Linguistic manipulations used to create a negative image of Russia in the mass consciousness of European residents: using the example of a Wikipedia text

The article looks at an extract from the English version of a Wikipedia entry about the Special military operation (denominated by Western media and political circles as the Russian invasion of Ukraine). This research object was chosen since in the modern world Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of encyclopedic information for the general reader and, therefore, has a strong influence on the formation of their views. The article aims to reveal the techniques used by the authors of the entry for manipulating public opinion and to establish the purpose of these manipulations. The analysis of the extract revealed a number of distortions, logical contradictions, uses of equivocal language, all these contributing to a negative image of Russia being created in the readers’ minds and constituting part of the general Russophobe trend adopted by European governments. The author conducts a step-by-step analysis of the text of the selected fragment and determines the degree of its objectivity in terms of linguistic design and semantic load. The author also pays attention to stylistic presentation of the information, which allows the Wikipedia authors to obtain the desired effect. The conclusions section presents a list of ideas the creators of the entry wish to convey as well as enumerates the aims behind their manipulations. As a result of the research, the author identifies the basic methods used by the creators of the encyclopedic resource to manipulate public consciousness, and outlines the image of Russia which they seek to create through the use of these techniques. The study evidently shows that contemporary European policy is aimed at creating a negative picture of Russia, its people, and blames Russians for all the problems that have been recently arising in the world.