The Case of the War in Ukraine
Open Access DepositedEssays in Political Communication during International Crises
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How do states compete for the hearts and minds of foreign publics during international crises? This dissertation examines the formation and reception of strategic narratives during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest conventional land conflict in Europe since World War II. Drawing on an original corpus of approximately 125,000 Russian-language news articles from seven state-affiliated outlets (three Russian and four Western) covering January 2022 through December 2023, as well as original experimental data from Kazakhstan, the dissertation addresses three interconnected research questions across three empirical chapters. The first empirical chapter employs structural topic modeling to examine agenda-setting in Russian and Western state-affiliated media coverage. The analysis reveals that Russian media prioritized military and geopolitical dimensions, while Western media emphasized humanitarian consequences, domestic repression within Russia, and economic impacts of sanctions. Temporal analysis shows that Russian media adapted its narrative priorities in response to the developments on the ground shifting from early emphasis on protecting Russian speaking populations to focusing on the conflict as a proxy war against the West. The second empirical chapter builds on this analysis by examining how strategic narratives use emotions to shape audience perceptions and policy preferences, applying a transformer-based Russian-language emotion classifier to the same dataset. The results demonstrate convergence in emotional intensity across blocs
Russian and Western media exhibit statistically indistinguishable levels of anger, fear, sadness, and joy. However, this convergence in emotional form accompanies divergence in emotional content, as the two blocs systematically direct the same emotions toward different targets, using them to justify competing causal stories and moral evaluations. The third chapter shifts from narrative supply to reception, testing whether anxiety changes how people seek and process information through a survey experiment in Kazakhstan (November–December 2024). Given its exposure to competing narratives and its geopolitical proximity to the conflict, Kazakhstan represents a particularly compelling context for studying these effects. According to Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT), anxiety should lead individuals to seek out more information, engage with a broader range of sources, and reconsider their views. However, my findings show no significant effect of anxiety on these behaviors, challenging AIT’s applicability beyond Western electoral settings. The dissertation contributes to scholarship on strategic narratives, political communication, and public diplomacy while providing timely empirical evidence on the major ongoing conflict. It also demonstrates the value of multi-method research combining large-N computational approaches with experimental design.
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