REPRESENTATION OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR IN ENGLISH PUBLICISTIC DISCOURSE: LINGUOSTYLISTIC AND TRANSLATION ASPECTS

Abstract

The article examines how English-language publicistic texts represent the Russian-Ukrainian war through lexical choice, metaphor, evaluation, narrative perspective and pragmatic framing. The study treats war journalism not only as a channel of information but also as a field where political meanings, ethical judgments and national identities are constantly negotiated. The analysis focuses on recurring naming patterns such as war, invasion, aggression, occupation, liberation, resistance and resilience; on metaphors that conceptualise Ukraine as a defending community and Russia as an aggressor; and on syntactic structures that may either clarify or blur agency. A separate part of the article discusses translation into Ukrainian. It is argued that Ukrainian translation should preserve factual precision, restore clear agency where English headlines compress responsibility, avoid uncritical transfer of euphemisms, and keep a balance between publicistic expressiveness and scholarly accuracy. The theoretical basis combines sociolinguistic views on language policy, language situation and linguistic landscape with discourse-oriented attention to public communication. The sources visible in the screenshots are used as the main bibliographic foundation, especially works on language policy, language situation, naming, linguistic landscapes and multilingual contexts. The article demonstrates that the translation of war discourse is not a mechanical replacement of words but a culturally responsible act of interpretation. A translator must understand both English media conventions and Ukrainian social sensitivity to occupation, state language, memory, trauma and security. The proposed observations may be useful for students of translation, journalists, editors and researchers of contemporary political discourse.