On Wednesday in Helsinki, the event “Special Operation: the Language of War” took place as part of the project “How the Russian Language Has Changed in the 2020s?”

Together with philosopher and war researcher Arseny Kumankov, a research fellow at the University of Mainz (Germany), we spent two hours discussing how language changes in times of war: what euphemisms are used by the authorities and the media, how soldiers’ slang emerges, how the language of the media transforms under censorship and in exile, and what academic rhetoric reveals about the war.

Words can wound no less than bullets, but they can also protect. Euphemisms shield the mind from the trauma of reality, irony helps release tension and maintain sanity, while harsh rhetoric fuels hatred. We live in a time when even a single word becomes a marker of one’s stance — and our conversation made this clear.

The recording of the event is available here: https://youtube.com/live/1fdSHyxZ86M