Mapping Cognitive Targeting and Discursive Conditions Associated with Emotional Exploitation in the Russia–Ukraine Conflict (2014–2026): A Text-as-Data Analysis of Strategic Framing and Semantic Structure

Abstract

Introduction: Cognitive warfare has become a central dimension of contemporary conflict because it targets perception, attention, interpretation, and judgment through strategically organized communicative environments. This study analyzed the semantic structure of public discourse on the Russia--Ukraine conflict between 2014 and 2026 to identify how cognitive targeting and discursive conditions associated with emotionally salient framing are distributed across actor settings, and to assess whether these patterns support the interpretation of cognitive warfare as an empirically observable structural dimension of the conflict. Methods: The study used a quantitative-computational text-as-data design implemented in R on a stratified corpus of 173 documents, including institutional documents, think tank reports, press and analytical coverage, and official statements. After standardized preprocessing, the corpus was examined through correspondence analysis, lexical specificity analysis, semantic co-occurrence networks, and nonparametric tests of group differences. Results: The analysis identified a dual semantic architecture composed of a cognitive dimension centered on information, media, disinformation, influence, and narrative construction, and an operational dimension associated with events, territoriality, and military action. Think tank reports concentrated the lexicon linked to the cognitive dimension, whereas press and analytical coverage dominated the operational dimension. Conclusion: The findings indicate that cognitive warfare functions as an autonomous and systematically distributed component of conflict discourse. Methodologically, the study shows that text-as-data approaches can recover latent structures of cognitive targeting in heterogeneous corpora and can help map the discursive environments within which cognitive and affective processes may later be examined in psychological and neuropsychological research.