The Russian Media and the War in Ukraine

The Russian war in Ukraine has been accompanied, fuelled, and legitimized by a Russian information war campaign that is unprecedented in its scope and nature. This Russian state-media propaganda campaign has been surprisingly successful in disguising and distorting the nature of the war and shaping the way it is perceived and understood, both in Russia and beyond. This special inaugural issue of JSPPS sets out to launch an interdisciplinary discussion on the Russian information warfare being waged in parallel with the military war in Ukraine.The JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY (JSPPS) is a new bi-annual journal about to be launched as a companion journal to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS) book series (founded 2004 and edited by Andreas Umland, Dr. phil., PhD).

Julie Fedor is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Russia and the Cult of State Security (Routledge, 2011); co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012); and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) and Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (Routledge, 2013).

Andriy Portnov is currently Guest Lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His publications include Histories for Home Use: The Polish-Russian Ukrainian Triangle of Memory (in Ukraine, 2013; Yuri Shevelov Prize); Historians and their Histories: The Faces and Images of Ukrainian Historiography in the 20th Century (in Ukrainian, 2011); Ukrainian Exercises with History (in Russian, 2010); Between 'Central Europe' and the 'Russian World' (in Ukrainian, 2009); and Scholarship in Exile: The Scholarly Activity of Ukrainian Emigration in Inter-war Poland 1919-1939 (in Ukrainian, 2008; Jerzy Giedroyc Prize).

Andreas Umland is a researcher of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics with a focus on the post-Soviet extreme right, at the National University of 'Kyiv-Mohyla Academy', Ukraine, and the Eichstaett Institute for Central and East European Studies, Germany. He is also initiator and co-director of a Master's program in German and European Studies administered jointly by Kyiv's Mohyla Academy and Jena's Schiller University.