Recent research brings to the surface a distinction between the media representations of Ukrainian

refugees fleeing their country when it was invaded by the Russians in February 2022, and those of

refugees from Asian and African countries arriving in the EU: the former are portrayed in more favorable

terms than the latter. Such a discriminatory distinction occurred and was debated in the Greek public

sphere as well, when the then Minister of Migration and Asylum N. Mitarakis characterized Ukrainian

refugees as real refugees explicitly stating that Asian or African refugees arriving in Greece are illegal

and should not be granted the same benefits as Ukrainians. The present study offers a critical analysis of

how these statements and the ensuing discussions were reported in articles coming from 3 Greek

newspapers with different political orientation. More specifically, we investigate whether the texts under

scrutiny reproduce racist and/or antiracist discourses and how they evaluatively frame politicians’

statements on the topic at hand. To this end, we exploit specific discursive strategies from Reisigl &

Wodak’s (2001) discourse-historical approach as well as certain evaluative parameters identified by

Bednarek (2006) in journalistic discourse. The analysis of our data reveals that all the newspapers under

scrutiny reproduce refugee representations ascribing to racist discourse despite their more or less

pronounced antiracist political orientation. Such representations pertain not only to those refugees who

come from Asia and Africa, but also to Ukrainian refugees.