Bolivar can't carry double? The impact of the Israel-Hamas war on media coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war

The article describes how the first six months of the armed conflict in and around the Gaza Strip impacted political and media discourses about Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2023, in five countries: the two belligerents, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. It shows that after 7 October 2023, the attention of Western leaders and media was distracted from the situation in Ukraine and redirected to the Gaza Strip. The sampled social media, VKontakte and Telegram, reacted to the military operations in the Gaza Strip mostly in unison with legacy media. Before and after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, sources of political and media discourses formed national clusters. The corpora containing more than 218 million words in four languages, Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French, informed the analysis. In addition to social media, the corpora include speeches from political leaders and news items about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, run by seventeen legacy media outlets (newspapers, online news portals, and T.V. channels).