This book focuses on the war in Ukraine and how politicians commented on this issue in the first months after the invasion. The reactions of heads of state to the Russian invasion of Ukraine have varied, even in the democratic world. While an overwhelming rejectionist view was expressed in Western Europe, politicians in some Central and Eastern European have demonstrated a difficulty seeing the Kremlin as the culprit for the war. The main aims of the book are to examine how politicians in selected countries reacted to the war, to identify the main actors of the political discourse and how the political elites formed their positions, to analyze the content of the discourse and how the various supported or opposing positions on the war were formulated, and to examine the linguistic means and strategies employed by the political elite. The authors examined political discourse in Slovakia, Hungary, France, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Austria, and compared and contrasted the features of political discourse in countries with a long democratic tradition with those in Central and Eastern European countries which were under non-democratic regimes before 1989. There seems to be a tendency to push political discourse to a different plane in countries with a communist experience, as we found solid, pro-Russian sentiments in Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic that can attenuate attitudes towards Russian aggression.

Zusammenfassung: This book explores the discursive dimension of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It analyzes how political leaders, mass media, social media, and ordinary people in Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France discuss the war. War propaganda and counterpropaganda structure discourses about the invasion, strengthening post-truth conditions. The book highlights the consequences of the growing distrust in the institutional truth-teller, mass media. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the first social media war. Social media became the principal source of information about the invasion. The rise of digital media did not change the tendency of the discourses about war to be territorially segregated according to national boundaries. Nationalization of discourses about war continues to prevail over their globalization. The corpora containing more than 180 million words in four languages inform the analysis. The data was collected during the first year and a half of Russia's all-out war in Ukraine. Dr. Anton Oleinik is a professor of sociology who taught in Canada (Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's), Kazakstan (Academy of Public Administration, Astana), Mongolia (National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar) and Russia (Smolny College, St. Petersburg). His areas of expertise are political sociology, social data science, text-as-data, content analysis and mixed methods research. He previously authored Building Ukraine from Within: A Sociological, Institutional and Economic Analysis of a Nation-State in the Making, The Invisible Hand of Power: An Economic Theory of Gatekeeping, Market as a Weapon: The Socio-Economic Machinery of Dominance in Russia and Organized Crime, Prison and Post-Soviet Societies

The book offers a detailed analysis on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A book needs to be written on this to make sense, from a theoretical perspective, why this invasion has occurred and what the main actors are pursuing. The originality rests on testing main international relations theories: realism, liberalism and constructivism to the war that emerges with the practices and approaches during the Cold War to date from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Soviet Union (and now Russia) and Ukraine. The monograph commences with a historical overview of NATO and how it has engaged in expansionism policy to further contain Russia in contemporary international affairs with the accession of additional former Soviet states. This helps to explain the current Russian invasion of Ukraine that would attract great readership. The main argument presented rests on the pursuance of realist interests by NATO, Ukraine and Russia for containment, national security interests and as a response to the security dilemma respectively. This has served as the main catalyst of this conflict that has made diplomacy, international law and collective security measures problematic to implement.

This collection focuses on Ukraine’s ethno-cultural minorities who in recent years have undergone forced displacement, emigration, the destruction of familiar ways of life, and a transformation of identity and language behaviour. The book examines the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which began with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas in 2014. It shows what happens to the cultural identities of minority groups and considers the mechanisms and components of their resilience in times of crisis. Key themes addressed include minorities’ collective memory and coping strategies, mobilisation and humanitarianism, forced displacement, and the preservation of identity. While most works on the Russo-Ukrainian war focus on the international context and the causes of the war and its humanitarian consequences for the population of Ukraine and the region as a whole, this book seeks to mainstream the issue of ethno-cultural minorities, which is often neglected in the coverage of this type of conflict. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of Law, Political Science, Anthropology, Human Geography, Religious Studies and War and Peace Studies.

Beyond the Euromaidan examines the prospects for advancing reform in Ukraine in the wake of the February 2014 Euromaidan revolution and Russian invasion. It examines six crucial areas where reform is needed: deep internal identity divisions, corruption, the constitution, the judiciary, plutocratic "oligarchs," and the economy. On each of these topics, the book provides one chapter that focuses on Ukraine's own experience and one chapter that examines the issue in the broader context of international practice. Placing Ukraine in comparative perspective shows that many of the country's problems are not unique and that other countries have been able to address many of the issues currently confronting Ukraine. As with the constitution, there are no easy answers, but careful analysis shows that some solutions are better than others. Ultimately, the authors propose a series of reforms that can help Ukraine make the best of a bad situation. The book stresses the need to focus on reforms that might not have immediate effect, but that comparative experience shows can solve fundamental contextual challenges. Finally, the book shows that pressures from outside Ukraine can have a strong positive influence on reform efforts inside the country.

The proposed volume reflects on the Coronavirus pandemic as a still evolving phenomenon and captures critically its socially constructed dimension. The papers by well-established international contributors deal with a variety of themes that range from the different discourses of the first and second lockdown; the comparative responses to Covid in different parts of the world, in light of the relationship between language and culture; and the reflection of who the actors are, who talk and are talked about, in relation to the pandemic. This last theme, in particular, offers a wide variety of responses, from politicians’ and health experts’ communiqués to the voices of marginal individuals and groups like the refugees. The overall questions the papers as a whole try to answer is whether the discourses of and around Covid are equalizing or inciting inequality, whether they perpetuate existing structures of dominance and exclusion and if and how they contributed to language change. The volume offers an opportunity to both discourse analysts and sociolinguists to cross paths and work together. The variety of analytic approaches adopted in both linguistic fields, from corpus-assisted and computational approaches, to survey and interview-based studies, guarantees a ground-breaking interdisciplinary volume, with contributions designed to include linguistic analysis at all levels including the plane of grammatical description, lexis, phonology and discourse analysis.

Exploring the ways in which language and conflict are intertwined and interrelated, this volume examines the patterns of public discourse in Ukraine and Russia since the beginning of the Ukrainian Crisis in 2014. It investigates the trends in language aggression, evaluation, persuasion and other elements of conflict communication related to the situation. Through the analysis of the linguistic features of salient discourses and prevalent narratives constructed by different social groups, Language of Conflict reflects competing worldviews of various stakeholders in this conflict and presents multiple, often contradictory, visions of the circumstances. Contributors from Ukraine, Russia and beyond investigate discursive representations of the most important aspects of the crisis: its causes and goals, participants and the values and ideologies of the opposing factions. They focus on categorization, stance, framing, (de)legitimation, manipulation and coping strategies while analysing the ways in which the stress produced by social discord, economic hardship, and violence shapes public discourse. Primarily focusing on informal communication and material gathered from online sources, the collection provides insight into the ways people directly affected by the crisis think about and respond to it. The volume acknowledges the communicators' active role in constructing the (often incompatible) discursive images of the conflict and concentrates on the conscious and strategic use of linguistic resources in negative and aggressive communication.

Declared the country's official language in 1996, Ukrainian has weathered constant challenges by post-Soviet political forces promoting Russian. Michael Moser provides the definitive account of the policies and ethno-political dynamics underlying this unique cultural struggle.

In Volume Three of this four-volume series, we examine the rhetorical development that occurred during the first two terms of Vladimir Putin’s tenure as president of the Russian Federation. Initially, Putin appeared to follow in the path set by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, vowing that Russia was, at heart, a European nation and would be a westward facing democracy going forward. He even mentioned partnering with the EU and NATO. Eight years later, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin excoriated the West for, in his words, attempting to create a “unipolar world” in which NATO expansion threatened Russia’s security, the United States acted as the world’s sole “hegemon,” and Europe simply followed orders, relinquishing any sense of agency in its own affairs.