Putin and Biden’s Speeches on the Russian Involvement in Ukraine: Dialogue and Polemics

Throughout the world’s long tradition with war, it has often been raised as a question whether any war was worth waging, and if so, when and how? The reply to this philosophical maze of extreme convictions differs depending on whom you ask. In this present article, we tackled the ideological differences that lead to the discrepancies between answers given by Russia and the United States of America. For this, we took as primary sources the speeches of 24 February 2022 that Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden made on Russia’s immediate involvement in Ukraine. We tried to look for dialogic clash over the choice of diction as a major ideological stance, relying on Michael Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and his notions of hidden polemics and parody to illustrate the condemnation of the war on one end and its justification on the other. The aim was to extrapolate the themes tackled and their sequence by referring to the just war theory in its three divisions jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum which together structure the ancient practice of the art of war in its distinct phases. Biden and Putin heavily bid on these notions to give their viewpoints legal and ethical legitimacy and convince the international community of their just causes. Through this study, we found that the presidents stylized their speeches to follow each other’s, giving responses in an implicit and tacit manner, which we uncovered as hidden polemics in their styles of diction. We have also discovered that both presidents evoked their nemesis’ violation of the just war theory and defended their own just cause and respect for international regulation. This study falls within the field of discourse analysis that is a key element in understanding politics on the levels of presidential speeches.