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ABSTRACT How do political leaders construct nationhood through social media in wartime? This article examines Volodymyr Zelenskyy's personal Twitter (currently X) communications alongside those of official Ukrainian government accounts during the Russo‐Ukrainian War. Drawing on English‐language tweets from January 2022 to January 2024, it investigates how different political actors contribute to wartime national image construction through emotional expression, self‐other positioning and securitized communication. Combining sentiment analysis with a difference‐in‐differences design, the study compares changes in affective expression before and after the war's onset. The findings show that Zelenskyy's account displayed greater affective intensity and volatility, combining narratives of victimhood, resilience and antagonism to construct the national image and delineate self‐other boundaries. By contrast, official accounts maintained a more stable and institutionally restrained communicative style. The article contributes to nationalism scholarship by demonstrating how elite communication functions in wartime nationhood.
Yao et al. (Sun,) studied this question.