Never before have the eyes and ears of the whole world been on Ukraine as much as they are now due to a full-scale war launched by Russia in February 2022. There are opinions about this war being the start of WWIII, for it poses innumerable risks not just to Ukraine, but globally as well. Specialists in various areas of expertise are engaged in searching for the optimal solutions to the multiple problems that this massacre in the middle of the European continent has initiated and might further generate universally. This makes the book under review an extremely timely and propitious volume, elucidating political, social, cultural, and linguistic dimensions of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The book is an assortment of thematically linked chapters that focus on the discursive practices preceding the actual physical invasion, investigate the specifics of verbal aggression and propaganda, and disclose evaluative and persuasive elements of conflictual communication. Methodologically situated within the framework of critical discourse analysis, the volume recognizes and unveils the leading role of language and discourse in provoking, instigating, and maintaining the conflict. The book contains thirteen chapters, each exploring multifaceted and complex issues from verbal aggression, identity work, and discursive framing of the conflict, to coping strategies and refugee communication.
Some parts of the volume deal with parliamentary communication. For instance, the first chapter, by Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe, offers a comprehensive corpus-linguistic study of parliamentary discourse in Ukraine and Russia during the sad events in the Donbass and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. It discloses the differences and similarities in the dominating ideologies of the two parliaments, their visions of the conflict, and their respective official stances on the disputed problems. In chapter 10, Halyna Mokrushyna makes a comprehensive critical analysis of Andriy Biletsky's political discourse, as manifested in his blog on the Ukrainska Pravda website, his interviews, and some other of his writings. The zest of this character choice is that Andriy Biletsky is not only a politician and a deputy of Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament), but also the first Commander of the Azov battalion.
Several chapters deal with metaphorization of Russian-Ukrainian war discourse. In chapter 2, political conflict is treated as a discursive act of violence, and the study presents a comparative analysis of the conflict's metaphorical representation in presidential speeches of Poroshenko and Putin, addressed to international audiences. The author, Liudmila Arcimavičienė, explicates how conflict scenarios can be created metaphorically, even in diplomatic communication. Through systematic metaphor analysis, the ideological foundations of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia are identified. This chapter envisages the significance of the Ukraine crisis in international relations, showing it as a turning point in the relationship between the Russian Federation and the West. In chapter 5, Olga Baysha also resorts to the analysis of metaphorical representation of the conflict, but with the focus on the role of dehumanizing metaphors in facilitating antagonism and radicalization. The online usage of such terms as maidowns, panheads, kolorady, and sovok was traced to offer insight into the Euromaidan-related antagonistic discursive behaviour. Chapter 6, by Daniel Weiss, deals with the metaphorical representation of Ukraine in Russian government statements, parliamentary debates, and the press. In the analysed data, Ukraine is conceptualized via contradictory family metaphors that play a prominent role in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: in one respect Ukraine is considered ‘a stepmother’ but ‘a stillborn baby’ in another. The patterns of such inconsistent metaphoric mappings reveal the underlying reasons for the conflictual relations between the two nations.
In chapter 3, Ewa Szkudlarek-Śmiechowicz & Izabella Błaszczyk deal with the discursive construction of the Ukrainian crisis in the Polish media operating in Ukraine. Considering the unprecedented support Poland is providing to Ukraine in the current stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war, this study is a precious source of information on Polish-Ukrainian conceptualization of the crisis in the pre-war times. Chapter 4 examines the novel insulting blends that exploit the surnames of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, as they were used in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Such hybrid names as Putler (Putin + Hitler) or Parashenko (parasha (piss can) + Poroshenko) have derogatory connotations and often express the speaker's/writer's negative attitude to the named person. The authors, Natalia Beliaeva & Natalia Knoblock, prove the hypothesis that blended names are used in more informal ways and bear more emotionality than their unblended counterparts.
Chapter 7 investigates identity negotiation in contemporary Ukraine. The data for this study comes from interviews conducted with thirty-eight young Ukrainian adults in a period during 2014 and 2015. According to the authors, Natalia Beliaeva & Corinne A. Seals, the national identity of Ukrainians is ‘an identity in transition’. In this respect, the discursive choice between the pronouns we/our/us and they/their/them is particularly interesting, as the use of these pronouns is related to the formation of imaginary ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ identities. In chapter 8, Alla Nedashkivska analyses the stances and beliefs about language(s) in Ukraine in the time of the crisis. The study focuses on online media where the language matters following the Maidan revolution of 2013–2014 are discussed. Examined online media texts revealed four prominent language ideologies in Ukraine: language as a national and state symbol of Ukraine, the ‘mother tongue’ or native language activism, ‘democratic’ bilingualism, and plurilingualism and internal diversity.
Chapter 9 deals with the detailed description of a forced transformation of identities the residents of the Donbass region were undergoing due to the attempts to legitimize and strengthen the ‘statehood’ of self-proclaimed separatist ‘republics’. Yulia Abibok analyses the speeches of the de facto authorities of the newly created ‘states’ on the occasions of Russian Unity Day, Russia Day, and the new Republic Day—newly introduced holidays to the newly established ‘statelets’, with the main analytic focus on their ideological value. The next chapter demonstrates how a combination of activism and artistry can be deployed in promotion of certain views and ideologies. Analysing a YouTube video in which Ukrainian soldiers (re)create a well-known painting by Ilya Repin that depicts Cossacks writing an insulting reply to the Turkish sultan, the author, Alla Tovares, discloses the expressive potential of multimodal repetition and intertextuality in the context of a Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical conflict.
In chapter 12, Yaroslava Sazonova shows how humour can be successfully employed for pragmatic purposes of non-violent resistance to stress and fear. The material for this study consists of humorous blog texts by the blogger nicknamed Did Svyryd Opanasovych, dating from 2014 to 2016. The analysis reveals that ridicule is a commonly used discursive strategy in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It serves the function of non-violent political and social resistance, facilitates solidarity in opposing the enemy, mobilizes like-minded people, stigmatizes opponents, and, as a result, reduces fear. The last chapter of this volume is an attempt to compare the representations of refugees and migrants in Western mass media with those in the Russian and Ukrainian press. Ludmilla A'Beckett comes to the conclusion that persistent empathetic claims in Russo-Ukrainian refugee discourse indicate that the main ideological claims concerning refugees from Eastern Ukraine to other regions of Ukraine and to the country-aggressor are similar. At the same time, they differ from beliefs about migration expressed in the Western media, where the migrants’ images evoke fear rather than compassion.
One of the prominent features of the volume under review is its evident impartiality. All of the authors excel in equally representing the opposing positions of the antagonistic countries—participants of this largely discursively constructed battle that unfortunately resulted in a battlefield. This book might be of interest to researchers involved in investigating the role of language and discourse in the processes of social semiosis. Consequently, these are linguists, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists that will greatly benefit from reading this volume. Some of the chapters could be used in academic courses of sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and communication theory. The book might also be a precious source of information for anybody wishing to better understand the essence of the current military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
