Russian invasion of Ukraine in the Italian media coverage

Abstract

Introduction. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Italy, which has long had close economic, political and cultural ties with Russia, has found itself in a situation of some social and political imbalance. The presence of different, even opposing, views was reflected in the media: some publications have adopted an openly pro-Ukrainian position, while others have taken an openly anti-NATO position, if not openly pro-Russian, providing information about the causes, course and possible solutions to the war in accordance with these positions.
Relevance and purpose. The relevance of the study lies in the need to research the narratives of the Italian press about the Russian-Ukrainian war. The purpose of the article is to outline the vision of the Russian-Ukrainian war in one of the leading Italian newspapers “La Repubblica”.
The research methodology involves a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the publications of the website and the archive of issues of “La Repubblica” in the period from 24.02.2022 to 1.05.2022. The systematisation method allowed to systematise the results obtained during the automated research, the generalisation method – to draw conclusions of research.
Results. A qualitative analysis of publications shows that news reports related to Ukraine on the La Repubblica website since the beginning of the Russian invasion have been published in a separate daily publication “The Russia-Ukraine War, News for [date]”. The total number of mentions in the publications using the keyword “war Ukraine” using the automatic search is 7,767 mentions. The most frequently used phrases were selected from this array and grouped into 8 thematic blocks: “Zelenskyy”, “refugees”, “Mariupol”, “Russian troops”, “Bucha”. It has been found that only a small proportion of publications on the pages and website of “La Repubblica” contain the terms “Nazis” and “neo-Nazis”.
Conclusions. Based on the data processing results, it was found that the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” covers information about the Russian-Ukrainian war using frames of a war for democratic values, where Ukraine and its population is considered to be a victim of unmotivated aggression of Russia Federation, and Ukrainian politicians are portrayed as new symbols of humanistic values. There is an attempt to avoid focusing on acute issues related to Ukraine or internal Ukrainian politics, which can be partially defined as “pro-Ukrainian” propaganda. The findings are important for the inclusion of Italian media in the broader framework of European media coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war.