“Terrorists or insurgents?” Methods of nomination of participants in the conflict in Donbas on the example of titles in the Polish mass media

Abstract

From the very beginning, the conflict in Donbas was widely reported by the Polish mass media, including via Internet. The article discusses the names of the armed forces of the participants of the hybrid war in the east of Ukraine. The names of participants in the conflict in Donbass have been subjected to the semantic analysis (mainly the names of the separatists, because the names of the government forces do not differ from the standard terms used in the wars of that type), which appear in the titles of information contained on the websites of various information media operating in Polish-language information area. The analysis of these names allows to determine what image of the participants of the conflict is shown in the Polish media discourse. The names of struggling parties belong to keywords that must be used in the title of the information, because it allows quick identification of the conflict lines. Polish mainstream media adopt the Ukrainian point of view and Ukrainian narrative. Therefore, opponents of the government side fighting in the ATO zone are called separatists and terrorists in information titles. These names have not been created specifically to describe the conflict in Donbass, but earlier they were used to describe slightly different phenomena. Therefore, these terms are often supplemented with the adjectives pro-Russian and Russian. Thanks to this, information titles indicate not only sides of the conflict, but also the leaders of the groups referred to as separatists and terrorists. The use of such expressions as the pro-Russian separatist emphasizes also the further goal of their actions - joining Donbass to Russia. It is worth noting that the more frequent use of the term separatists is undoubtedly associated with the emergence of Islamic terrorism in Western Europe. In the right-wing media, often guided by a critical assessment of Polish-Ukrainian relations, information is created taking into account the Ukrainian point of view, one can even notice the prevalence of titles with the term terrorists. In the information posted in extreme nationalist or leftist portals, you can find examples of titles that create a different image of the war in Donbass, presented from the point of view of the pro-Russian party. It is worth noting that the choice of the insurgent’s lexeme, which defines the people fighting on the side of the separatists, is poor due to the connotations of this lexeme in Polish.