“Suitcase – shelling – Russia”: narratives about refugees from Ukraine in Russian media

ABSTRACT

The armed conflict in South-East Ukraine has brought a massive increase in refugees in the Russian Federation. This article examines the meaning-making process surrounding the sudden presence of these refugees, through analysis of narratives in three major national newspapers – Izvestiya, Novaya gazeta and Rossiiskaya gazeta –1 June – 30 September 2014. Three thematic groups of narratives predominated: about war, about refugee reception and aid, and about Russia in international relations. These give meaning to the subject-position “refugees from Ukraine” primarily as war victims and aid recipients.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• refugees from Ukraine
• narratives
• media
• conflict in Ukraine

Acknowledgements

I thank Bjørn Schiermer Andersen, Helge Blakkisrud and Anne Krogstad and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Anne Heyerdahl, Mari Andrine Hjorteset, Martin Arstad Isungset, Edvard Nergård Larsen Aron Sandell, Hege Sørreime and Maren Toft for their input on an early draft of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Natalia Moen-Larsen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at University of Oslo. Her PhD project examines the discursive construction of “refugees” in the Russian context. She has also published articles about the development and political use of new media (internet, blogosphere, social networks) in Russia and Russian female migrants in Norway. Other research areas are migration, culture, values, ethnic/national identities, nation building, patriotism and Russia's demographic issues.

Notes

1 I have chosen to use the Russian form, “Donbass”, instead of the Ukrainian “Donbas”, and “Lugansk” instead of “Luhansk”, because my empirical material is in Russian.

2 Over the years, Russia and Ukraine have had entangled histories and a complicated relationship. Space limits do not allow for a detailed discussion of this relationship here, and there is already an ample literature on this topic: (e.g. Reid 2000; Sakwa 2015; Wilson 2015; Plokhy 2017, 2014).

3 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who pointed this out.

4 In the newspapers I have analysed, refugees from Ukraine were also referred to as refugees from South-East Ukraine, Russians (russkie) from Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees, compatriots and [forced] migrants (pereselentsy). I have chosen to call them “refugees from Ukraine” or “refugees”. However, it should be noted that the majority of these people are Russian-speakers from Donbass.

5 The beginning and the end of the story are particularly important parts of the plot, because they influence the meaning of the whole story (Johannessen, Rafoss, and Rasmussen 2018, 103).

6 All quotes are translated from Russian by the author.

7 When I include quotes from the empirical material, I specify the voice behind the quote and the journalist who has written the article. In cases where I mention only the name of the journalist, the journalist is also the narrator. All data referenced in the text are listed in Appendix 1.

8 Had I based my data selection on a timeframe that included Euromaidan and other search words than “refugee”, I would probably have captured more stories about Ukrainian fascists. However, that was not the purpose of this article.

9 This is a reference to a pogrom against the Armenian population of Sumgayit in Azerbaijan in late February 1988, the first violent inter-ethnic conflict in the final years of the USSR.

10 See Gaufman (2017, 103–123) for a discussion of Russian representations and perceptions of fascism in the context of the Ukraine crisis.