WORLD LEADERS’ RHETORIC AS A MARKER OF THEIR STANCE ON UKRAINE WAR
Abstract
Language has always been a powerful tool in the world of politics and diplomacy. Public statements delivered by world leaders both define the developments on the global arena and reflect expectations of voters in their home countries. In times of crisis, the weight of what people of power say increases considerably and has an immediate impact on the state of things in the world. Since Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in the East of Ukraine in 2014, it can be seen how political statements of the world leaders and diplomats have mirrored their stance on the aggression and the aggressor. This article analyzes the language of the public statements delivered by the US President Joe Biden, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the French President Emmanuel Macron at two time points – in February-March 2022, shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in May 2022, after the world had seen the atrocities committed by the aggressor. The aim of the analysis was to find linguistic evidence for the popular opinion about the uneven stance of the leaders of the United States, the UK, Germany and France towards Russia and personally Putin in the context of Ukraine war and to see whether the language data confirmed a change in this stance over the first four months of the war. Two statements of each leader, pronounced one early in the war and the other later, in May, were analyzed specifically with the aim to track a change (if any) in their evaluative language. As a result of the analysis of the four leaders’ evaluative references to the aggressor in their speeches, it has been confirmed that, firstly, the overall verbal evaluation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grew more negative over the first four months of the war and, secondly, the verbal stance of the leaders of the four countries on Russia’s and personally Putin’s actions in Ukraine varies in terms of its critical intensity and identification of the aggressor. The conducted research also fully confirmed the role of language in marking political stances.
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