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Abstract On February 24, 2022, Russia escalated its aggression against Ukraine. In addition to a staggering civilian death toll (i.e., ≥ 14,383), the Russo-Ukrainian War had generated approximately 5,752,670 refugees as of October 31, 2025. While scholarship on the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees has centered on the three largest EU destinations—Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic—Spain has emerged as the fourth major host. Given its unique history as a colonizer and that Spanish news outlets demonstrably dehumanized refugees from the Syrian Civil War, we ask: How have Spanish news outlets textually and photographically portrayed the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees? Conceptually, we entwine Water Metaphors, Off-Whiteness, Orientalism and Sentence-Image. Through a Descriptive Content Analysis and a Visual Framing Approach, we examine the news coverage from El Mundo ( n = 97) and El País ( n = 119) between February 24 and March 15, 2022. We argue that, although both news outlets employed Water Metaphors that conventionally connote dangerousness (e.g., Avalanche), such meanings were textually and photographically disrupted through non-Orientalist, Off-White re-racializing lenses. Consequently, Spanish news outlets portrayed the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees as “Oriental European Others” whose movement was compelled yet “civilized” and whose whitened visibility rendered them absorbable by the “Western European Us”, thereby co-constructing distinctive “Contingent Safe Waters”.
Silva et al. (Mon,) studied this question.