Metaphor of war in the discourse covering pandemic (on material of Russian media)

The article reviews the military metaphor used by journalists and politicians to characterize COVID-19. The research is based on the material of articles on the topic of the pandemic, published on the Internet in the second half of 2020. The article aims at studying the linguistic representation of the metaphor of war in the discourse covering the situation of the pandemic. The analysis reveals five areas of military vocabulary, on the basis of which metaphorization occurs in publicistic texts: the name of hostilities and their characteristics, the result of hostilities, the name of the weapon types, the place of hostilities, the war participants and their actions. It is shown that the virus is metaphorically explicated as an enemy, treatment is a fight / war with the enemy, doctors are military / heroes fighting the enemy and saving humanity. It is concluded that in the COVID discourse, the use of the war metaphor allows to designate "friends" and "aliens".