Global and Indian Perspectives on Russia-Ukraine War using Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

In today's world, social media has become a platform through which people express their opinions and thoughts regarding various topics. Twitter is one such platform wherein people resort to expressing their opinions or portraying sentiments to the world. Today it has become easier to analyze mass opinion by using sentiment analysis. This paper investigates the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war by analyzing opinionated tweets, and it seeks to understand the sentiments from a global and Indian perspective. Operation Ganga was carried out to evacuate Indian citizens from the war-hit region. Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier classified the tweets into positive, neutral, and negative categories. The paper employed NRCLex for emotion classification and aspect-based sentiment analysis to divide opinions into aspects and determine the sentiment associated with each element. For the study, 4,31,857 tweets were extracted, and the results of sentiment analysis depict that 44.09% users had negative sentiments followed by 33.378% users expressing positive sentiment and remaining 22.53% people were neutral in their tweets. Fear, anger and sadness were amongst the top emotions expressed in the negative tweets whereas the positive tweets expressed trust and anticipation that the war would end soon. Operation Ganga was carried out to evacuate Indian citizens from the war-hit region. An analysis was performed on 1542 tweets that were obtained for Operation Ganga. 74.5% of the users had positive sentiments about Operation Ganga, whereas 16.67% and 8.5% had negative and neutral sentiments respectively. The people trusted this evacuation process resulting in more positive sentiments. Fear of losing near and dear ones and fear of safety was the topmost concern for Indians and leadership was one of the topmost aspects tweeted in the positive sentiments. Thus, the overall results depict that the common man does not prefer war and is fearful of the outcomes. The government should hear the voice of the common man and plan strategies and decisions considering the common man's sentiments.