While Western media have debunked these messages as part of Russian propaganda lacking any substantive foundation (see Weber et al., 2022, for an overview), Western journalists have also argued that NATO is (partly) to blame for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (see Carpenter, 2022 Friedman, 2022, for some examples). As a result, Russia accused the Ukrainian government of “carrying out a ‘genocide' against the Russian-speaking population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions” (, 2022). These accusations date back to 2014 when Russian-sponsored uprisings in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine were met with an Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) by the Ukrainian forces. Rhetorically, Russia justified the invasion as an operation to “protect the people” of Donbas through the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine (, 2022). Right after Russia's president Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in a televised address, Russian forces began to sweep into northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine. Since Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Russia's war against Ukraine has reached a tipping point. ![]() It also highlights the importance of cultural and linguistic sensitivity when addressing responsibility in armed conflicts and the need to consider the diverse perspectives derived from divergent problem definitions and evaluative standards. ![]() German-speaking users fall somewhere in between these two perspectives.ĭiscussion: Our research contributes to the literature by providing a novel integration of conceptual and methodological perspectives on the framing and stance-taking of social media users during wartime, addressing known research gaps in the comparative analysis of these discussions, i.e., adding “non-English” perspectives. This is in contrast to the Russian-speaking community, where the opposite is true. Finally, English-speaking Twitter users who attribute blame to NATO for the ongoing war tend to adhere to a preconceived notion, rather than arriving at an interpretation based on the situation at hand. We also observed that the Russian-speaking Twitter community exhibits a comparatively lower tendency to hold NATO accountable for the ongoing war as compared to their German-speaking counterparts, and they are also notably the least likely to expect NATO to bring an end to the war. Results: We found that English-speaking tweeters were more likely to hold NATO responsible for finding a solution and least likely to blame NATO for the war compared to German and Russian speakers. Our analysis explored how these language-specific Twitter communities framed NATO's role in the conflict. Methods: To further investigate the role of social media in the ongoing invasion, we conducted a manual content analysis to examine tweets in English, Russian, and German that explicitly mentioned NATO in the context of the full-scale invasion during February to May 2022. Introduction: Since social media has become a significant tool for conflict communication amid the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, researchers have grown more interested in the digital content citizens are exposed to. ![]() 4Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland.3Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.2Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.1Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany.Lara Kobilke 1 Aytalina Kulichkina 2 * Ani Baghumyan 3 Christian Pipal 4
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