The media in war politics: how the reasons of Russian-Ukrainian war 2014-2017 are presented.

Abstract

Since 2008 Putin has ushered in military reforms and a massive increase in defense spending to upgrade Russia’s creaky military forces. Thanks to the above-mentioned project, Russia has recently evinced a newfound willingness to use force to get what it has planned. First, in February 2014, right after Euromaidan protests Moscow sent soldiers in unmarked uniforms to wrest control of the Crimea from Ukraine, implicitly threatening Kiev with a wider invasion. It then provided weaponry, intelligence, and command-and-control support to the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, checking Kiev’s attempts to defeat them. The Ukrainian territory of the Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation (RF) on 18 March 2014. Since then, the peninsula has been administered as two de facto Russian federal subjects—the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, which, until 2016, were grouped within the Crimean Federal District. The operation in the Crimea was not a shooting war, but actual fighting followed a few weeks later in the Donbas region. The mass media has already named a tactic of the Crimea invasion as “hybrid warfare”: providing logistical and intelligence support for the proRussian separatists in the Donbas while undertaking military exercises near the Ukraine’s border to keep Kiev off balance”.