Intelligence Brief: Russian Military Action Against Ukraine

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Our OSINT analysts prepared a brief overview of the media mention trends surrounding the current situation between Ukraine and Russia. This short analysis uses a small sample of data collected by our Media Mining System between July 2021 and January 2022 and covers selected topics, including Sentiment Analysis, Social Media Analysis, as well as visualizations of media mentions. 

Background Information – Brief Overview

The situation by the Ukrainian border is tense: over the past few months, Russia has deployed thousands of soldiers and military equipment to the Russian and Belarusian borders with Ukraine. It is estimated that around 100,000 troops are stationed near the border. The U.S. President Joe Biden warned that a large-scale conflict could be unavoidable.

However, the Russian President Vladimir Putin denies a planned military invasion, citing security concerns over the Western presence in Eastern Europe as justification for increased militarisation at the border. Putin has sought to block Ukraine and other former Soviet Union states from becoming members of NATO – a request that has previously been rejected by NATO.

The situation is at an impasse. On one hand, the EU and U.S. have announced strict economic measures if Russia proceeds with its military action and invades Ukraine. On the other hand, Russia may respond to these sanctions with countermeasures: as Europe’s largest supplier of oil, natural gas and coal, Russian government could inflict considerable economic damage to the West in retaliation.

Trend Analysis: Media Mentions of Russia's Troop Buildup

Through strategic mining of multi-media sources – including audio and text processing – it is possible to detect trends within the media landscape. The trend graph below shows mentions of the keywords Russia, Ukraine, and NATO in relation to troops, soldiers and/or military by traditional and social media, from the 19th of September, 2021, to the 19th of January, 2022

Trend graph generated by HENSOLDT Analytics' Media Mining tool

It can be observed that the keywords Russia, Ukraine and NATO follow the same trend:

  1. At the beginning of November 2021, along with the first considerable increase in Russia’s military presence, the media mentions increased significantly.

  2. This reached its peak on the 7th of December, in large part due to a phone call between Putin and Biden regarding Russia’s troop buildup, which caused a significant media response.

  3. The second and highest peak around the 14th of January can be linked to an increase in media mentions covering Russian cyberattacks on the Ukrainian digital infrastructure.

Qualitative Analysis: Tweet Timeline

Following the media mentions trend analysis, a qualitative analysis revealed the following tweets which underscore the previously mentioned events:

Social Media Mentions of Russia and Ukraine – Heatmap Comparison

The visualisation below is a heatmap of social media posts mentioning the keywords Russia and Ukraine in relation to troops, soldiers and/or military in (1) July 2021 and (2) December 2021. The comparison of these two heatmaps reveals the rapid international escalation in social media mentions of the Russia-Ukraine conflict online.

1. Media Mentions of Russia and Ukraine in July 2021
2. Media Mentions of Russia and Ukraine in December 2021

Profile Relations of Russia and Ukraine

The HENSOLDT Analytics relations widget displays the most closely associated named entities correlating with the search terms Ukraine and Russia. While displaying high-level data, the relations graph simultaneously reveals the connections between different entities. The colour of the lines connecting the entities visualises the sentiment with which the named entities are being mentioned. The graph shows that the sentiment of both social and traditional media covering the Russia-Ukraine conflict is overwhelmingly negative (red).

Relations graph generated by HENSOLDT Analytics' Media Mining tool

Sentiment Analysis: Perceptions of NATO

The HENSOLDT Analytics sentiment filter reveals the sentiment of the underlying data (i.e., its polarity). Sentiment Analysis (SA), aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to the overall contextual polarity of a document. Opinions, emotions and expressions may be conveyed through word choice, capitalisation, exclamation marks or emoticons. The following gauges display the number media mentions of NATO in the Ukrainian and Russian media. A differentiation is made between positive, mixed/neutral and negative sentiment within the past three months.

1.Ukrainian media mentions of NATO: 40% negative; 59% mixed/neutral; 5% positive

2.Russian media mentions of NATO: 40% negative; 57% mixed/neutral; 3% positive

It can be observed that both Russian and Ukrainian media mention NATO with a predominantly mixed or negative sentiment.

Ukrainian media – Perceptions of NATO
Russian media – Perceptions of NATO

Wordcloud Analysis: Twitter vs. VKontakte

The word cloud tool allows for visualising names, entities, organisations and countries. The size of the font represents the number of times an entity has been mentioned. These following word clouds – one focusing on Twitter and the other one on the Russia-based VKontakte – display the most prominent media mentions with negative sentiment that correlate with the keyword NATO in the past month.

What can be observed is that VK users mention the keyword Cold War in correlation with NATO. This is not reflected on Twitter. An exemplary qualitative analysis of media mentions of the Cold War in the past three months revealed that Russian-speaking VK users appear to perceive the current standoff with NATO as a continuation of the Cold War.

Qualitative Analysis: VKontakte

VKontakte is a social network with around 95 million, predominantly Russian-speaking users. In Ukraine, the network used to be popular until its ban by the Ukrainian parliament in 2017. Since December 2021, more than 50% of the voting rights within the VK Group belong, through its subsidiaries and affiliated companies, to the Russian majority state-owned company, Gazprom. Accordingly, the network is said to be closely affiliated with the Russian government. The following posts exemplify the prevailing atmosphere in the social network in correlation with the keywords Russia and Ukraine.

VKontakte posts in relation to keywords 'Russia' and 'Ukraine'

Future Development of the Conflict

The future of this conflict remains unclear: already in April 2021, Russian officials announced an end to the military exercises near the Ukrainian border but then failed to withdraw the majority of Russian troops. Since the 2014 Crimea annexation, the conflict remains predominantly hybrid in nature, with stakeholders attempting to subdue the enemy without resorting to open armed conflict. However, according to the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, ceasefire violations still occur almost daily in the Donbass region .

While Russia has previously demanded unconditional acceptance of its demands, Putin has recently shown more diplomacy in subsequent negotiations. It remains to be seen how the situation will unfold.

HENSOLDT Analytics will continue to monitor the media landscape around this issue.

This is a brief and unbiased overview of the data collected by the HENSOLDT Analytics system and does not represent the entirety of the information gathered on the topic thus cannot be treated as singular and final analysis of the event(s).

HENSOLDT Analytics
HENSOLDT Analytics

HENSOLDT Analytics is a global leading provider of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) systems and Natural Language Processing technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition, which are key elements for media monitoring and analysis.