The study looks at how Russian regional hybrid warfare actions on Ukrainian territory serve as occasions for Russian global information warfare and how media messages become information weapons. The goal is to understand how events in the combat zone and the general situation in Ukraine impact basic features of Russian media reports, such as intensity, eventfulness, and intentionality. The research focused on the informative materials of the Russian multilingual international information channel Russia Today (RT).
This article discusses the results of verbal framing analysis of the conflict in news published on Telegram channels by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti (RIAN) and the Ukrainian news agency (UNIAN) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis, using the text mining method, shows differences between how a more authoritarian and more competitive regime uses social media to construct strategic narratives. RIAN benefits from a technical frame that has not changed throughout the war although the reality on the ground has been evolving dramatically. It focuses on military issues and international rivalry (e.g. sanctions) because the Kremlin focuses on it. UNIAN, on the other hand, uses the moralizing frame of conflict which is more flexible and has been developed in response to changes on the ground – from discussions about the possibility of the invasion to humanitarian tragedy to war crimes, and to creating a more essentialized image of the enemy (‘rashists’).
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