The article is aimed at the study of linguistic aspects of persuasion in diplomatic discourse. The discursive analysis has been employed to establish features of diplomatic discourse, whereas the methods of semantic, syntactic and stylistic analyses have been applied to examine linguistic means of persuasion. As a result of the study, persuasion has been defined as a communicative phenomenon which has an impact on the addressee’s opinions, impressions, attitude, feelings, and emotions and includes rational-logical and affective components. Characteristic features of diplomatic style, such as interdiscursiveness, the presence of a mass addressee, the use of cooperative and confrontational strategies, ritualization, dialogical nature, and persuasiveness have been established. Linguistic means of persuasion, namely lexical, grammatical, syntactic and stylistic, have been analyzed in detail. Lexical means of persuasion include etiquette cliches, terms and idioms, abbreviations, international and bookish vocabulary which add a special tonality to the diplomatic document. The use of grammatical means of persuasion (the superlative degree of adjectives and adverbs, intensifiers, infinitive, verbal and parallel constructions) helps to accentuate and highlight important elements in diplomatic texts. In turn, stylistic means, especially epithets, metaphors and metonymy, contribute to the credibility of diplomatic speeches and addresses. The obtained results contribute to further scientific development of the problem of persuasive communication.