The article is devoted to the study of the means of implementing speech manipulation against Russia in the American political discourse due to speculation on the topic of the coronavirus pandemic. In the course of the study with the use of discourse and corpus analysis it is proved that the lexical-semantic field "Coronavirus", in combination with the name of V. Putin and mentioning Russia, might be considered as a marker of manipulation for its automatic detection in texts of the same topic.

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... e material of the study includes articles of American publications (The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, Foreign Policy), which widely use the lexeme coronavirus as a means of the opponent deligitimization: in one of its manifestations some negative characteristics of the virus are attributed to the President of the Russian Federation, in the other - Russia is accused of spreading fake news, covering up the real number of cases, the use of the pandemic as a cover for testing the security and surveillance system, glorification ofV. Putin's personality before the election.