Linguistic Strategies of Military Communication in Ukrainian and European Media Discourse

Abstract

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of linguistic strategies for the representation of the Russian-Ukrainian war in English-language media discourse. The study is based on the corpus approach and combines the methods of corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and quantitative framing analysis. The empirical base is a corpus of 197 English-language news headlines for the period January–May 2026, divided into two subcorporas: Ukrainian and Western European. With the help of the Voyant Tools tool, a frequency analysis of vocabulary was carried out, as well as an annotation of each headline by type of discursive strategy (neutral reporting, threat/framing, diplomatic framing, analytical framing, attribution/hedging, revelation/exclusivity framing) and level of intensity. The results demonstrate the dominance of the two main strategies: threat/framing (44.2%) and neutral reporting (33.5%). An almost deterministic relationship between the level of discursive intensity and the type of strategy was found (Contingency Coefficient = 0.816; p < 0.001). No statistically significant differences were found between the Ukrainian and European subcorporas (p = 0.733), which indicates a discursive convergence of the English-language media space regarding the war in Ukraine. The results obtained confirm the theoretical provisions of strategic narratives, framing theory and the concept of "diffused war", as well as indicate the stabilization of certain linguistic models of representation of long-term conflict.