National Identity in Media Discourses from Russia and Ukraine: Amid the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War

Abstract

Summary This paper, based on the corpus of the news from TASS and UKRINFORM between February 24 and March 5, 2022, investigates different concerns of the two media platforms regarding conflict discourses, and analyzes their different naming strategies of social actors from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA). It is found that Russian and Ukrainian media attempted to construct different national identities for each other through distinct discourse strategies. The Russian TASS named Ukraine a security threat while including Donbas as Russia’s in-group member. It also utilized out-group discourse strategies to exclude western countries, such as the United States, from its friend circle. The Ukrainian media discourse from UKRINFORM, however, grouped Ukraine itself together with western countries allied with the United States while stigmatizing Russia and excluding the Donbas region. The current research shows that the politically driven principle is commonly used in the media discourses from TASS and UKRINFORM as the representative national media of the two countries.