LAUSR

The Euromaidan and the ensuing war in Ukraine constituted signal geopolitical events, but their ramifications at the micro-level have been less explored. The articles by Toal et al. and Hale et al. take advantage of the authors’ ability to conduct public opinion research at critical moments after Russia’s annexation of Crimea to investigate belief formation amidst conflicting narratives, and in particular, under the influence of state propaganda. These studies are being published at a moment of heightened anxiety about Russia’s influence in other countries’ affairs, from its interference in the 2016 US presidential election, to its financing of anti-immigrant groups in Europe. It was not evident at the time, but Russia’s information operations in Ukraine then may have acted as a dry run for these more recent and widely covered events. Commentators have been drawing attention to Russian propaganda for years, but mostly in the context of the Kremlin’s efforts to shape the discourse within Russia (e.g. Pomerantsev 2014). They have noted the Putin regime’s takeover of independent media, its use of heroic and masculine tropes to portray President Putin favourably, its division of society based on “patriotic” values and its strategic use of conspiracy theories (Smyth and Soboleva 2014; Sperling 2014; Yablokov 2015). The projection of the Kremlin’s media apparatus abroad, used to (reputedly) great effect in Ukraine, had by 2018 become a major preoccupation in Western Europe and the United States. However, to accept the argument that Russia’s “active measures” have substantial impacts on what people believe would go against the grain of the majority of research on political attitudes, which finds that they are rooted in identity and values, and therefore resistant to short-term stimuli (Feldman 2003). Both studies in this issue test the Russian propaganda thesis, along with other claims, by focusing on significant and polarizing incidents—the crash of MH17 and the Odesa massacre—which Toal et al. call shock events: “windows of opportunity for transformational political action”. For analytical purposes, these tumultuous developments, which fed the conflict in Ukraine, are useful for studying blame attribution, identity and mobilization because