Media and the War in Ukraine

Information war

During the first year of the war, claims of Ukraine winning the information war, the battle for (Western) hearts and minds, continuously made the headlines of international news media (see e.g. Aral 2022; Butler 2022). Since the invasion, Ukraine’s self-defence has dominated the information space in the West, not only gaining political, economic and military help but also mobilising moral support and wide compassion. The invasion has united Western democracies, at least temporarily. The European Council, in a statement at the outbreak of the war on 24 February 2022, strongly condemned Russia’s ‘unprovoked and unjustified military aggression against Ukraine’ with which ‘Russia is grossly violating international law and the principles of the UN Charter and undermining European and global security and stability’ (EC 2022). Following up on this stance, the EU has introduced expanded economic and individual sanctions against Russia, and many EU and North American countries have supplied arms to Ukraine. In the Western governments’ framing, the war has been seen as defending democratic values against actions taken by an authoritarian regime. This framing echoed President Zelensky’s (2023) narrative of Russia’s war against Ukraine being between evil and good, with his country protecting democracy and freedom.

It is not surprising that the Russian narratives used to build an enemy- image and legitimate the invasion, including Kyiv being overrun by ‘Nazis’ or Ukraine threatening ethnic Russians (Grigor and Pantti 2021; Splidsboel Hansen 2016), have not gained ground in Europe, as they defied observable reality. A further justification of the invasion purported by Russia has been that the West is to blame for the start of the war due to its hostility towards Russia. Moreover, despite great human and material losses in the war, the Russian narrative has enduringly been that Russia’s victory is inevitable. For example, President Vladimir Putin delivered a televised state of the nation address on 21 February 2023, three days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in which he expressed confidence that Russia would prevail on the battlefield. Yet all these communicative and political attempts at winning the war narrative have failed to stop Western support to Ukraine’s effort to fight the Russian aggression. In the West, the war has unanimously been regarded as an unjustified and unprovoked military aggression against a sovereign state.

Since the invasion, disinformation has increased on social media platforms (OECD 2022). War propaganda has proliferated by using digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and TikTok to misrepresent the war in Ukraine. TikTok became a dominant channel for disinformation, partly because of its inadequately resourced moderation policies (Frenkel 2022). While for many Ukrainian TikTok users the platform provided an arena to narrate the reality of war, out-of-context video manipulations and disinformation seeking attention or profit also proliferated. The current information war points to the ongoing development of forms of disinformation and tactics such as fake debunking videos, social media influencers being paid to promote propaganda and audio misinformation on TikTok (reusing audio tracks on top of unrelated videos).

At the same time, Ukraine has made a substantial and systematic effort to counter malign narratives and disinformation, while also promoting its own narrative. Ukraine’s ‘winning’ of the information war is partly due to various actors’ preparation for Russian interference. Since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Ukrainian civil society organisations, such as the fact-checking website Stopfake (Bolin et al. 2016; Khaldarova and Pantti 2016), the Disinformation Coordination Hub and the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, have attempted to battle disinformation and sustain Ukraine’s resilience to Russian information campaigns with the help of international funding and collaboration with international civil society organisations that specialise in fact-checking, media literacy and governmental agencies (NED 2023). Moreover, the Ukrainian IT Army, composed of international and Ukrainian volunteer hackers, work in collaboration with officials from Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence to target Russian infrastructure and websites.

Media infrastructures and the shaping of connected war

It is a continuing and critical task for scholars from different disciplines to examine how media and information technologies create the infrastructures that shape how wars are represented and played out. Studies of the relationship between media and war have investigated the impact of broadcast and print journalism on public opinion and, consequently, policymaking (e.g. Cottle 2009; Hallin 1986; Robinson 2002; Thussu and Freedman 2003; Taylor 2003). Starting with Harold D. Lasswell’s (1927, 1938) pioneering propaganda research in the interwar period, scholars have paid attention to how media framings of war have been conditioned by states’ efforts to control and curate information from the frontline. Media serve as tools of war in the hands of a wide array of state and non-state actors. They constitute a channel for making conflicts knowable and visible for local and global audiences and as one of the environments in which war is waged and shaped – as understood in scholarly discussions concerning ‘mediatized conflicts’ in reference to media as an entity that is actively involved in co-structuring conflict (Cottle 2014; Eskjær et al. 2015; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010).