During the coronavirus pandemic, linguistic innovations emerged in national languages, but many pre-existing words were also used to describe the new coronavirus reality. The purpose of the research is to analyze the implementation of the cognitive linguistic metaphor ‘Coronavirus is War’ in Russian media discourse. Using selected online media texts, specific words can be found that formulate the description of the fight against the pandemic in terms of war. Two main research findings emerge from this study. There are basic lexemes which enable activation of collective patterns of thought about the pandemic in terms of war. In the analyzed texts both narrowing and widening of the meaning of the keywords of the pandemic period can be seen. Lexical markers indicating the source domain of WAR are used regardless of the scale of the territory – it can be the world, country, city, hospital, apartment in which people protect themselves and others from the coronavirus. It can be concluded that military metaphor is effective in describing crisis situations such as the coronavirus pandemic. The use of this type of metaphor in media texts helps contain the threat, explain what is happening, as well as influence people’s behavior and direct their way of thinking to a specific domain.
