https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5229-1052
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The article describes how the first six months of the armed conflict in and around the Gaza Strip impacted political and media discourses about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2023, in five countries: the two belligerents, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. It shows that after 7 October 2023, the attention of Western leaders and media was distracted from the situation in Ukraine and redirected to the Gaza Strip. The sampled social media, VKontakte and Telegram, reacted to the military operations in the Gaza Strip mostly in unison with legacy media. Before and after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, sources of political and media discourses formed national clusters. The corpora containing more than 218 million words in four languages, Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French, informed the analysis. In addition to social media, the corpora include speeches from political leaders and news items about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, run by seventeen legacy media outlets (newspapers, online news portals, and T.V. channels).
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their comments on early versions of the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Live coverage of suffering and hardship leads citizens to demand that governments intervene.
2 The Web of Science’s relatively limited coverage of the first half of the 20th century may be a factor here. In 1956, the Web of Science indexed 5,700 publications in communication, sociology, and political science, whereas in 2020, this number grew to 43,600 plus.
3 He chose not to mention the exact source of this information either: ‘some now say (segodnja govorjat) … ’ (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/72672).
6 ‘voennaja operatsija’ (‘military operation’) in the Russian case since the invasion is framed as a ‘special military operation’ instead of a war in Russia.
7 All news items run by a media outlet, or all speeches delivered by a leader on a particular date constitute a single document.
8 Remarks by President Biden Before Marine One Departure on 13 January 2024 (Day 689/99) in the former case and RBC-Ukraina’s daily coverage on 2 April 2022 (Day 38) in the latter case.
9 The expression ‘to get a ticket to Kobzon’s concert,’ meaning to get killed while invading Ukraine, became a meme in this country. Joseph Kobzon was a Donbas-born singer known for his performance of Soviet songs and support for the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic before he died in 2018.
10 Israel lost to Iceland, whereas Ukraine won games with Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iceland, qualifying for Euro 2024.
11 Although President Biden signed the relevant foreign aid bill into law on Day 791/201, it was actively debated during the period covered in this article.