Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s speeches. Qualitative content analysis of the speeches to the international community during Russia’s war of aggression

Abstract or Introduction

The question of this paper is as follows: How does Zelenskyy try to convince the international community in his speeches to win foreign aid in resisting Russia’s war of aggression? By means of qualitative content analysis according to Kuckartz (2022), categories are to be formed for this purpose, which are referred to as Zelenskyy’s linguistic tools. In this way, certain patterns of persuasion in Zelenskyy’s language are to be identified, which serve to win over the foreign aid. As President of Ukraine, Zelenskyy serves as the central figure in requesting foreign aid.

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride". With these words, the Ukrainian president rejected the US offer to evacuate him on 26 February, when Russian sabotage groups had already entered Kiev. By doing so, he impressed the whole world and proved himself a courageous leader in the resistance against the Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. A short time later, Western countries are providing unprecedented amounts of military, humanitarian, and financial aid to Ukraine, which continues to this day.

As the war in Ukraine has become a global crisis, the political and academic discourse is often about what governments and international organizations can do to solve the crisis. Consequently, foreign aid to Ukraine counts as a political instrument for this purpose. Thus, donors get to play the central role in the issue of foreign aid, while the role of the recipient is marginalized. This means that the approaches, strategies, or instruments of recipients are hardly considered when it comes to obtaining aid.

Yet a high volume of aid could be as much due to the performance of the recipient as to the interest of the donor. A similar situation emerges in the state of research on foreign aid to date. In contrast to the donor perspective, the recipient perspective is neglected. It is surprising, therefore, that there have been no contributions to date on approaches, strategies, or instruments on how borrowers proceed to win foreign aid. The exception here is well-known news services such as BBC or Forbes, which analyzed Zelenskyy’s speeches in journalistic style and succinctly. The aim of this paper is therefore to contribute to filling this research gap.