Corpus of Serbian Online News Articles and Reader Comments on the Russia–Ukraine War (February–August 2022)

This dataset contains a corpus of 4,201 news articles and associated reader comments collected from four major Serbian online newspapers — Novosti, Politika, Blic, and Danas — during the first six months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (24 February – 31 August 2022). The corpus includes articles explicitly mentioning Russia or Ukraine and at least one associated reader comment. It covers outlets across the ideological spectrum, from nationalist right to liberal left, and was used to examine how debates over Serbia’s own war legacies shaped public responses to reports of war atrocities in Ukraine. The dataset has been cleaned and prepared for both quantitative and qualitative text analysis. It serves as a resource for studying online deliberation, transitional justice, vicarious trauma, and denial in post-conflict societies.(2025-08-24)

Funding Lanabi La Lova and Denisa Kostovicova gratefully acknowledge funding for this research from the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant “Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding: From Static to Dynamic Discourses across National, Ethnic, Gender and Age Groups” (JUSTINT), No. 772354.