Research · 2 December 2025
The Representation of Ukraine in Belarusian State News in the Context of the War: An Analysis of Lexical Series and Semantic Patterns in BELTA Articles (November 2024 – October 2025)
The article analyses the representation of Ukraine in Belarusian state news in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, based on publications by the BELTA news agency from November 2024 to October 2025. Drawing on a corpus of more than 5,500 news items devoted to bilateral relations between Belarus and Ukraine, the study examines stable lexical series that emerge in the construction of the images of Ukraine, the West and Belarusian state power itself. The paper describes the methodology of automated and manual text analysis, identifies the main groups of lexical series and shows how their repetition shapes key narratives: the delegitimisation of the Ukrainian authorities, the opposition between the “people” and political elites, the sacralisation of time, the image of an external enemy and the secondary legitimation of power in Belarus.