Narrative structure of President V. Zelenskyy’s daily video addresses

Abstract

The Russo-Ukrainian war has been receiving a lot of attention from communication scholars worldwide since it is the first big military conflict of the epoch of social media. Despite Ukraine is fighting the enemy with unprecedentedly strong information warfare capabilities, it has managed to achieve wide international acceptance for its variant of the war narrative. This success is, in large part, due to the great efforts by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose outstanding communication skills made him a highly effective rhetorical leader of our time. The article investigates the contribution of
presidential daily video addresses delivered throughout the first two years of the conflict to the development of the Ukrainian narrative of war. It studies major strands of narrative featured in the addresses and analyses their functions in relation to the local, global and enemy audiences. Our research found that the narrative structure of presidential video addresses comprises three strands of the war narrative (narratives of resistance, suffering and resilience) and three associated narratives (narrative of reform and development, national identity narrative and World War II memory narrative). These narratives are intended to provide accurate information about the current situation, dismiss propagandistic fakes created by the enemy, promote interpretation of the events favourable to Ukraine, boost morale and encourage involvement in the country’s war, resilience and rebuilding efforts, create discord within the enemy ranks and discourage further aggression. The study also traces the dynamics of changes in the narratives over time and puts them in context of the
internal political processes in Ukraine.