THE UN RESOLUTIONS ON RUSSIAN AGGRESSION AGAINST UKRAINE 2014–2023: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The United Nations is the main international organization that, since its founding after the end of World War II, has been aimed at preventing the outbreak of World War III. Although the UN General Assembly resolutions are advisory rather than binding on all states, they form the context and semantic framework of the meanings of terms in the global system of international relations. The purpose of the study is to clarify the peculiarities of the UN rhetoric on Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014–2023 within the framework of the constructivist theory. To this end, a discourse analysis of the resolutions adopted by the UN on Ukraine during the selected period was carried out using the methodology of T. van Dyke, who is a leading expert in the field of discourse analysis. Researchers evaluate the UN’s response to Russian aggression from the standpoint of international law [1] or from the perspective of liberalism, diametrically opposing the effectiveness of the UN as a global institution whose purpose is to prevent and resolve conflicts [2, 3, 4, 5]. The novelty of this study is the methodological approach, as the discourse analysis method allows us to analyze all the resolutions adopted by the UN on the armed conflict in Ukraine from 2014 to 2023 and to determine the change in the rhetoric of this organization. It was found that from 2014 until the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s war against Ukraine was not called a war in UN resolutions, and Russia was not directly called an aggressor, but instead was a state responsible for security in the region. After the outbreak of a full-scale war, Russia is recognized in UN resolutions as an aggressor that is fully responsible for its actions, but the war is still not called a war, but a «situation», «crisis» or «conflict». Such rhetoric influences the perception of events in Ukraine by world leaders and international society as reassuring and does not contribute to the end of the war through the consolidated efforts of the international community against the aggressor country, but it makes it possible by ignoring reality.