Us and Them and the imperial power motive syndrome: a comparative analysis of the political and media discourses on the Russo-Ukrainian War

This paper analyses the opposition of Us and Them in the context of power relationships. Power relationships are theorised and operationalised with the help of McClelland's human motivation theory. Power takes the most manifest forms in times of war where parties to the military conflict perceive each other as enemies. The Russo-Ukrainian War is no exception. The unique quadrilingual 320 million-word corpus of political and media discourses about the Russo-Ukrainian War assisted the critical discourse analysis. The data were collected in five countries (Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) from January 2022 to January 2025. The category ‘Us’ predictably tended to collocate with the words operationalising the need for affiliation. Although the Western leaders did not include Ukraine in the scope of ‘Us’, they frequently associated this country with the need for power in their war-related speeches. The Ukrainians, as ‘Them’, were perceived as needing to be empowered to defend themselves against aggression. The study confirms the premise of critical discourse analysis, requiring all categories to be interpreted in context.