Article at hand examines the Russian press narrative concerning the origins of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February and March 2022. The subject of this paper is a set of articles by English-language portal Sputnik International examined through qualitative-quantitative analysis. The primary aim of the study is to describe the Russian narrative about the parties of the conflict in the perspective of propaganda techniques usage. The work includes: (i) identification of active and passive actors, (ii) analysis of the mutual relations of key actors, (iii) identification of the media narrative concerning present conflict, (iv) and the determination of the propaganda techniques applied. The result is a description of the Russian media narrative with a particular focus on the propaganda construction within information war context.
