External enemies in contemporary disinformation discourse on the russia-ukraine war /

With the rise of social media outlets, it has become much easier to spread and consume disinformation, where one side is blaming the other and as some scholars notice, this discourse has become a battlefield for some politicians, where they seek to damage the reputation of one another. A great amount of research has been done on the topic of disinformation, but not so much on the “external enemies” in disinformation discourses, which this thesis dealth with while analysing the speeches given by V. Putin and V. Zelenskyy. The subject of the thesis is the semantic marker “external enemies” in contemporary disinformation discourse concerning the Russia-Ukraine war from February 24, 2022, until February 28, 2022. The aim of the Bachelor thesis is to compare the semantic marker “external enemies” used in public speeches given by Putin and Zelenskyy about the Russia-Ukraine war. In order to achieve the aim, the following objectives have been set: 1. To examine scientific literature on disinformation, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the semantic marker “external enemies”. 2. To categorise the “external enemies” used in the transcripts of speeches given by Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 3. To analyse the “external enemies” in the collected speeches. In the first part of this thesis, scientific literature was analysed, where insights on the definition of fake news and its categories, including disinformation, the techniques of disinformation spread, the Russia-Ukraine war, the semantic marker “external enemies” and diversionary war theory. In the second part a research tool was created with 5 types of “external enemies”, to which the collected samples from the speeches given by Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy from February 24, 2022, until February 28, 2022, were categorised accordingly. In the analysis a qualitative method was applied and used to determine and analyse the types of “external enemies” that were used in the speeches given by the previously mentioned politicians. During the analysis it was noticed that both politicians blamed Foreign Governments the most. Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine’s politicians, the West and its allies and the US and its allies in this type. Volodymyr Zelenskyy mostly blamed Russia and its military, then Belarus and other foreign governments. Supranational Alliances type had only 16 cases from both presidents. V. Putin blamed NATO itself, while V. Zelenskyy was not happy about the silence from the other countries on Ukraine’s acceptance into NATO. International Organisations had only 4 cases all of whom were from the president of Russia, Lastly, the least used “external enemy” types were Hacker Groups or Cyber Threat Actors and The Supernatural, which were used only once in each type and only by V. Zelenskyy. There he noticed that many fakes were being produced and he compared Russia to an evil entity out of this world. It is also worth noting that the transcripts of speeches posted on kremlin.ru showed that Vladimir Putin does not tend to speak directly to the audience as much as V. Zelenskyy does, where he uses rhetorical language to appeal to the audience that he is talking to.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Janutytė, Deimantė,

• dezinformacija, išoriniai priešai, Rusijos ir Ukrainos karas, diversinio karo teorija, naratyvinė analizė, disinformation, external enemies, Russia-Ukraine war, diversionary war theory, narrative analysis

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210587116&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210587116