The Credibility of Vladimir Putin’s Statements about the Relationships between Russia and Ukraine: The Study of Annual News Conferences

Abstract

The main research objective of this article was to determine the level of credibility of Vladimir Putin’s statements concerning Russian-Ukrainian relations. The subordinate goal was to identify the types of Russian-Ukrainian relations and the way of presenting Ukraine with the statements of the Russian president. An in-depth study of the content of the transcripts of the Russian President’s speeches during the annual press conferences at the turn of 2014–2016 and articles on the subject allowed to realize the set goals and verify the research hypotheses. The following research problems were answered: What was the level of credibility of Putin’s statements on Russian-Ukrainian relations during the annual press conferences? What was the specific level of credibility? And what types of Russian-Ukrainian relations are present in Vladimir Putin’s statements? How does Putin talk about the Ukrainian state during his public speeches? The above research problems are important from a cognitive point of view, because their resolution outlined the degree of credibility of the president’s statements, their dynamics and variability depending on the situation and the type of interlocutor and allowed to show the differences between the reality and the words uttered by Putin. In the article selected postulates were compared with real events using the desk research method. The technique that made it possible to implement the essence of the existing content is a qualitative analysis of the content of Putin’s speech transcripts.