POLITICAL IMAGE OF UKRAINE: ANALYSIS OF FAKE INSTRUMENTATION IN HYBRID WARFARE (BASED ON GREEK MASS MEDIA MATERIALS)

Abstract

This article examines the processes of transforming the political image of Ukraine against the backdrop of the armed conflict with Russia. All the information used in this study has been selected from contemporary Greek mass media, scientific, and expert-analytical works from 2014 to 2023. The relevance of this research is based on the assertion that mass media serves as a tool in conducting hybrid warfare, either destroying or weakening the authority of a particular state, creating a negative image of political institutions or politicians, thereby causing social and economic tension and subsequent societal fragmentation. The aim of the article is to investigate the toolkit for creating and promoting fakes in Greek media as an element of hybrid warfare in the context of highlighting the peculiarities of Ukraine’s political image perception during the military aggression from the Russian Federation. The following methods were employed in the preparation of this article: analysis, synthesis, abstraction, cultural and systemic methods. This combination of methodological tools ensured the integrity of the study in elucidating the role and place of fakes in the context of conducting hybrid warfare. The authors provide numerous examples of political narratives and pro-Russian propaganda employed to erode the trust of the Greek population in Ukrainian politicians and ordinary citizens, fabricating a significant amount of false information in Greek mass media, as well as in scientific and expert-analytical works. The researchers attempted to reveal the ambivalence of societal perception regarding Ukraine’s position in the European integration processes and to identify the events and decisions of the Ukrainian authorities that contributed to the negative imaging of Ukraine in Greece. To achieve the stated objective, the authors of the article addressed the following tasks: delineating the stereotypical perception of Ukraine’s political image from the pre-war period to the active phase of the armed conflict, elucidating the binarity of image content, and identifying image characteristics against the backdrop of military aggression from Russia.