This paper provides an analysis of the reports in the Russian social media (Facebook, VK, Instagram and Twitter) during the escalation of the armed conflict in Donbas (from January to March 2015) on topics related to the conflict. These include institutional actors (the executive and legislative branches at the federal level and officially registered political parties) and political individuals. We examined only the textual messages belonging to the subjects of the sample. Reposts from the pages of other actors were not included in the database. The authors hypothesize the existence of two divergent discourses which characterize differently the armed Donbas conflict in the social media. To confirm the hypothesis the authors devised an analysis technique that is optimal for discourse analysis in political studies. The technique involves two levels of discourse analysis - identifying key conceptual metaphors in both alleged discourses (positively or negatively characterizing the Donbas insurgents) and the ident