Browsing by Author "Luoma, Anselmi"

In February 2022, Russia started the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Russian media claim that “denazification” of Ukraine is one of the invasion’s main goals. Russia seems to have a strategy of justifying the invasion of Ukraine by using denazification propaganda against Ukraine and the West and labelling other nations that do not support their invasion as Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. The goal of the research is to examine, how Russia’s state-owned media uses propaganda about Nazism to justify the invasion of Ukraine to foreign audiences. Research’s theoretical framework draws from propaganda studies and post-foundational discourse theory. This research’s data consists of 141 news articles publish by Russia Today and Sputniks News between February 24th and August 31st, 2022. Both media outlets are owned by the state of Russia and are known as distributors of pro-Russia propaganda. Research’s method on analysis is post-foundational discourse analysis, that draws from Ernesto Laclau’s and partially Chantal Mouffe’s post-foundational discourse theory. The results show that Russia’s state-owned media uses propaganda about Nazism to justify the invasion of Ukraine to foreign audiences by contesting the meanings of Western understanding of Nazism. Russia’s state-owned media attempts to dominate the Western discoursive field by claiming that Ukraine has a long history of Nazism, and it is still run by them, the West is morally degraded like how the Nazis were, Ukraine and Western nations are manipulating history, and that Ukraine and the West support violence and discrimination against minorities in a way Nazis did. By trying to dominate the discoursive field, Russian media attempts to fix meanings to Nazism that are not equivalential with the common Western understanding of Nazism and engages in hegemonic struggle with the Western established meanings. The results indicate that contesting the foundations of Western understanding of Nazism operates as a powerful propaganda tool for Russia in its attempts to change the public opinion in its favour. The research concludes that ungrounding foundations of different concepts and ideologies can be used as a propaganda tactic to further influence the opinions of targeted audiences by challenging the hegemonic meanings of a given concept. In addition, it is suggested that by strengthening the foundations of concepts or ideologies that are, or can be, under attack by different propagandists might be an efficient way to increase resilience against such propaganda.