Russia’s current policy towards Ukraine can be seen as a prominent example of regionalism and re-territorialization, based on geopolitical considerations and the redefinition of regional identities. Within this framework, the Kremlin, using a set of “signifiers” and discursive tools, especially the media, attempts to produce, represent, and solidify its preferred narrative of the conflict. The main goal of this article is to analyze the role of the Russian media in creating and disseminating the Kremlin’s official narratives as a means of legitimizing the war against Ukraine and influencing public opinion in both Russian and Ukrainian societies. By depicting the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a narrative story, the present study explains the crisis through the narrative beliefs and semantic frameworks of political leaders and elites. The media war between the two sides has been an arena of intense linguistic and discursive interactions in which language, terms, and concepts are strategically used to shape public perceptions and normalize violence. The central question of the article is how legitimizing strategies have been used in the discourse of the Russian media in 2022 to justify the “special military operation” against Ukraine, and how they relate to each other. The research hypothesis is based on the assumption that the Russian media have legitimized the discourse of the war by simultaneously employing the strategies of moral evaluation/altruism, authority and expert voice, hypothetical future, mythologizing, and rationalization; in such a way that the moral evaluation strategy,