Political Communication in the Post-Truth Era: Mind Mapping Values of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky

Abstract

The study is focused upon the public figure of Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and media person, who burst into politics in 2019 to win the Presidential Election and to become the sixth President of Ukraine. In this article, intent analysis of Volodymyr Zelensky’s key public speeches allows looking through the speech patterns, action words, metaphors, and other stylistic and rhetorical devices to recognise the speaker’s communicative intentions. To visualise the correlation between the intentions and the values communicated by the President of Ukraine on various occasions, a mind map of his cognitive, emotional, and behavioural intentions was constructed. To assess the adequacy of social reactions to Zelensky’s communicative intentions, a discourse analysis comprising global journalists, analysts and media critique commentaries upon his public speeches was performed. The results of the study shows that although media mostly criticise and assess Zelensky’s political messages as populist, the values he transmits though his official communication to the public tend to reflect the European vector set by Ukraine as a dominant after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.