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Part of
Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 265–290

Chapter 11
Displaced Ukrainians

Russo-Ukrainian discussions of victims from the conflict zone in Eastern Ukraine

This paper compares several discourse representations of migrants in the British media with the data on Ukrainian displaced people from the conflict zone in Eastern Ukraine. The comparison shows that mainstream media in Russia and Ukraine attempt to depict displaced Ukrainians sympathetically, to win the hearts and minds of the people from the disputed conflict zone and to evoke approval from the international community. Participants in online debates in both countries actively use different techniques of negativisation of the images of migrants. They often either rely on a novel vocabulary for abuses or adapt old disparaging expressions activating cultural prejudices. The paper concludes that Russian and Ukrainian sets of abuse developed during the confrontation reinforce the specifics of the national vision of the conflict development.

Keywords: humanitarianism, negativisation, numerical elements, scroungers, catastrophe scenario, Russia, Ukraine, social media, official media, stereotypes, disparaging expressions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
  • 3.“Numbers”, “figures”, and “masses”: Are they perceived as a threat?
    • 3.1Numbers and figures
    • 3.2Masses of water
  • 4.Agents of evil as activators of topoi of economic burden and threat
    • 4.1Use of “parasite”-terminology
    • 4.2Russian stereotypes about Ukrainians
    • 4.3New names for terrorists and victims of propaganda
  • 5.Representations of victims and aggressors
    • 5.1Refugees as victims
    • 5.2Blending victims and persecutors
    • 5.3IDPs as supporters of the aggressor
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.12abe
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Moen-Larsen, Natalia
2020. “Suitcase – shelling – Russia”: narratives about refugees from Ukraine in Russian media. East European Politics 36:1 ► pp. 124 ff. DOI logo
Palomino-Manjón, Patricia
2022. Book Review: Natalia Knoblock (ed.), Language of Conflict: Discourses of the Ukrainian Crisis. Discourse Studies 24:1 ► pp. 135 ff. DOI logo

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