Mining themes, emotions, and stance in the news coverage of the Russia–Ukraine War from Reuters and Xinhua.

This article presents a comparative analysis of how the British news agency Reuters and the Chinese state-owned news agency Xinhua covered the Russia–Ukraine War between 2022 and 2023. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines corpus linguistics, text mining, critical discourse analysis, and emotion computation based on the NRC emotion lexicons, the study examines differences in publication frequency, thematic focus, entity mentions, and emotional language in their reporting. Findings reveal that Reuters published more articles overall and emphasized themes such as refugee crises, economic impacts, and military operations, while Xinhua highlighted dialogue, peace efforts, humanitarianism, and China's role, often framing narratives to distinguish China from Western countries. Emotionally, both agencies frequently used terms related to fear, anger, and surprise, but Xinhua showed significantly higher use of anticipation and sadness words, reflecting its ideological stance and socio-cultural context in news framing.