Frequency Analysis of Russian Propaganda Telegram Channels

Abstract

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In addition to large-scale military operations against Ukraine, many information attacks were organized. These attacks began before the invasion: for several months, Russia has been actively paving the way for the war by launching different types of information operations in cyberspace. As an example, Russian propaganda media were promoting the idea of “Russian world”, which calls into a question the existence of Ukraine as an independent state and justifies Russian military aggression. In this work, Russian propaganda Telegram channels were analyzed using term frequency analysis with bag-of-words technique. For this analysis, text data from Telegram propaganda channels was collected and processed. The obtained results revealed different patterns in Russian propaganda against Ukraine via Telegram channels.