Analyzing Sentiment of Reddit Posts for the Russia-Ukraine War

Currently, we are witnessing a major global crisis caused by the ongoing war in Ukraine. In this paper, we deepen the insights into people’s opinions about the Russia-Ukraine war by analyzing the posts on the Reddit subreddit r/UkrainianConflict. The extracted posts are preprocessed and the sentiment polarity (neutral, positive or negative) is determined using the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER). We analyze the frequency of the most representative keywords in two longer periods in May and October 2022. The keyword Zelensky appeared more in positive contexts than in negative ones. Keywords Ukraine, Russia, and especially Putin appeared more frequently in negative contexts. Finally, the trend of Google searches on the war is compared with the number of daily subreddit posts.