CONTENT AND COLLOCATION ANALYSES OF THE RT ANALYTICAL REPORTS ABOUT UKRAINE

Abstract

The Russian Federation is waging a powerful information and psychologi- cal warfare against Ukraine, the consequences of which, unfortunately, are already obvious. The Kremlin's propaganda forms the framework for the perception of objective reality and places favorable accents for Russia on Ukraine, its statehood, leaders, and the population as a whole. As a result, a distorted reality is created in the mind of the recipient, which calls into question the veracity of any statements. Understanding the mechanisms of destructive information and psychological influence is extremely important for the object of aggression, which must not only effectively resist, but also rethink, restructure its own security policy. The subject of the study is rep- resented by analytical materials of the multilingual information channel RT (Russia Today) with the hashtag «#Ukraine» for the period of September 2018 – April 2020 (990 articles). The whole period is divided into 4 subperi- ods: 1) September – December 2018 and 2) January–April 2019 – the time of 1) Poroshenko’s Presidency, 3) May–December 2019 and 4) January–April 2020 – the time of V. Zelensky’s Presidency. Content analysis made it pos- sible to find out the most commonly used words of Kremlin propaganda of each period, while the authors substantiated the reasons for the frequency of words, analyzing the events in Ukraine and Russia's reaction to them. Collocation analysis enabled to create a network that clearly demonstrates the thematic distribution of RT analytical materials. In particular, the first subnet is a purely propaganda pattern, the purpose of which is information and legal support for the actions of the Russian Federation; the second sub- net is related to specific subjects / objects and events; the third subnet is the «mononet», which presents a single topic – the reaction of Kremlin propa- ganda to the international recognition of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the events around it.