Wartime Leadership Analysis: Russo–Ukrainian War Media Corpus (2022–2025)

Wartime Leadership Analysis: Russo–Ukrainian War Media Corpus (2022–2025) Description This dataset contains a structured corpus of 18,936 newspaper articles examining media representations of the Russo–Ukrainian War and its two principal political actors, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The corpus was designed to support research on political discourse, wartime leadership, media framing, and ideological positioning in European media systems. The dataset enables comparative analysis of how political leaders, military developments, and war-related events are represented across countries and media outlets with different political orientations. Coverage The corpus includes articles from mainstream liberal/centrist and conservative media outlets in the following countries: France Germany Hungary Italy Poland Sweden The data spans the period 2022–2025 and focuses on politically salient phases of the conflict, including: Initial phase of the Russian invasion: 15 February 2022 – 20 March 2022 European energy crisis and rising energy prices: 15 October 2022 – 31 October 2022 War fatigue and reactions to the limited success of the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive: 15 October 2023 – 15 November 2023 European Parliament elections and the political mobilization of war-related issues: 15 April 2024 – 15 May 2024 Trump's inauguration and shifting transatlantic political dynamics: 20 January 2025 – 31 March 2025 Data Collection Articles were collected through automated web scraping using keyword-based queries related to: Vladimir Putin Volodymyr Zelenskyy The Russo–Ukrainian War Predefined conflict-related time windows Data Structure The dataset is provided in tabular format and includes the following variables: article_url — URL of the original article Title_eng — Article title translated into English date — Publication date Section_eng — Newspaper section translated into English time_slot — Internal time-window identifier site — Media outlet Language — Original language of publication Country — Country of publication Orientation — Political orientation of the media outlet Time_period — Descriptive time-period label Period — Simplified time-period category num_wds — Total word count uniq_wds — Number of unique words The dataset contains article metadata and derived textual measures. Full article texts are not included due to copyright restrictions. Potential Applications The corpus enables the study of: Media representations of wartime political leaders Framing of the Russo–Ukrainian War across countries and media systems Ideological differences in war reporting Cross-national variations in political communication Leadership narratives during periods of armed conflict Linguistic complexity and textual characteristics of news coverage Preprocessing The following preprocessing steps were applied: Articles were cleaned and organized into a tabular format Titles and newspaper sections were translated into English Word-count (num_wds) and lexical-diversity (uniq_wds) measures were computed Time-period variables were standardized across countries Limitations Several limitations should be considered when using the dataset: The corpus reflects the editorial practices of selected media outlets and is not fully representative of national media systems. Some metadata fields may contain missing values. Automated translation may introduce minor semantic inaccuracies. Differences in media archives and publication practices may affect coverage across countries. The use of predefined time windows may exclude relevant coverage published outside the selected periods. Ethical Considerations This dataset is intended for academic and research purposes. Users are responsible for complying with applicable copyright regulations and the terms of use of the original news sources. No personal or sensitive data was intentionally collected.