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Lucio Caracciolo,
Editor-in-Chief of Limes, an Ital-
ian geopolitical magazine:
I believe that contemporary
conflicts are oftentimes about rhetoric. If your
coverage satisfies your audience then you success-
fully achieve your goal. If not, you are a failure.
As one professor said recently, perception often
means more than reality.
Problems always arise when you are less sure
about your truth and especially so when you be-
lieve your own propaganda. Thus you end up one-on-one with the bodyguards who do
not defend your country but, quite the contrary, cause misunderstanding within your own
camp. This is what happened with our U.S. allies in Afghanistan last year, when they tried
to create plausible rhetoric about the success in which not even the U.S. public believed,
let alone foreigners.
It seems to me that the Ukraine conflict is a good example of a conflict of rhetoric.
With regard to the conflict in Ukraine, many Europeans, in particular northeastern Euro-
peans, believe that Ukraine should be part of the North Atlantic alliance, but in reality
people who live in eastern Ukraine belong to eastern Slavic civilization. Today, there is a
challenge to Russia and the United States but it is different from the cold war.
Yaroslav Skvortsov,
Head of the Department of In-
ternational Journalism:
As we mark the 25th anniver-
sary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we realize that
there remain walls in the minds of Europeans,
and, moreover, we may be building new walls as
well.
Just make a note of this - the new cold war idea
is literally in the air. It is with our own hands, dear
fellow journalists, that cold wars are begun and
fought, and it seems to me that it's very important to see what, at the end of the day, is
our role, the role of journalists, in the new reality: will we create opposing groups on both
sides of the barricades, on both sides of the wall?
One more subject I'd like to raise is the new media. Those who use the Internet as a source
of information have a better knowledge of specific events, respondents from that category
are more rarely undecided when asked about their views on various issues, and a larger
proportion of them are interested in politics.
However, this has practically no effect on one's political preferences and in practically no
way determines which candidate one supports at elections. In other words, one may take
interest in information and take it in, but by no means always does such information un-