The joint victory of the Soviet-Mongolian forces in the battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 laid the historical and moral-ideological foundation that became an important resource of Russian-Mongolian relations in the post-socialist period. The article analyzes the mechanisms of constructing historical memory of the events at Khalkhin Gol and the factors that transformed this victory into a significant symbolic resource in bilateral interaction. The author examines the historical context of the conflict, the debate over its terminological definition, the geopolitical consequences of the victory, and the place of Khalkhin Gol in Mongolian and Russian commemorative narratives. Particular attention is paid to the post-socialist period: anniversary events, high-level visits, restoration and erection of monuments, youth expeditions, exhibitions, academic conferences and publications. The article concludes that the memory of Khalkhin Gol performs a stabilizing function: it maintains the image of “battle brotherhood”, structures the rhythm of interstate contacts and legitimizes strategic partnership by referring to a shared victorious past.

The article examines the United Arab Emirates’ role in Iraq’s post-conflict reconstruction in 2018–2024. It analyzes key political, humanitarian and economic aspects of interaction between the two countries, including the development of energy cooperation, infrastructure investment projects and UNESCO-supported reconstruction programs. Particular attention is given to the Development Road Project, a transport and logistics initiative linking Iraq’s southern regions with Turkey’s Mediterranean coast and potentially strengthening the Iraqi economy. The study explores foreign policy differences and points of convergence between the UAE and Iraq, particularly regarding the normalization of relations with Israel and regional security amid the Arab-Israeli conflict. The relevance of the topic stems from the search for effective ways to restore post-conflict states and from the growing role of regional actors in this process. The article analyzes the doctrinal principles of both countries’ foreign policies and introduces Arabic-language sources into Russian scholarly discourse.

The article examines the cultural connections between legends and natural as well as man-made monuments. The author analyzes monuments in folk legends as elements of cultural symbolism that reveal their significance from the perspective of cultural studies. The study is based on several key legends about monuments included in the Collection of Chinese Folk Tales. Two types of legends are identified: those explaining the origin of monuments and those explaining their characteristics. Within the first group, the article considers stories connected with historical figures, Daoist ideas of immortality, the spirit of traditional culture and motifs of folk literature. The study concludes that the relationship between local monuments and legends is essentially a process of symbolization: legends endow natural and man-made objects with names, spiritual content and memory, transforming them from physical objects into cultural symbols that carry collective memory, value systems and spiritual beliefs. The article also notes that Russian electronic academic databases contain no specialized studies devoted directly to legends about monuments, which makes the cultural analysis of this material a promising research area.

The article provides the first comparative analysis of themes and imagery related to World War II in both essays and fiction of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955). The programmatic essays “A Personal View of Japanese Culture” (1942) and “Discourse on Decadence” (1946) are examined, in which Sakaguchi expresses his view of Japanese culture and human nature, drawing on wartime ideological stances and his personal experience of the war. From Sakaguchi’s prose fiction, the short stories “The Idiot” (1946) and “Mr. Sun-Moon” (1949) are used as material for the study: the former describes the bombing of Tokyo from the perspective of an ordinary Japanese person, while the latter depicts a sense of loss in the postwar social crisis. The analysis shows that Sakaguchi preferred to interpret wartime experience through the lens of Buddhism, considering destruction and defeat as a particular example of the fragility of human nature. He presents a way out of the prevailing situation as paradoxical rebirth through the experience of tragedy or transgression.