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Paper short abstract

This paper examines ecosystems of trust and mistrust in media reporting and mediation of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. It foregrounds mistrust as a structuring and generative force shaping access, proximity, visibility, and silence in war knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines trust and mistrust as affective social relations that structure media practices, access, and knowledge production in the context of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Based on ethnographic research with journalists, vloggers, displaced Ukrainians, and their hosts in the UK, I argue that media functions not merely as a channel of information but as a trusted communicative circuit - one that must be continually negotiated and can easily fracture. Across my interlocutors, trust emerges as a condition of access: at the frontline, it determines which journalists are granted permission to enter specific spaces, return to particular military units, or document certain stories. These decisions are formally framed through security and censorship but are practically governed by personal relationships and reputational trust. When trust is damaged, access is withdrawn, shaping both journalistic practice and the public imagination of the war by rendering certain units, directions, or events invisible. In this sense, mistrust does not merely obstruct information flows; it actively reorganises them. Rather than opposing trust and mistrust, the paper shows how mistrust operates as a generative force: enabling selective engagement, ethical judgment, and the anticipation of agenda and bias. I further examine how “nodes of trust” emerge among mediators, activists, and audiences, translating emotional proximity into recognition, authority, and material resources. The paper concludes that trust and mistrust are central mechanisms through which war is made socially real, mediated, and morally intelligible far from the battlefield.