Out now: Ukraine’s media landscape guide

What information do people need in the event of a disaster? How can aid organizations reach them? Knowing a country’s media is crucial for communicating during a crisis. The "Media Landscape Guide" for Ukraine is online now. It has just been published on the pages of DW Akademie’s partner CDAC and provides much-needed information about the Ukrainian media landscape. Aid organizations can now use the guide in helping citizens get vital information and to combat misinformation.

Even before the Russian invasion, Ukraine was facing a complex humanitarian crisis brought on by the eight-year conflict in Russian-occupied Crimea and the separatist territories in the east. The fighting and occupation of these territories have sparked a refugee crisis, outward migration, social cleavages and an economic downturn while intensifying an environmental calamity. Many of these challenges have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Media Landscape Guides for eight countries

Ukraine’s media play a multi-faceted role in countering disinformation, covering the conflict and can help humanitarian actors navigate the information chaos while communicating vital information to affected communities. While, of course, the media environment is changing rapidly, the information contained in this “Ukraine Media Landscape Guide” may still be useful as a snapshot of the landscape as it was, and for background and contact information, based on information from January 2022.

The international Communication with Disaster-Affected Communities Network (CDAC) and DW Akademie are developing new Media Landscape Guides for a total of eight DW Akademie focus countries: Belarus, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Malawi, Morocco, the Palestinian Territories, Pakistan, and Ukraine. The guides provide up-to-date and essential information on the countries' media and telecommunications sectors, including contact information to help aid organizations reach vulnerable groups in times of COVID-19. They are all scheduled for release by the end of April.

The guides are produced by the CDAC Network in cooperation with DW Akademie and supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. This project is part of the global initiative “Transparency and media freedom - Crisis resilience in the pandemic”.