Joe Biden’s announcement that he would no longer seek the Democratic Party’s 2024 nomination for President sent shockwaves around the political world. This project compares the reactions of the Kremlin and the Lukashenka regime to Biden’s announcement, and decode the tactics and operations of their respective communications strategies. I examine 24 total Belarusian (15) and Russian (9) state media and influencer Telegram channels in a quali-quantitative approach to decode the communications strategies used by both dictatorships.

Accounts were chosen with a combination of TGStat rankings and prior human judgement on their relevance. Data was downloaded using Telethon, cleaned and lemmatized, and ingested into the WordCloud package, in Python. 301 pieces of content from Kremlin-affiliated Telegram accounts were examined. This included 150 from 28-29 June and 151 from 21-22 July. 153 pieces of content from Lukashenka-affilliated Telegram accounts were examined. This included 65 from 28-29 June and 88 from 21-22 July.