Політичні дослідження (Nov 2021)
The Russian-Ukrainian War in Ukrainian Political Discourse
Abstract
The proposed article aims to explore the discursive dynamics of Ukraine caused by the Russian-Ukrainian war. The semantic and pragmatic dominants of relevant political texts were revealed by the method of discursive and content analysis. The article considers the peculiarities of the political discourse of Ukraine after the beginning of the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine in 2014. Discursive changes in wartime are analyzed through comparisons with the pre-war state, the leading feature of which was the mode of „brotherhood” with Russia.In the course of the analysis it was established that there was no logical immediate change to a „hostile” discourse with the beginning of the Russian aggression. Ukraine was unprepared for an adequate response to Russia's military aggression not only in real but also in discursive terms. Instead, a euphemistic complex was formed in Ukrainian political discourse to present Russia's aggressive actions as something else, something different. In this regard, an attempt is made to analyze the reasons for the belated response of Ukrainian society, especially the leading echelon of Ukrainian politics, to external aggression.Particular attention as a reason for this state of affairs is paid to post-totalitarian influences, which remain relevant to the socio-political dynamics of Ukraine. Among the key ones is the lack of a full-fledged historical and political narrative and the reproduction of mental schemes of the totalitarian past.Along with this, positive changes in the representation of the Russian-Ukrainian military confrontation as such were identified and studied. The discursive mechanisms of creating a narrative adequate to the military situation and discursive means that oppose Russian aggression are analyzed. At the same time, it was found that in the process of forming a specific discursive order, certain canons and standards of the former metropoly remain relevant in the Ukrainian context. First of all, it concerns the inclusion of substandard elements in the official communicative repertoire as a tool of information confrontation in hybrid aggression.The article concludes that a holistic historical and political narrative is the cornerstone for the formation of national and state identity. Without this, the establishment of a full-blooded state subjectivity of Ukraine appears to be an extremely difficult task. In modern Ukrainian realities, we have not a uniquely specific political discourse as part of a detailed historical and political narrative, but a post-totalitarian discursive surrogate, in the mirror of which even the contrasting notions of war and peace lose the necessary clarity.
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