Discussion
In September 2022, seven months after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia found itself in need of more troops to continue its war. To fill the gaps in manpower, the government announced a "partial mobilisation" (частичная мобилизация) which would see 300,000 men from across the country drafted into the military and sent to Ukraine.
The announcement was met with resentment by the Russian population, with protests taking place in many major cities and a reported 200,000 people fleeing the country in the first week of the draft. The state was thus met with a necessity to justify the "partial mobilisation" to the nation while keeping up appearances of the might of the Russian army.State-controlled television, particularly evening news programme "Vremya" (Время, Time) airing on the biggest Russian TV channel "Pervyi Kanal” (Первый Канал, Channel One) can be considered one of the main platforms for the legitimation of the mobilisation. This study analyses the broadcast of "Vremya" that aired on the evening of 21 September 2022, the day the "partial mobilisation" was announced, in order toidentify legitimation strategies used by the programme in relation to the event.
The analytical framework used combines and builds upon legitimation classifications proposed by Van Leeuwen (2007) and Reyes (2011) and encompasses 8 strategies: authority, reasoning, past/future imaginaries, morality, altruism, emotions, and symbolic annihilation. The full broadcast is coded manually by sentence for these eight strategies. The analysis is conducted in original Russian, with the data being translated through online software and the translations manually changed/adjusted in order to share results with non-Russian-speaking audiences.
I expect the results to align with a previous study I conducted on the “Vremya” broadcast dated 24/02/2022, the start of the full-scale invasion. There, I found that the authority strategy is used to position Putin as the center of legitimation, and different influential politicians at home and abroad are presented as supporting the president, thus creating a sense of a universal consensus of the necessity to invade. Similarly, I expect to see the legitimation of the “partial mobilisation” to be rooted in Vladimir Putin’s authority. What is more, at the start of the invasion the Russian army was legitimised through moral evaluation and reasoning by being portrayed as treating the Ukrainian Armed forces with respect and dignity while avoiding civilian casualties. These traits were also frequently juxtaposed to supposed shortcomings of Ukrainian soldiers who were framed as hiding behind civilians and committing other human rights offences. Therefore, in relation to the draft I expect to find more legitimation and glorification of the Russian army through similar means.
