Heterostereotype of Ukraine in the discourse of quality British newspapers

The study is dedicated to the issues of media reception of Ukraine by British quality newspapers, that largely determines the nature of intergovernmental cooperation and the geopolitical priorities of the European community in the Ukrainian issue as a whole. This issue can be solved by pointing out the most frequent heterostereotypes, identifying their formal content features and operating contexts in the text space of the media.The new concept that is called the «Stereotype of the Transition Period» has been updated, which, on one hand, indicates the specifics of the object of stereotyping, and on the other hand, motivates the receptive features of the subjects of stereotyping, which are the British articles in our study. The investigation of heterostereotyping of Ukraine was carried out by using the programmatic content analysis AntConc 3.5.0 (Windows), which can be characterized by the signs of validity, objectivity and reliability. The most frequent heterostereotypes formed by the process of combining of the ethnonym "Ukraine" with occasionally relevant concepts are revealed, and their semantic fields are analyzed.It is stated that conflict-related issues are mostly chosen by British quality newspapers to cover the Ukrainian theme. It becomes a discursive background for representing Ukrainian society as polarized, split according to geographical, cultural, linguistic and ideological parameters. Ukraine is presented as a state with the divided identity. Among the heterosterotypical images, the militarized image of our state dominates. Among the frequent contexts of ethnonym, the contexts of war, political crisis and environmental catastrophe are outlined.It is revealed that in the materials on Ukrainian subjects, the concept «Russia» dominates over the concept of "Ukraine". It is pointed out that the British media legitimize certain institutions and phenomena that are tabooed in the Ukrainian media-discourse practices.The results obtained have a theoretical significance for «Social Communications» field and can be used in technological developments to create and correct the image of Ukraine.