Political and legal aspects of the information warfare

This article describes the technological features of information warfare and possible lawful mechanisms to counter information attacks. The aim of the article is to analyse the political and legal features of information warfare. The tactics of the aggressor state’s behaviour in a hybrid war was substantiated using the case of the information war between Russia and Ukraine. The channels of information dissemination, which are most often used for disintegration and disinformation purposes, were studied. Problematic issues of the domestic public space that most often appear in the perspective of disinformation attacks on the Internet are determined: the activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, cooperation between Ukraine and the EU, reforms in Ukrainian society, temporarily occupied territories and annexed Crimea, corruption in Ukraine. The tactics of confrontation between countries in the information space was analysed — attempts to establish their “security belt” from other actors in international relations and to maintain their own dominant influence in certain regions by spreading misinformation. Promising areas of further research will be the analysis of the peculiarities of the national legal systems’ development in order to counter misinformation in the context of the continuous development of democracy in the world

The Media Image of the Multinational Transcarpathia: The Problems of the Search for Ethnic and Civil Identities

The article is concerned with the media image of Transcarpathia in the light of the formation of ethnic and civil identities of the auditory of Ukraine's westernmost region. The peculiarity of this region as a part of the national information space, lies within the fact that the local mass media satisfy the information needs not only in Ukrainian, but also in Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Romani, German, Slovak, and other languages. At the same time while residing in the borderland area and speaking several languages, the Transcarpathian audience has free access to any media product of the four neighboring EU countries. The broad palette of national and non-national media is called to facilitate the formation of the Transcarpathians' affiliation not only to their ethnic group, but also to the civil (national) identity. To the author's mind, however, an intentional separatist image of the region is emerging due to the destructive materials, the spreading of information myths both in Ukrainian and foreign mass media. The resolution of these problems is seen by the author in the creation of a distinct media system and development of a national information strategy in Ukraine and in the multi-ethnic borderland areas among others