Although Wikipedia aspires to provide neutral information, alternative versions can be used for political manipulation. This paper analyzes how narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War are linguistically reframed in a Russian Wikipedia Fork compared to the original Russian Wikipedia. Using Kullback-Leibler Divergence on a corpus of war-related edits in more than 13,000 articles, we identify key differences between the two versions. While the original Wikipedia features Ukrainian references and administrative details, direct war terminology, and Ukraine’s territorial designation, governance, and statehood, RWFork replaces or removes these elements, emphasizing reassignment of Ukrainian territories to Russia, favoring euphemistic war language, renaming locations, and recognizing Russia-backed DPR and LPR. These patterns closely align RWFork with demobilizational strategies observed in pro-Kremlin media.

With the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the spread of pro-Kremlin propaganda increased to justify the war, both in the official state media and social media. This position paper explores the theoretical background of propaganda detection in the given context and proposes a thorough methodology to investigate how language has been strategically manipulated to align with ideological goals and adapt to the changing narrative surrounding the invasion. Using the WarMM-2022 corpus, the study seeks to identify linguistic patterns across media types and their evolution over time. By doing so, we aim to enhance the understanding of the role of linguistic strategies in shaping propaganda narratives. The findings are intended to contribute to the broader discussion of information manipulation in politically sensitive contexts.