Russian-Language Student Debate Dataset

We present DebateRu, an annotated dataset of Russian-language student debates designed for argument mining in culturally specific contexts. The corpus includes 10 h of spontaneous televised debates (429 arguments across 10 topics) and reflects authentic rhetorical strategies and socio-political discursive patterns typical of Russian youth culture. Unlike scripted debate corpora, DebateRu preserves the emotional intensity and contextual nuances of real-world argumentation, filling a critical gap in non-English-language resources. We evaluate the dataset on two tasks: stance detection and argument generation, testing several modern language models adapted for Russian. DebateRu provides a benchmark for developing argumentation systems and studying cross-cultural discursive patterns. We release the dataset to support research in multilingual natural language processing and rhetorical education. The collected dataset is publicly available on GitHub.