Inside War’s Hall of Mirrors
Zelens’kyi’s and Putin’s Political Rhetoric
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Russia’s war in Ukraine is also being fought on the media battlefield. Both presidents are employing rhetorical strategies to rally audiences at home and abroad to their side. However, Putin’s wartime propaganda has become bogged down in absurd arguments and can hardly reach those addressed outside of his own ideological circle. Zelens’kyi benefits from his television experience and consistently orients his forceful speeches to the horizon of his audience’s expectations. Whatever the military outcome of the war, Zelens’kyi has already won as a rhetorician.
(Osteuropa 12/2022, pp. 95–104)