Legitimation of the Invasion of Ukraine by Russian State-Affiliated Television Programmes: Framing and Blaming

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The Russia-Ukraine war that started on 24 February 2022 has immediately become the centre of the world's attention. There already appears to be tens of thousands of casualties on both sides (Ljunggren et al., 2022), not to mention the refugee crisis in Europe caused by almost 8 million Ukrainians fleeing the war ("Ukraine Refugee Situation", 2022). It comes as no surprise that an issue of such magnitude would attract scholarly attention across disciplines, including linguistics, particularly in the field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). For example, Ebim et al. (2022) study Putin's speeches and note that he justifies the "special military operation" by arguing that it was required to defend Russia from "Ukrainian threats".Russian state-affiliated television has been studied in the recent years as well, and the focus of such research has often been the depiction of the situation in Ukraine. Kaltseis (2021) uses CDS and metaphor analysis to analyse metaphors in Russian TV talk shows during the annexation of Crimea, and Khaldarova (2021) adopts the multimodal approach to uncover how Ukraine's portrayal changed from "brother" to "enemy" after Euromaidan. However, all of the aforementioned research into Russian government-controlled television has been conducted before February 2022, when the conflict escalated, which also forced the official government discourse to adapt and become even more hostile to Ukrainians in order to legitimise the "special military operation". What is more, the Russian government discourse and its manifestation on television seems to not have been studied in relation to the invasion at all.