Strategic narratives constructed by the Russian television around the crisis in Ukraine

Kone Foundation funded my individual research project which resulted in a PhD dissertation. The dissertation is finished, currently being reviewed and is scheduled to be submitted by 28.02.2020. The summary of the dissertation (research project) is below.

In November 2013, people in Kyiv started protesting Ukraine's course towards closer ties with Russia and Ukraine's perspective membership in the Customs Union. Instead, they were calling for greater integration with the European Union. When Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union, the protests spread across other regions of Ukraine and escalated into a political crisis. The crisis resulted in an overflow of the government, loss of a part of the territory and the most violent military conflict in Europe since the Balkan wars (1991-1999) (Cottle, 2016; Thomson, 2017). In the humanitarian context, the Ukrainian conflict affected more than 4.4 million people with over 10,000 killed, 25,000 injured, 1.3 million internally displaced and 3.4 million continuing to be in need of humanitarian assistance (European Commission, 2018).

In terms of international politics, the crisis provoked a heightened confrontation between Ukraine and Russia, and the worst deterioration of the relations between former Cold War adversaries since the early 1980s (Charap & Shapiro, 2015; Trenin, 2014). In addition, the Ukrainian crisis has triggered claims that Russia has raised information war to a new level, as it has effectively managed national and international perceptions of the conflict through its use of mainstream media and by controlling internet discussions (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2015; Hutchings & Szostek, 2015; Lucas and Pomeranzev, 2016; Roman et al., 2017; Allen and Moore, 2018; Rugge, 2018; Jensen, 2018; Moore, 2019; Hammond-Errey, 2019). Since the relations between Russia and other states continue to grow tense and complex, the information warfare has become a serious security concern to the whole world, but especially to the “frontline states” — Poland, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine (Lucas and Pomeranzev, 2016). Academic scholars and political practitioners explore the contemporary information warfare strategies with increasing interest to critically assess their role and potential capacity in geopolitical conflicts, international relations and domestic policies (Robin, 2005; Butler, 2010; Roger, 2013; Cottiero et al., 2015; De Graaf et al. 2015; Kenneth, 2017; Szostek, 2018a; Kuzio, 2019).

In this context, the concept of strategic narratives has come to the fore as an instrument used by political actors to construct a nexus of political activities and messages within a compelling narrative framework aimed at positing a particular version of events (Miskimmon et al., 2017), gaining legitimacy (Roselle, 2006) and cultivating public support (Brown, 2005; Dimitriu, 2012). Therefore, the concept of the strategic narrative plays a central role in assembling the main argument for my dissertation. The concept provides a foundation of the analytical framework to study the discursive environment in which the political elites operate, manage public expectations, and wield their influence (Roselle et al., 2014). Although, Russia’s use of information as a weapon is not new, in the light of the limited transparency of Russian strategic thinking, studying Russia’s discursive environment and, in particular, strategic narratives becomes critical.

Russia has long been credited with having significant information warfare capabilities (Iasiello, 2017) and using them through agitation and propaganda to mobilize its population (Kenez, 1985). The literature provides an insight into how modern Russian information war stems from the Soviet propaganda techniques relied heavily on strategic narratives, disinformation and isolation (Kragh and Åsberg 2017; Jack 2017; Iasiello, 2017; Allen and Moore, 2018; Kuzio, 2019). Some scholars argue that Russia continues to use Soviet-style propaganda practices and only adapts them to the contemporary context (Galeotti, 2016, 2017; Giles, 2016). Others suggest that Russian information warfare is currently much more sophisticated and intense (Lucas and Pomeranzev, 2016). Indeed, the powerful intrusion of social media and Internet has made it more difficult to impose the hegemonic narratives or framings of the conflicts (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2015; Roselle et al., 2014; Kaempf 2013). Thus, Russia has to produce competing narratives and effectively incorporated publics to reproduce and amplify the narratives through social media (Jaitner & Mattsson, 2015; Mejias and Vokuev, 2017).

Russian television has been in a key position in advancing the strategic narratives of the government. Television remains the main news source for roughly 85% of the Russian population, though this figure has declined a little in the last 5 years (Volkov, 2016). Szostek (2018b) claims that the strategic narratives broadcasted on the state-run Russian television have the ‘power’ or resonance among diverse domestic audiences, even among those who distrust state media and turn to alternative sources. In the same vein, Cottiero et al. (2015) conclude that the role of television in Russia is so significant that there is no distinctive difference between opinions shared by television viewers and internet users.

Despite a prominent position of the state-run television in media and political landscapes of Russia, relatively little is known about how strategic narratives are constructed in the television news. One of the reasons is the communicative complexity of television news associated with its polysemic nature (Grabe and Bucy, 2009), in which visuals are intensively applied in tandem with text and audio underlay (Griffin, 2010; Parry, 2010; Trivundza, 2004; Wilkes, 2015). At the same time, the power of visuals is greater now than ever before. The digital technologies, which have been increasingly developing nowadays, assume faster and easier producing images and disseminating them globally. The combination of moving image and text is the most ubiquitous form of a message in modem media, and their highly complex interactions are especially important in coverage of conflict and war (Brantner et al., 2011). Therefore, if to exclude images from the analysis, the conclusions tend to be incomplete and misleading.

The visuals, embedded into the Russian television news, have received surprisingly little scholarly attention to date. My research focuses on the visual dimension of strategic narratives constructed in the Russian television news, presuming that image selection influences evaluation of the journalistic story. The starting point of my study is the desire to gain a deeper understanding of how the government’s complex and controversial political decisions related to conflicts are legitimised on television and what role images play in constructing strategic narratives. First and foremost, my intention is based on the assumption that television images are an important mode of war reporting (Hoskins, 2004; Chouliaraki, 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2007). Furthermore, scholars recognise the vital position of visuals in promoting strategic narratives during political and armed conflicts (Miskimmon et al., 2015; Mirzoeff 2011; Butler 2010; Virilio 2002 and 2009). Finally, the valuable theoretical and empirical studies were particularly concerned with a crucial role that images play in influencing public responses to wars and inducing ideological sentiments (Michalski and Gow, 2007; Fahmy and Kim, 2008; Parry 2010a; Seo and Ebrahim, 2016).

To achieve this goal and move beyond the existing knowledge about strategic narratives, I adopt three distinct perspectives. First, the study employs a comparative perspective. In particular, it compares and contrasts the narratives produced for two different audiences — domestic and foreign. The dissertation also compares the strategic narratives constructed around two different conflicts — a military conflict in Eastern Ukraine and civil war in Syria. Second, the dissertation has a retrospective perspective. Within this dimension, I explore the narratives not only in terms of their current application but also as the culmination of a process that has developed over a period of time. Finally, the dissertation employs a hybrid media perspective to explore interactions between mainstream media and social media. Each of the perspectives has at least one article (or a book chapter) published or submitted for publication in the academic journals (or a book). These three perspectives, in combination, facilitate the development of a construct that encompasses the better understanding of how the strategic narratives are constructed in mass media and change (or persist) in different contexts. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods add ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ dimensions to the dissertation’s analytical spectrum.

The key findings of the dissertation are important for several reasons. First, while much of the media and international relations literature focuses on projection or reception of strategic narratives, this dissertation builds upon a more in-depth approach to integrate various perspectives on the dynamics of strategic narratives within a certain media and cultural environment. Second, wartime images studies anticipate, but rarely empirically examine the television images employed to mediate the contemporary conflicts. How exactly do media visualise strategic narratives? This dissertation extends the awareness of how the television in Russia selects the sources and images to mediate the conflicts and represent their vision of the events. Finally, this dissertation argues that images mediating contemporary conflicts are powerful in terms of provoking emotional responses, like building sympathy and aversion while reinforcing existing strategic narratives and presenting distorting information.