Public Sentiment and Emotion Analyses of Twitter Data on the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

With the aggravation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the rising involvement of foreign powers, it has become more substantial to identify whether an endorsement or condemnation of war efforts is the universal message. This goal is empowered by the clear literature on the vital linkage between public opinion and international relations. Thus, we investigated the sentiments and emotions of the international community on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A total of 27,894 tweets posted within the first day in the #UkraineRussia hashtag were analyzed. Results show that "war", "people", "world", "putin", and "peace" were some of the most frequently occurring words in the tweets. There were more negative sentiments than positive sentiments, and sadness was the most salient emotion. To date, this study is the first to examine the Russo-Ukrainian War and one of the few sentiment and emotion analyses for exploring Twitter data in the context of modern war.