A visual representation of the Russo-Ukrainian War Through the Perspective of Ukrainian and Russian Milbloggers on Telegram

Abstract: The theory of mediatized war implies that any study of conflict that takes place in modern times must also consider the impact of the media within that conflict, especially including new media and communication technologies. Images as visual representations of war have become a part of the information warfare and used to create narratives rooted in the culture of media witnessing (Mortensen) but sometimes entirely divorced from reality (Baudrillard’s simulacrum). The purpose of this thesis was to study images from two Telegram channels, in order to analyze the visual representation of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022. A qualitative content analysis was used on the images, to observe and interpret the visual themes and context of the images. The theoretical framework that was applied to the categories were the theory of the visual, the culture of witnessing in war, and mediatization of war. The results indicate that both channels try to employ features of media witnessing, with a notable difference that the Russian channel presented a more sanitized, gore-less, and staged version of war while the Ukrainian one focused on the casualties and horrors of war. The study contributes to the fields of mediatization of war and visual representation of war by focusing on the previously unstudied material and combining this unique case with a broad theoretical and empirical body of knowledge.