This thesis aims to present a critical discourse analysis of the online newspaper headlines that reported on the politically sensitive incident involving the Ryanair flight FR4978 from Athens to Vilnius, which was forced to land by Belarusian MiG-29 fighters in Minsk on the 23rd of May 2021. Published by four dominant Russian online newspapers, the selected 40 headlines were collected to explore the impact of linguistics used by journalists to construct the event in a discursive practice. This study was further enriched by investigating whether there is a difference in the way independent and state-controlled online media outlets in Russia frame news.