This chapter aims to gain an understanding of how the Ukrainian refugee crisis is constructed as a public problem in the Romanian media and what modes of engagement and courses of action are proposed with respect to this problematic situation. We privilege the media discourse on refugees as our site of investigation because of its potential to construct social reality (Couldry, 2000). The media create “arenas of public discourse and action” (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988) where claims are made about problematic situations, responsibility is attributed, and acceptable forms of public action are proposed. Our analytical perspective is based on a communicational constructivist perspective on public problems, which focuses on the symbolic negotiation of the meanings of the crisis. To discern the positions the media take on the topic of the refugee crisis, we investigate which narratives and themes are given more visibility in media discourse and how ownership is established. Another focus is on the ideals and values mobilised by the media in facilitating the public’s engagement with the problem of the refugee crisis, along with the meanings attributed to the refugee as a symbolic presence. Finally, we want to clarify how the media problematise their own involvement in the debate about refugees. Our corpus is based on 153 media articles on the topic of Ukrainian refugees, published between February 24, 2022 and November 30, 2023 in the Romanian media, comprising a mix of journalistic genres (war reportages, investigative reportages, interviews, informative articles, editorials, and portraits), types (mainstream and alternative) and formats (media campaigns). We employ thematic analysis and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress, 2010, 2012; Van Leeuwen, 2013) to understand how the media use a variety of semiotic resources for meaning-making in relation to the refugees. In this respect, we explore the affordances of text and image used to perform various communicative tasks in three distinctive contexts—the outbreak of the war, Ukraine’s Independence Day, and one year after the start of the war. Overall, our analysis shows that the refugee crisis was used by the media to project the image of an ideal Romanian society with strong humanitarian commitment. In this way, the media engaged with the problem of the refugees to emphasise Romanian exceptionalism rather than normalise the discourse around refugees.