The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is the great Florian Töpfl, whose focus is on the news repertoires of Russian speakers in Germany. Past work on this has found four key sub-types here: those with a politically motivated news repertoire, who tend to choose either pro-Western or pro-Kremlin news repertoires; those with a truth-seeking news repertoire, who actively compare diverse news sources; and those with a situationally motivated news repertoire, who are relatively limited news users overall.
This study extended on this by interviewing some 25 Russian speakers during September 2022 to May 2023, to test for the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on these four news user types. This found that people had a surge in news consumption in the immediate aftermath of of the invasion, but this declined again with news exhaustion; many people also turned to Telegram as an additional source of both Russian propaganda and independent war reporting.
Pro-Western news repertoire users rejected Kremlin media even more strongly, but were also disenchanted with German media coverage, and turned instead to Russian opposition media. This was driven by complex feelings which distinguished between their own Russian identity and belonging and the Russian regime’s illegal actions, as well as by the strong anti-Russian language in Ukrainian media coverage.
Pro-Kremlin news users only deepened their emotional connection to Russia, and did not separate between the country and its leadership or military. Their sense of pride in their country only increased, and their news repertoires did not change.
Truth-seeking news users became less confident in their capacity to find the truth, recognising that there was propaganda and disinformation on both sides; they expected the full truth only to come out after the end of the war.
News avoiders showed the greatest change in practices; some of them developed a greater sense of political identity, and began to follow the war more actively – following either Western or Kremlin media sources more closely, and paying more attention to news from the war than domestic news from Germany where they had lived for many years. Some, though, avoided news about the war even more actively than before.
This means that the four types of news users remained broadly valid, but that their usage patterns changed somewhat through the post-invasion news surge; these transformations are largely related to the changed sense of belonging or non-belonging felt about Russia. Some participants also transitioned from one to another of the news user groups.
