War with Ukraine or with the West? Securitisation Through Associations in the Evolving Discourse of Vladimir Putin About the War in Ukraine

The paper explores the evolution of Vladimir Putin's discourse on the war in Ukraine using the concept of securitization through associations. It focuses on the evolution of Putin´s discursive justification of the invasion and the following “special military operation”, which the Russian President has presented more and more strongly as a conflict not only with Ukraine, but rather with the West. We thus analyse the development of direct and indirect securitization of the both subjects, Ukraine and the West, in Putin´s discourse, focusing on their portrayal as security threats in Putin´s relevant speeches during the period from February 2022 to February 2026. The analysis will follow the first year of the conflict, during which the focus of Putin´s discourse shifted from portraying Ukraine as a threat into the portrayal of the war as a conflict with the West as the prime “Other” and “antagonist” vis-à-vis Russia. It will subsequently follow Putin´s discourse accompanying the development of the situation at the frontline in the following two years, characterised by such events as Ukrainian counter-offensive that has also affected Russian territory. In the last part it will also reflect the situation following US Presidential elections and the policy of Trump´s second administration that influenced the dynamics in the relations between Russia, the West and Ukraine. The paper thus aims to discuss also the developments in Putin´s discourse in time and possibly changing narratives portraying the threats associated both with Ukraine and also with the West. For the discourse analysis, the research follows Discourse-Historical Approach as its sub-strand, which stresses the intertextuality, context and historicity and their roles in discourse formation, which also corresponds well with the concept of “securitisation through association”. We use the analysis of discursive strategies as defined by Reisigl and Wodak (2009) with the emphasis on nomination, predication and argumentation. The main research questions and sub-questions for the analysis are: Which discursive strategies did Russian President Vladimir Putin use to portray Ukraine and the West during the period between February 2022 and February 2026, in connection with the Russo-Ukrainian war? How were these strategies used to securitize Ukraine and the West? Which associations did Vladimir Putin evoke to communicate the threats to the Russian public? What was the development of Putin´s discursive strategies concerning the securitisation of Ukraine and the West through associations during the respective period? Conceptually, the study aims to contribute to the debate about emotions and historic allusions in the justification of war in political discourse in non-democratic regimes, particularly in contemporary Russia. The preliminary findings show that the West serves in Putin’s discourse as a threat association through which the war in Ukraine is portrayed as a “proxy” of the broader conflict with the West. The current war has been portrayed as a conflict limited not only to Ukraine, but rather as a struggle between great powers with far-reaching consequences for the Post-Cold War order of international relations, which (according to Putin´s discourse) has been dominated by the West.