The war in Ukraine is gradually taking a back seat to the Covid, at least in the French media.
A study by a media monitoring organization, Aday, quantified the number of references to the war in Ukraine in 3,000 press titles and 397 radio and television stations in France. And if of course, this war reached a peak with 137,500 citations in the week following the invasion, on February 24, this treatment continues to decrease: today it is four times less important than at the beginning of the conflict.
And since the second half of June, the resurgence of the Covid in France has caused more talk about the pandemic than the war in Ukraine in the French media. And yet, as the study notes, the war in Ukraine is multi-faceted. It’s not just the fighting, it’s also the geopolitical, economic and energy issues with the consequences of this war on inflation and consumption.
European conflict with global repercussions
Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi made it clear Friday in Bali to her G20 counterparts that the war in Ukraine is not only a European conflict, it also has repercussions whose effects are felt around the world. entire, ” on food, energy, budgetsshe says, and as always poor or developing countries are the most affected “.
This war can therefore be dealt with through the prism of military operations, bombardments or massacres. But the newsrooms no longer cover the fighting with the same assiduity and they cannot ignore that war is already more than war. Because the invasion of Ukraine is at the origin of crises which are also the news of the world: crisis of wheat, hydrocarbons, sovereign debts, inflation, migration crisis and so on.
The longer the conflict stretches out in time, the less it will be at the center of concerns
Faced with the G20 which is announced for the fall, the risk now is that the relationship with Russia will be normalized little by little. For the moment, the European ministers avoid crossing Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs. But the Kremlin knows well that time is on its side. The longer the conflict stretches out in time, the less it will be at the center of concerns; or as an American firm, Recorded Future, puts it, the longer the war lasts, the more there will be “ erosion of support for the Western coalition, brought about by war weariness and reluctance to suffer economic effects“.
For him, the apparatus of Russian influence now seeks to exploit the divisions to come within European public opinion. The media will then have to recall that the crisis is the consequence of the invasion more than of the sanctions.