Sentiment Analysis of Russian-Language Social Media Posts Discussing the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The current study sought to identify the sentiment of Russian-language social media posts about the war in Ukraine and to contrast sentiment between two popular social media platforms in Russia: VK and Telegram. Overall, 1,393,245 posts were gathered from social media platforms from February 2022 to September 2022 using keywords associated with the conflict. Using the sentiment analysis program Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning (VADER), we completed an analysis of 15,000 randomly selected, translated Russian-language posts related to the war. Overall, findings show that sentiment was initially positive in the early stages of the invasion before becoming more neutral by the end of the study period. On VK, sentiment followed a similar positive-to-negative trend over the study period. Alternatively, on Telegram, sentiment was neutral throughout the study period. Findings show an initial difference in sentiment toward the war that existed among Russian-language speakers on the two sites before lessening over time.