| Abstract [eng] |
The purpose of the master thesis is to analyse how the Russian news agency TASS shapes the image of Lithuania and the European Union during the first month of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022. Russian information warfare has been studied many times by Lithuanian and foreign scholars, however, how Moscow's information warfare appeared in the construction of the images of Lithuania and the European Union during the large-scale invasion of Ukraine has not been researched so far. The instruments, capacity, potential and the images of other countries constructed by Russia's information warfare have been discussed by M. Martišius, V. Denisenko, N. Maliukevičius, J. Darczewska, C. Sancu and others. The aim of this thesis is – to determine how the Russian news agency TASS has shaped the image of Lithuania and the European Union in the wake of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the object – the image of Lithuania and the European Union on the website of Russian news agency TASS. The three main goals of the study were – to analyse the literature to find out the peculiarities of the relations between Lithuania and the European Union with Russia and the impact and consequences of Moscow's information war on European countries; to identify the main discourses shaping the image of Lithuania and the European Union in the publications of the news agency TASS by applying the qualitative content research method; to compare the information presented by the news agency TASS in the English and the Russian languages, which forms the image of Lithuania and the European Union, by using the comparative method. The final thesis presents the information war, how the media shape people's perception of the world, describes the relations between Lithuania and the European Union with Russia and their reaction to Moscow's invasion to Ukraine, analyses the images of Lithuania and the European Union formed by TASS in Russian and English, and looks at the differences between the Russian and the English publications. The research was based on the method of discourse analysis. The analysis of Russian and English language publications generated a total number of 9 images of Lithuania and the European Union. These images are divided into two groups – general images of Lithuania or the European Union, that is those images that are formed in publications written in both Russian and English, and other images that are constructed only in Russian or only in English. |
