PSCRP-BESA Reports No 117 (March 4, 2025)
by Alexander Shpunt
February is a time of plenty for the researcher of intellectual and academic thought. Publications are published that did not find a niche in the editorial plans of the previous year; yearbooks appear for which the publishers hold back the most interesting materials. February 2025 was no exception. The task of the researcher was, rather, to limit himself in what materials to select for a review of current scientific and academic thought on the causes, course and development of conflicts in the post-Soviet space.
We did not plan this specifically, but this issue, unlike the previous one, talks more about conflicts within the states of the former USSR – cognitive, interethnic, interreligious and even ideological. Well, the world agenda – including the part that directly affects Israel – is now so dense that everyone sometimes wants to rise a little above the horizon of the flow of short news and look at the fundamentals of this news flow.
1. Large, calibrating monographs and books rarely make it into the monthly review. But it would be wrong to ignore the work “Making Sense of Russian Strategic Narratives Affect and Reception Among Young Russian Speakers in Latvia”, published by Uppsala University Press — the oldest university not only in Sweden, but also in all of Scandinavia, which will be 550 years old in a year.
Emma Rönngren, a young researcher, currently a doctoral student, has prepared a deeply-founded research project aimed at studying the perception of Russia’s strategic narratives among young Russian-speaking citizens in Latvia.
We often read such studies from both Baltic and Russian sources, but even the most reputable of them have a touch of political bias. The more valuable is the fact that in Emma Rönngren’s work the empirical part of her work is written carefully and in great detail, which is a great rarity even for seasoned researchers. Leaving the reader the opportunity to immerse themselves in the text of the monograph, we will note two points that seemed important to us in Emma Rönngren’s work.
The first point is related to the author’s introduction of the concept of “media ecosystems” in relation to Russian-language media and media using the Latvian language. Thus, the author correctly describes the fact that all communication between sources of information in these two different languages - from apologetics to harsh criticism – takes place within each ecosystem; a look at the neighboring ecosystem is limited to a proposal to readers to ignore this media ecosystem.
The second point is closely related to the first. The author classifies the consumer of news and public political information in Latvia into four categories – more details on this can be found in the text of the monograph – and points out that the audience in that part of it that can be called thinking and politically active does not live in the logic of closed ecosystems, being simultaneously in both the Russian-speaking and Latvian language bubbles. This creates an information deficit, especially in the analytical sphere, which the reader compensates for in social networks, the bias of which creates even more distortions.
2. Unexpectedly for the authors of this review, it coincided that another text, which attracted our attention with the quality of the presentation and the evidence of the conclusions, is related to the same area of study – media consumption by the audience of the cross-border information flow from neighboring Russia.
An article by researchers from several universities in Kazakhstan – Gumilyov Eurasian National University, the University of Information Technologies and several others – under the title “Media Consumption of Youth in the Border Regions of Kazakhstan and Its Impact on National Identity” analyzes this communicative field.
The authors indicate that, according to data for September 2024, there are 5,584 national and 301 foreign mass media outlets in Kazakhstan that have official registration. A fundamental aspect emphasized by the authors is the exclusion of Internet platforms from the statistics provided. This factor is of particular importance in border regions, where there is increased availability of media content from neighboring countries.
The empirical part of the study, based on a survey of 565 young respondents from the North Kazakhstan, Kostanay and Pavlodar regions, is aimed at analyzing the correlation between media consumption in border areas and the formation of national and civil identity. The authors find signs of an identity crisis, manifested in the ambivalence of respondents’ political positions on sensitive issues, and associate it with the typology of media consumption.
The analysis reveals the dominance of social networks as a primary source, which contributes to the transition to personalized and fragmented models of media consumption. According to the researchers, this provokes the formation of eclectic ideological attitudes. According to the results, 38% of respondents do not have a clear understanding of their socio-political role, which correlates with expert assessments of the state of youth consciousness. The contrast between the high level of trust in the institution of the presidency (64%) and international organizations (52%), on the one hand, and the critically low level of trust in national media (19%) and parliament (22%), on the other, seems paradoxical to scientists. This imbalance, as the authors argue, indicates a deficit of systemic trust in the institutions responsible for maintaining social consensus.
3. Another publication, also by Scandinavian authors – from the Norwegian Defence University College (NDUC) – touches upon the extremely important question of the motives that guided the Russian military-political command in making the decision to invade Ukraine. The publication of the article “Russian Forecasting and Pre-emption: The Prelude to the Invasion of Ukraine” is respectable. The study of Russia’s motives is one of the most politicized in the study of the conflict; perhaps the most politicized. Russia’s supporters see here the tragedy of the military confrontation in Donetsk and Lugansk, which had lasted for eight years by the time the war began and had led to huge casualties, including among the civilian population of the self-proclaimed republics. Ukraine’s supporters see in this Moscow’s desire to destroy Ukrainian statehood and, more broadly, Ukrainian civic identity.
The NDUC researchers, as befits military process researchers, take a much more focused approach. “Although it may come as a surprise to many, Russian threat perceptions between the late 2000s and 2022 have focused on the perceived threat of hybrid warfare from the West,” Amund Osflaten immediately outlines the framework of her analysis. The study shows that, from a Russian perspective, the “Arab Spring” and “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space were provoked and engineered by the West as part of a campaign to undermine and overthrow governments.
This threat perception arises from an approach to strategy making that involves monitoring and forecasting the international situation in order to identify trends and scenarios that could lead to future threats to Russia’s national security. As the article amply demonstrates, Russian countermeasures have evolved into a strategy of “active defense,” involving the preemptive use of troop groups outside the borders of the Russian Federation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was part of this “active defense.” “…As tensions between the Russian Federation and the West increase, our need to correctly interpret Russian views and actions has never been more important. Failure to understand the thinking framework underlying Russian behavior could have serious consequences: from military defeat to unnecessary escalation, including nuclear war…” writes Amund Osflaten, with which the authors fully agree.
4. And again Scandinavian material, and again the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is researchers from Scandinavia, in the context of the imperative polarization of approaches to this conflict, who can afford to objectify its projection into the media space; researchers from Russia or the US and EU have less and less such free space.
Södertörn University, a Swedish state university located in Flemingsberg, Stockholm region, publishes an extensive report “Media Objectivity and Bias in Western Coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict”, completed by applicants under the supervision of Anna Maria Jonsson, a professor of media and communication studies working in the School of Culture and Education of this university.
The study attempts to determine, at a certain academic risk in the current context, whether journalistic objectivity has been compromised in the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war and how various media bias practices are incorporated into news reporting.
The text provides a rigorous, detailed analysis of the portrayal of the conflicting parties in Western national media, examining how the “We” versus “They” narratives have been constructed and how the discourse created complies with the principles of peace journalism.
From a methodological point of view, the study uses a combination of critical discourse analysis, semiotic and narrative methods of analysis, and quantitative content analysis to achieve its objectives. The content analysis of articles obtained from the BBC and CNN, published in two different time periods, shows, the authors note, that Western media coverage disproportionately represents the Ukrainian point of view, while the Russian point of view is largely marginalized or stereotyped.
What is particularly valuable for an Israeli observer is that the results show that Western media also normalize or trivialize the role of neo-Nazi organisations in the conflict.
Quantitative content analysis, according to criteria adapted from Galtung’s model, reveals a marked dominance of the discourse of war journalism over that of citizen journalism, thereby spreading divisive narratives.
5. After the start of the military conflict in the southeast of Ukraine and Russia, the scientific exchange between Russian researchers and their Western colleagues has practically stopped. All the more valuable is the joint publication of researchers from the Institute of Ethnological Research (a division of the Ufa Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and scientists from the Paris National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), entitled “Eastern Udmurt Sacred Places, Yesterday and Today” and published in June last year, but appeared in the international scientific search in February.
The Eastern Udmurts, living in the northwestern regions of the Republic of Bashkortostan and in the south of Perm Krai, have historically been protected from the all-pervasive Russian culture, including Orthodox missionary activity. These ethnic communities were never baptized even formally, and until the 1930s they preserved the rituals and customs of their ancestors in full continuity.
The authors note that the preservation of their pagan religious identity today is one of the special aspects of their identity, distinguishing the eastern Udmurts with this unique feature among the neighboring ethnic groups of the Russian Urals and the Volga region – and, at the same time, forming the basis for an ethno-religious conflict that has been smoldering for many years.
The supporting factor for the self-identification of the eastern Udmurt ethnic group – and, at the same time, the most irritating factor for other ethnic groups surrounding them and secular authorities – are pagan sacred places and spaces, the existence of which is difficult to fit into the modern economy of the region.
The events of August 2020, when a conflict between the Bashkir Soda Company, which planned to extract raw materials on the mountain (“shikhan”) Kushtau, and local residents who consider the mountain a sacred place, gained international fame. The contradictions resulted in an open confrontation between activists and the police and the Russian National Guard.
At that time, the intervention of the head of Bashkiria made it possible to avoid an open confrontation, a compromise was found – but the set of problems around pagan sacred places and local groups of believers remains one of the destabilizing areas that generate conflicts of varying intensity and different formats. All these factors make the study of Russian and French authors not only academically significant, but also extremely important for practical strategizing in the region.
Alexander Shpunt is an Israeli and Russian researcher and expert in theory and practice of information and analytical work in the field of politics. Since 2016 he has served as a professor at the National Research University “Moscow Higher School of Economics” and in 2011 founded and headed the Institute of Political Analysis Tools (Moscow), specializing in systems for monitoring political behavior.