Russia’s Image in False Mirror of Russophobia

The article analyses russophobia as a tool for creating a distorted image of Russia. The publications in the Russian media serve as the material for the study. These publications, on the one hand, represent the falsified perception of our country by the collective West, and on the other hand, are part of the official mass media discourse in the promotion of universal and state values. The research is carried out in compliance with the imagological paradigm. Modelling is the main method of the analysis. Modelling provides the opportunity to investigate and describe the phenomena of reality taking into account the existential, cognitive, discursive, and axiological characteristics of object under analysis. Russophobia in the present research is considered as a discursive practice with its own existential, axiological, linguistic characteristics, and content, which are determined by the peculiarities of the modern geopolitical situation. As a result of the analysis of empirical material, the following characteristics of the analyzed phenomenon are revealed: russophobia is, first of all, the activity of the Ukrainian authorities; russophobia is equated with xenophobia, nationalism and nazism; russophobia is a political technology of the fight against Russia. From a linguistic point of view, russophobia possesses the following characteristics: militant, rabid, manic, cave-like, attributed to a specific geographical name. The paper presents an analysis of the metaphorical content of russophobia in the official mass media discourse. The Research prospects are outlined.