History as Strategy: A Text-Mining Study of Russian Diplomatic Discourse on Ukraine, 2004-2022

This study examines Russia’s strategic use of historical narratives in its foreign policy toward Ukraine. It analyzes a corpus of 3,502 press documents from the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (June 2004–December 2022) using text mining methods including TF-IDF analysis, co-occurrence analysis, n-gram analysis, and topic modeling. First, the longitudinal analysis reveals a strong correlation between periods of geopolitical crisis and the patterns and frequency with which “history” or related keywords are mentioned in press documents mentioning “Ukraine”, indicating that history functions as a strategic discourse by the Russian government against Ukraine. Second, a subsequent thematic analysis demonstrates that Russia frames history as a cognitive battleground against “falsification” and “revision”, instrumentalizing especially the memory of the Great Patriotic War as a central narrative in justifying its foreign policy and diplomatic actions. Third, the topic-modeling analysis suggests that the Russian leadership emphasizes three historical discourses to further legitimize their political and eventual military intervention in Ukraine: (1) the anti-Nazi struggle; (2) the defense of international norms; and (3) the preservation of the Orthodox civilizational sphere. Collectively, these discourses cast Ukraine’s pro-Western orientation as an existential threat to Russia’s sovereign identity and civilizational integrity. The study’s primary contribution lies in its quantitative validation of established theories on Russian identity politics and its influence on Russian foreing policy and Russian-Ukrainian relations. By employing various text mining techniques, it moves beyond and enhances qualitative assessment of this topic by empirically demonstrating how historical narratives and disroucese are systematically operationalized as diplomatic and strategic discourse by the Russian government.