We defeated Russia in the battle of minds of the world" - identity leadership in times of war

The Russo-Ukrainian war has intensified in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine at which point, President Zelenskyy declared martial law and became a war-time leader. What remains to be explored is how Zelenskyy constructs leadership rhetoric in this crisis and whom he wants to include as an ally in support of the war defence. The project is theoretically embedded in a Social Identity Framework of Leadership (SIL, Haslam et al., 2020) and seeks to explore identity leadership construction in crisis (Haslam et al., 2021). We to extend the scope of the SIL by studying the strategic social identity construction vis-à-vis varying audience over time in an ongoing crisis using tools from the language psychology. To this end, we examined President Zelenskyy's speeches to foreign governments, non-governmental/trans-governmental organisations like the NATO, EU and G7 (N = 116) and focus on first-person plural use as an outcome. We found that Zelenskyy uses more we-referencing language when his audience was member of a political powerful groups compared to audience that were not members of these groups. We also found a positive correlation between geographical vicinity and we-use. However, the effect of similarity was also influenced by power in the sense that geographical distance only mattered for the use of first-person plural use when Zelenskyy speaks to a less powerful audience. Lastly, we saw that also time since the start of the conflict influenced first-person plural use and that this effect was not linear but shifted according to phases in the way that we see more we-use at the beginning of the war and towards the end of our investigation. Overall, our findings are consistent with our hypothesis and speak for the importance of understanding context, here defined as of political power of the audience, similarity and time, when analysing social identity leadership during a crisis.