her comrades to pay.I had just finished talking to a lady injured by a shell while returning from her 90-year-old neighbor's home, where she was taking care of him.Ukrainian army troops were lodged in a nearby building.
I was waiting in a shopping line too.The petite girl caught my eye as she looked so fragile.Her skin was pale, almost transparent.She was like a porcelain doll in camouflage clothes."What is this angel doing on the front line?"I wondered.The stark contrast between her delicate appearance and her brutal profession bothered me so much that I could not resist, so I approached her outside.
Me: "How old are you?"Petite girl: "I'm 19."She seemed to me childish before she looked me in the eyes.I was 28 then, and often the youngest person among the people I networked with.Now I felt like a middle-aged woman but an immature one compared with this petite girl.I could not find a comfortable position in this conversation.Me: "You are very young!You are a soldier, right?What are your duties?"Petite girl: "I am a signaler.I make sure that the guys can communicate.I take care of wires.There are other girls in our team, and they cook."Me: "You are frequently under fire, aren't you?Aren't you scared?"Petite girl: "Of course I am.My guys have been injured.I saw them."An involuntary twitch of her left eye changed her face.Her voice was trembling as she gazed aside.I was unsure whether I should ask anything more.But then she continued.Petite girl: "I couldn't stay home.My brothers and my dad are in the military; they went to the front.When I turned 18, I applied for the service and underwent training.I am a contractor.I cannot stay home while they [the invading forces] are here.It is our land and our people.I know that we will win this war."I believed every word the girl said; she was not naïve or extremist.On the contrary, she was peaceful and smiled warmly at me.There was something intimate, sacral about this moment: it seemed to me that she had accepted the possibility of death and was ready to sacrifice herself in the name of her country.
Later on, I thought a lot about what would I do if war unfolded in Latvia, and I had no answer.
The outside stimuli that shattered my present understanding of the Ukrainian army led me to wonder why some information was embedded well while some did not, in my imaginary reality of the war.In his classic book Public Opinion Walter Lippmann provided a well-grounded explanation for that.Stereotyped thinking underpins our pattern-based outside-world perception.We see the world while affiliated with certain ideas; it is a mechanism of self-defense for the knower.Whether positive or negative, stereotypes are not neutral.Lippmann argues that if the lived experience contradicts the stereotype, the case is perceived as an exception and wiped from his mind by the "no longer plastic" knower.If one is flexible the stereotype is modified.But if the incident is striking enough one can distrust his view of life (Lippmann 1965).
Picking up on this, I argue that the sustainability of stereotypes stems not only from personal flexibility or level of shock.The importance of endangered myths for the sustainability of our core assumptions is equally meaningful.Instead of changing the worldview, as proposed by Lippmann, I assume we will tend to censor out or reduce the importance of facts that might counter our fundamental beliefs about good/bad or right/wrong as they are connected to the meanings of the elements in our imagined reality.If objective truth aims to deconstruct less existential stereotypes, adjusting them will be easier.Take me: I do not mind challenging my notions about people of color, while I am really uncomfortable altering my beliefs about the Ukrainian army.
Let me unpack this (Figure 6).My facing of the Ukrainian army's casual misconduct was nerve-wracking not because of the objective reality, it is that some Ukrainian military persons sometimes do wrong things.In fact, it was not even that the new knowledge implicitly confirmed some Russian state narratives.No, my distress was caused by the need to reposition the Ukraine army in my value system against the location of the Russian military, which held an inverse meaning for me.
Before the mission, I had attributed the best possible characteristics to the Ukrainian army.Justice, honor, and patriotism placed it in the "absolute good" category on my value scale.Should I have appended negative adjectives, the Ukrainian army would fall lower into a "very good" or "good" box.
The Russian army has been in my category of "absolute evil" since 2014, and I have not upgraded it since then.Troops fighting tooth and nail against this absolute evil could not be placed anywhere other than under the category of absolute good.I could not demean the Ukrainian army without causing unacceptable damage to its relative meaning vis-a-vis the meaning of the Russian army.Such a shift would foreground larger issues.It endangered the basic notions about what and who is good and bad in my self-constructed world.
Unless I could redefine the latter, my every attempt to reconsider the former ended with a harsh cognitive struggle.I was searching for pathways to eliminate details threatening my moral meanings equilibrium, with the imagined distance between the Ukrainian and Russian armies at its core until I could obtain new evidence proving my constructs right.The petite girl helped to re-secure the position of the Ukrainian army in my estimation; although I have to acknowledge that the extent to which the new information damages the existing perceptions is no less important, as pointed out by Lippmann.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
This article has illustrated my ontology of the war and my personal epistemology in the production of knowledge.I have demonstrated how my conflict reality was constructed and deconstructed during the human rights monitoring mission I was part of, through the interaction of my mind and personality with the phenomenon I encountered-the war.
Aware as I am of all the shortcomings in scope and depth, I am attempting to attest to the two principal intertwined claims.That the ontological worldmind monism can lead to valid scientific inferences and deserves more credit, including methodological credit, in International Relations research, is the first (supporting Patrick Jackson's writing).
My monist ontological stance and personal epistemology uncovered the multi-layered and unbounded truth about the war.Rather than the degree of critical examination of the objective reality, it has been how I am "hooked up" to the world and the pathways I have taken that have determined my perception of reality.In such a way, for me, from an abstract geopolitical situation, the war transformed into a standoff between authorities, military figures, and civilians of Ukraine and Russia, with devastating humanitarian and human suffering effects on the inhabitants of the war zone.The war takes place within a border clash of the "Russian World" and Western civilizations, where the former claims superiority over the latter to the extent of death.These claims, therefore, bring risks of war for other countries on the same border, particularly those with deep historical links with Russia, including Latvia.My new knowledge was not determined by the nature of things (Hacking 1999); instead, it was acquired through my engagement with them.
The world-mind worldview is important in its own right.It enables worthy and worldly knowledge about the mind's constructs that exist beyond the objective reality in our social world.The biopolitics of Russia, including the castigation of people for the creation of the "Russian World" people strata, which I observed at the LNR checkpoint, is emblematic.Unless one admits the existence of an invisible "Russian World" populace, including but not limited to LNR inhabitants, further knowledge-making about it is impossible.Otherwise, they are just random people who are or are not let in and out of the LNR.My monist ontology opened the door to knowledge about the difficulties of movement between Ukraine-controlled and non-controlled territories.But it also led to a wider understanding of social processes taking place within the "Russian World" concept in the war zone.
The stigmatization of the world-mind monism in social sciences for achieving impartial and non-contaminated truth with the author's beliefs (Krieger 1991, 47) risks alienating science from empirical reality.The proposition to keep the researcher completely separated from the research object denigrates the role of the knower in interpreting raw data.Facts themselves mean nothing; the researcher makes sense of them.The sociologist Norman Denzin formulates this precisely, citing Bernard Lonergan: "There are no subjects anywhere; for being a subject is not being something that is being looked at, it is being the one who is looking" (Denzin 1997, 34).From this perspective impartial science and mind-free truth are only possible without the researcher's analysis.Facts inevitably are looked at through the lens of bias, be it cultural, historical, or personal.Should we eliminate the knower from "the seeingknowing equation" (Springer 1991, 178) for the sake of pure science, we may end up descending to politically unimportant and meaningless knowledge.In turn, such truth-making may discredit science's value for real-life problemsolving.In the most extreme case, it could fully deconstruct the existing mindmade constructs, such as friend/enemy, aggressor/victim, and good/bad, all of which help us make sense of the surrounding world.
The second argument stipulates the value of personal experience in understanding the object of knowledge and the knowledge itself.The autoethnographic research method, often accused of self-indulgence (Sparkes 2002), can be helpful in this endeavor.I suggest that methodologies tearing down borders between the knower and the known lead to scientific findings just as valuable as those distancing the researcher from the research object.It is exactly the interplay between the researcher's personal features, beliefs, and historical background, and the object, culturally or situationally located, that generates new knowledge.To put it differently, the researcher can investigate the humanitarian conditions in the conflict zone by conducting detailed interviews with the inhabitants of Opytne.Or one can interact with, say, a selfmade brick oven in the building's yard in Opytne to learn about the humanitarian crisis in the conflict area.While the brick construction does not convey any meaning or knowledge in itself, my experience of using a similar device and the surrounding context of war, including destroyed utility infrastructure, provided that object with meaning and me with knowledge.It is simply another way of doing science.The same underlying logic applies to knowledge production from an aesthetic distance about the conflict in general.
The author's own experience is indispensable for grasping emotional and bodily knowledge, and is unobtainable in any other way.Unfortunately, International Relations tend to avoid bodily memories as a credible source of information (Ronni 2012, 205).My unmediated bodily confrontation with, say, fear added another layer to my perception of the war.The death fear in the firing zone significantly differs from its representations in narratives, images, or personal testimonies.The traumatic bodily experience foregrounded my reconsideration of military means for foreign policy purposes.This dimension of knowledge now seems instrumental for competent foreign and defense policy decision-making.By no means do I advocate pacifism, only thoughtful judgments.I also give a full account of the reality that foreign policy decisions are, as a matter of fact, made under constraints of time and available information.
My personal empirical findings additionally point to the usefulness of reflexive science in promoting social change (Jackson 2016).My physical presence in Ukraine urged me to engage in civil activism advocating support for Ukraine in the aftermath of the mission.This illustrates that science can empower societal transformation, which starts already within the academic community.The researcher, encouraged by her own research results, may convert from being a change-promoter into an active change-maker.
Finally, the self-introspection epistemology contributes to our understanding of the knowledge-making process.Reflexive auto-ethnography offers unique opportunities for producing knowledge about knowledge.Our perceptions are as much subject to acquiring data as omitting details according to individual filters.Only thoughtful self-reflection can track these patterns.The deeply unsettling situation for my idealistic assumptions about the Ukrainian army made me contemplate why I cannot accept certain information.Unpacking the truth's absolute and relative nature would be impossible without selfinvestigation.I argue that the tolerance of contradicting information is related to the importance of endangered myths for the sustainability of our core assumptions, which underpin normative ideas we attribute to the world around us.Should the outside trigger attempt to erect our fundamental beliefs about good/bad or right/wrong embedded in the meanings of our reality elements, we will likely censor out or reduce the importance of such facts.If objective truth deconstructs less important stereotypes, their adjustment will be easier.Although the shock level and the flexibility of the knower for imagined reality are important, as Walter Lippmann argues, the endangered myth itself is no less significant in this equation.

Figure 1
Figure 1 View down the highway to Donetsk.(Photo by the author, September 2021)

Figure 2 A
Figure 2 A devasted house in Novoselivka Druha.(Photo by the author, September 2021)

Figure 3
Figure 3 Myself experiencing the fear of death in Verkhnotoretske during the shelling.(Photo by the author, September 2021)

PersonalFigure 4
Figure 4 Crossing into the so-called Luhansk People's Republic at Stanyta Luhanskaya checkpoint.(Photo by the author, September 2021)

Figure 5
Figure 5 The Ukrainian coat of arms on the building in Avdiivka, and text on the wall in the same building.(Photo by the author, September 2021)

Figure 6 A
Figure 6 A perception-building scheme.(Formed by the author)