Peace into war transformation in news discourse on Ukraine

Abstract The chapter explores the media construction of peace into war transformation in Ukraine since 2013 domestic unrest till the beginning of the 2022 full-fledged armed conflict by applying the cognitive-rhetorical method of analysis. It combines categorisation with rhetorical canons revealing four periods of peace into war transformation in Ukraine denoted by linguistic units in the prominent positions of news texts. The periods comprise breach of peace, subdivided into initiative, intense, confrontational, intervening, (potential) war stages; impasse, characterised by the rivalry between the conflict and crisis keywords; pre-war, marked by the opposition between crisis and tension ; war beginning structured by the units conflict — war in Ukraine — Ukraine war , offering different perspectives of a full-fledged confrontation.