Odessa Papers

On May 2, 2014 in Odessa (Ukraine), six people died in riots between Russia-oriented supporters of Ukrainian federation and West-oriented supporters of Ukrainian unity. Some of the participants entered the House of the Trade Unions that later caught fire. Dozens of people died. There are numerous speculations about who set up the fire and why police and firefighters intervened with a delay of about 40 minutes. The events in Odessa have been used by media in different languages to picture Ukrainian people and authorities as nationalists and fascists. The narratives about this event have a strong relation to the geo-political developments in that region, in the decade following it. We collected a dataset of 68 online articles in four languages spoken by authors of this paper at native and near-native level (Russian, English, Polish and German) distributed over eight years (2014-2022). Russian-language sources include publications from Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian venues.

The dataset is useful for research on political bias, political manipulation, propaganda and text summarisation.