Can Disinformation Change the Meaning of Peace?

A new study The Semantic Shift of the Concept of Peace during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine by Ruslana Margova, published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, approaches disinformation from this perspective by examining changes in the political and media use of one of the most fundamental concepts in international relations: peace.

Disinformation is commonly understood as a problem of factual accuracy — the creation and circulation of false or misleading information. This research explores a less visible dimension of the phenomenon: what happens when manipulation begins to affect the shared meanings through which political reality itself is interpreted.

Focusing on political and media discourse surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the study traces how the concept of peace can lose its position as an autonomous ethical and normative reference point.

The analysis identifies three interconnected mechanisms of semantic erosion:

Erasure → Substitution → Redefinition

Peace can first be marginalized from political discourse, subsequently displaced by more instrumental concepts such as ceasefire and deal, and finally retained in political language while acquiring an increasingly conditional, technical or strategic meaning.

Together, these processes point to a broader phenomenon of semantic bleaching: a familiar concept remains recognizable, but part of the normative content traditionally associated with it is progressively weakened.

Extended Research Summary

Disinformation and the Manipulation of Meaning

Fact-checking traditionally asks whether a statement is accurate or false. But political communication involves more than factual propositions. It also depends upon concepts — peace, war, sovereignty, security, freedom, democracy — through which facts acquire political meaning.

The study therefore introduces an additional question: what happens when the concepts themselves become objects of manipulation?

Peace provides a particularly important case. It operates simultaneously as a linguistic concept, a political objective and a normative principle associated with international relations, security, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The research examines whether contemporary political communication surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is changing the position that peace occupies within this conceptual framework.

To investigate this question, the study combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), speech act theory and lexical frequency analysis.

The empirical material brings together several distinct communicative environments:

• Vladimir Putin’s addresses of 21 and 24 February 2022;
• a curated research corpus documenting the first 33 days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, from 24 February to 28 March 2022;
• the publicly mediated Zelensky–Trump meeting of 28 February 2025;
• Putin’s statements concerning ceasefire negotiations during his March 2025 meeting with Alexander Lukashenko.

This comparison makes it possible to examine different forms of semantic displacement across state-controlled information environments, presidential rhetoric and high-level diplomatic communication.

1. Erasure: When Peace Loses Its Place in Discourse

The first mechanism concerns the Russian political and information environment surrounding the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The analysis examines not only the language of political leadership but also the broader transformation of the information environment: restrictions on terminology used to describe the conflict, pressure on independent media, legal sanctions, restrictions affecting digital communication and the narrowing of the space available for anti-war expression.

One linguistic feature is particularly revealing.

In Putin’s addresses of 21 and 24 February 2022, peace does not emerge as an autonomous political objective. The Russian root мир- appears primarily through adjectival forms — for example, in expressions corresponding to “peaceful population” and “peaceful means” — rather than through the noun “peace” functioning independently as a political goal.

This grammatical distinction matters.

A noun can occupy the position of an explicit objective: peace can be pursued, achieved, defended or restored. An adjective instead qualifies another object or action.

The study interprets this linguistic pattern alongside the wider restructuring of the Russian information environment, in which alternative descriptions of the invasion and anti-war expression were progressively restricted.

The replacement of terms such as “war” and “invasion” by “special military operation” is therefore relevant not only as political euphemism but as part of a broader struggle over the language through which the conflict can be understood.

The first mechanism is described as:

ERASURE

Peace loses visibility and its capacity to function as an independent normative reference point within the dominant discourse.

Erasure does not necessarily mean that every linguistic trace of peace disappears. Rather, the concept ceases to occupy a viable position from which the political reality of war can be interpreted.

2. Substitution: From Peace to Ceasefire and Deal

The second mechanism emerges from the analysis of the Zelensky–Trump meeting of February 2025.

Here, peace is not prohibited or directly erased. Instead, other concepts increasingly occupy the centre of the discussion.

The study combines qualitative discourse analysis with lexical frequency analysis of the transcript.

Selected lexical results reported in the study

• war — 10 occurrences
• cards — 9
• ceasefire — 8
• diplomacy — 5
• deal — 5
• peace — 1

The significance of these figures goes beyond the low frequency of “peace”.

The study examines the grammatical and metaphorical environment surrounding the terms that take its place.

Particularly important is the prominence of ceasefire, deal and the repeated metaphor of cards. Together, they frame conflict resolution through a vocabulary associated with bargaining, acquisition and exchange.

The “cards” metaphor is especially revealing because it transforms a question involving sovereignty, security and war into the language of a competitive transaction: political actors are positioned as players whose negotiating power depends upon the resources they possess.

The analysis also examines the unequal positioning of the participants, including references to military assistance, demands for gratitude and patterns of pronoun use. These features contribute to a discourse in which negotiation is structured by asymmetrical power relations.

Within this framework, the distinction between peace and ceasefire becomes particularly important.

A ceasefire can suspend hostilities without resolving the political and legal conditions underlying the conflict. Peace represents a substantially broader concept.

When the language of conflict resolution moves from peace towards ceasefire and deal-making, the change is therefore not merely terminological. It changes the conceptual framework within which resolution itself is imagined.

The second mechanism is described as:

SUBSTITUTION

The broader normative concept of peace is displaced by a more immediate and negotiable vocabulary of ceasefire, bargaining and deal-making.

3. Redefinition: When Peace Becomes Conditional

The third mechanism is explored through Putin’s later discourse concerning proposals for a ceasefire during his March 2025 meeting with Alexander Lukashenko.

Again, the analysis combines qualitative interpretation with lexical frequency data.

Selected results reported in the study

• combat — 8
• termination — 5
• control — 4
• ceasefire — 3
• verification — 2
• peace — 1

The discussion revolves around conflict resolution, yet the noun “peace” itself remains rare.

Instead, the discourse is structured around military activity, termination of hostilities, control, verification and the conditions under which negotiations might proceed.

This represents a subtler mechanism than direct erasure.

Peace has not disappeared completely. The concept remains linguistically available, but its meaning becomes increasingly dependent upon technical, strategic and political conditions.

The study describes this mechanism as:

REDEFINITION

Peace remains in the vocabulary, but its normative meaning is subordinated to conditional, technical and strategic considerations.

This form of semantic manipulation can be particularly difficult to recognize. Censorship can make a word disappear; redefinition allows the word to remain while changing the conceptual framework attached to it.

From Erasure to Semantic Bleaching

Taken together, the three cases reveal a progression:

ERASURE

Peace is marginalized as an autonomous normative concept.

↓

SUBSTITUTION

Peace is displaced by instrumental concepts such as ceasefire and deal.

↓

REDEFINITION

Peace remains linguistically present but becomes increasingly conditional and strategic.

The study relates this progression to semantic bleaching.

Semantic erosion is therefore not manifested solely through the quantitative disappearance of the word “peace”. It also occurs through functional marginalization: a concept can remain visible while losing its previous role within political discourse.

Across the cases examined, peace progressively moves away from a shared ethical and normative reference point and towards a technical, conditional and transactional political outcome.

The central finding is therefore broader than the changing frequency of a single word:

Disinformation can operate not only by distorting facts, but also by destabilizing the shared meanings through which political reality is understood.

Why Does This Matter?

The implications extend beyond the specific concept of peace.

Political communication depends upon a shared conceptual vocabulary. Concepts such as peace, sovereignty, security, freedom and democracy provide reference points through which political disagreement, public deliberation and diplomatic negotiation become possible.

If these concepts acquire radically different meanings across competing information environments, the problem is no longer simply that political actors disagree about facts.

They may also cease to share the conceptual framework necessary for meaningful deliberation.

This has important implications for the study of disinformation.

Traditional fact-checking asks:

“Is this information true?”

The semantic perspective developed in this research adds another question:

“How is language being used, which concepts are being displaced, and how are their meanings being changed?”

Countering disinformation therefore requires more than correcting false factual claims.

It also requires the capacity to identify framing, lexical substitution, semantic displacement and strategic redefinition.

The research consequently highlights critical discourse awareness and semantic literacy as important dimensions of contemporary media literacy.

Key Findings

• Disinformation can manipulate shared meanings as well as factual beliefs.

• The study identifies three mechanisms of semantic erosion: erasure, substitution and redefinition.

• In the Russian political and information environment surrounding the beginning of the 2022 invasion, peace is progressively marginalized as an autonomous normative reference point.

• In the Zelensky–Trump interaction, the language of ceasefire, cards and deal-making moves to the centre of the discourse while “peace” occurs only once.

• In Putin’s later ceasefire discourse, peace remains present but becomes increasingly subordinated to control, verification and strategic conditions.

• The progression points towards semantic bleaching, in which a familiar concept retains its linguistic form while losing part of its established normative content.

• The analysis suggests that contemporary media literacy must address the manipulation of concepts, framing and meaning, not only the verification of factual claims.

Read the Original Research

Margova, R. (2026). “The semantic shift of the concept of peace during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies. Taylor & Francis.

DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2026.2709833

The official Version of Record is available through the publisher via the DOI.

Funding

The research acknowledges support from the GATE project, Horizon 2020 WIDESPREAD-2018-2020, TEAMING Phase 2 Programme, Grant Agreement No. 857155; the Programme “Research, Innovation and Digitalisation for Smart Transformation” 2021–2027 (PRIDST), Grant Agreement No. BG16RFPR002-1.014-0010-C01; and the Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media (BROD), funded by the Digital Europe Programme of the European Union under Contract No. 101226153.

Keywords

Peace · Disinformation · Semantics · Critical Discourse Analysis · Political Discourse · Semantic Erosion · Semantic Bleaching · Media Literacy · Russia · Ukraine