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Legitimation of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian TV news programme Vremya

ORCiD logo with link | Lancaster University, UK
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Lancaster University.

Published online: 16 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00148.pas
Abstract
This study investigates legitimation efforts in Russian state-affiliated televisual media discourse seeking sanction for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Television is investigated since it has not only been under-researched in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) in general, but also because it remains the most consumed medium in Russia. One programme is selected for analysis: Vremya (‘Time’) broadcast on Russia’s biggest state-controlled channel, Channel One. The analysis seeks to gain insight into Russia’s newly emerged rhetoric on Ukraine post-full-scale invasion. It finds several legitimation strategies used by the programme to justify the invasion, including authority, reasoning, past/future imaginaries, morality, altruism, and blaming and defaming.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Russian state television
    • 2.1Background
    • 2.2Ukraine issues on Russian state television
  • 3.Theoretical framework: Legitimation
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Legitimation by authority
    • 5.2Legitimation by reasoning
    • 5.3Legitimation by altruism
    • 5.4Legitimation by past and future imaginaries
    • 5.5Legitimation by morality
    • 5.6Legitimation by blaming and defaming
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
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