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

始于2022年2月24日的俄乌战争立即成为全世界关注的焦点。双方似乎已经有数万人伤亡（Ljunggren et al., 2022），更不用说近800万乌克兰人逃离战争造成的欧洲难民危机（“乌克兰难民局势”，2022）。毫不奇怪，如此重大的问题会引起包括语言学在内的跨学科学者的关注，特别是在批评话语研究（CDS）领域。例如，Ebim等人（2022）研究了普京的演讲，并注意到他为“特殊军事行动”辩护，认为这是保卫俄罗斯免受“乌克兰威胁”所必需的。近年来，俄罗斯国有电视台也受到了研究，这类研究的重点往往是对乌克兰局势的描述。Kaltseis（2021）使用CDS和隐喻分析分析了俄罗斯吞并克里米亚期间电视谈话节目中的隐喻，Khaldarova（2021）采用多模态方法揭示了亲欧示威后乌克兰的形象如何从“兄弟”转变为“敌人”。然而，上述对俄罗斯政府控制的电视台的所有研究都是在2022年2月之前进行的，当时冲突升级，这也迫使政府的官方话语做出调整，对乌克兰人变得更加敌对，以使“特殊军事行动”合法化。更重要的是，俄罗斯政府的话语及其在电视上的表现似乎根本没有被研究过与入侵有关的问题。

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.