Authors

Discussion

This paper presents a corpus-based CDA investigation of discursive strategies centring on the lexical node Ukrainian in official statements issued by Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations during Russia’s war against Ukraine (2022–2025). First, collocations and anchored n-grams are analysed to identify recurring templates (e.g., “Ukrainian missile”, “Ukrainian neo-Nazis,” “the expired Ukrainian president”). Second, the agency of Ukrainian/Ukrainians is captured by examining agent/patient roles in the concordance lines guided by active/passive forms and “by”-phrases (e.g., “Ukrainian armed forces and radicals were shelling and bombing Donetsk and Lugansk”, “war crimes by the Ukrainian armed forces”). Next, the recurring templates are analysed through the lens of topoi, revealing consistent argumentative patterns around Ukrainian as propagated by the Russian Mission (e.g., “illegitimacy”, “Western puppetry/proxy”, “denazification”, Russian self-defence/legalism). Findings indicate a stable negative semantic prosody around Ukrainian, embedded in recurring derogatory constructions that delegitimise Ukrainian statehood and shift blame for aggression onto the “Ukrainian nationalists”. Concordance examples illustrate how these templates are staged in the UN setting, highlighting the Mission’s function as a high-volume conduit for Kremlin propagandistic narratives. In effect, the UN floor is being used to mainstream the anti-Ukraine framing for a global audience.