Online Pravda’s Communicative Intentions Regarding the War in Ukraine: A CDA-Based Study of the Website’s Opinion Articles

Abstract

This research paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), aimed to uncover how the opinion articles published on Pravda.ru discursively depicted the war in Ukraine and the parties involved. To achieve this, two elements of CDA analysis, namely presupposition and structural opposition, were examined. The first element was scrutinized to determine how Pravda.ru depicted the war in Ukraine (RQ1), while the second element was analyzed to understand how Pravda.ru portrayed the parties involved, whether directly or indirectly, in the war (RQ2). For this study, 83 articles were subject to critical discourse analysis, covering the period from February 25, 2022, to February 24, 2023, the first year of the war. The results obtained from this study indicated that Pravda.ru employed various techniques to construct presuppositions and structural oppositions. Pravda.ru portrayed the war as a 'special military operation' and a 'proxy war.' The former, characterized as a euphemism, aimed to mitigate the impact of the word, presupposing that the events did not constitute aggression against Ukraine. The latter presupposed that Russia was a victim of a conspiracy. Furthermore, the results revealed that Pravda.ru used stigmatization and religious affiliations and terms to construct structural oppositions.