Media and Propaganda| “She Played All the Pregnant Women!”: Russian Disinformation, Symbolic Annihilation, and the Mariupol Hospital Attack

Abstract

On March 9, 2022, the maternity and children’s hospital number 3 in Mariupol, Ukraine, was bombed as part of Russia’s full-scale war efforts in Ukraine. However, Russian state-aligned media promoted a different narrative: namely, that the bombing itself, as well as the victims on site, were fake. Thus, combining concerns of war, gender, and disinformation, I analytically unfold the state-aligned news media coverage of the Mariupol case in Russia within the framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis. The analysis demonstrates how female agents are stripped of victimhood and symbolically annihilated across the material, introducing the concept of false agency. Meanwhile, the experts in the coverage are solely male and predominantly Russian, pointing to an intersectional and unequal divide based on gender and nationality. Moreover, the analysis illuminates how fact-checking is used as a deliberate tool to legitimize the disinformative coverage within the discourse of information warfare in Russian state-aligned media.