The specifics of visual electronic mass-media and their influence on public opinion formation are considered in the article. Thanks to their technical abilities visual electronic publications ensure so-called “presence effect” – recipient’s feeling of their involvement to what is happening on a TV screen, a monitor or a display and ability to empathize.
The article deals with memes as expressive rhetorical resource in media representations of the Russian-Ukrainian hybrid war and military conflict. It explores textual slogans of Russian propaganda that serve to legitimize external aggression. When these units are mirrored as intertextual material in the Ukrainian counter-discourse, they become critical targets for deconstructing fakes and decontamination of manipulative programs. The network of memetic signs is subordinated to the task of symbolic identification of conflict sides and their objectives.