THE CONCEPT OF NOVOROSSIA AS DISCURSIVE MARKER OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION’S AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/folia.philologica/2024/7/3Keywords:
concept Novorossiya, discourse-forming role, discourse, narrative, national resilience, information operationAbstract
Language plays one of the key roles in shaping national resilience, which is especially true in the discourse of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. How we speak about ourselves and the enemy; how we name citizens who have suffered from the Russian war crimes; whether we agree with the concepts that Russia is actively incorporated into the global political discourse – all of these issues are crucial for the resilience of society resisting the enemy`s destructive information influence. One of the markers of the hostile Russian discourse is the concept of Novorossiya, which has been manipulated for a long time. Today, this concept is the cognitive basis of the Russian narrative “Novorossia is Anti-Ukraine” and its debunking is important for ensuring Ukraine’s information security. The purpose of the article is to investigate the discourse-forming role of the Novorossiya concept in the 2014–2024 Russian propaganda based on discourse and content analyses using Big Data technology. The article proves that the concept of Novorossiya was actively used in Russian propaganda discourses in 2014–2015 to join eight southeastern regions of Ukraine into a single entity. This idea has been rooted for a while only in certain areas of Luhansk and Donetsk regions. In 2024, the Russian Federation began to revive the Novorossiya project and used a new concept, DONBAS AND NOVOROSSIA, with a cognitive and pragmatic focus on several objectives, such as to demonstrate the successes of the “SVO” and the worthwhile human loss to the Russian citizens; to raise the status of Donbas, which has allegedly “took the path of returning home” and can help residents of the “breakaway” regions of Ukraine; to outline prospects for residents of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and those that Russia plans to occupy. The discourse analysis proved that Russia’s communication strategy to revive the “Novorossiya project” is a marker of both Russia’s political encroachment and the vector of further military escalation.
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