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Short abstract

This paper explores how silence is viewed as a moral failure in wartime publicity during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It highlights how digital platforms make both speech and silence visible, allowing public actors to evaluate and contest political stances.

Long abstract

This paper examines how silence becomes publicly interpreted as moral failure in platformed wartime publicity. Drawing on the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it asks under what conditions the absence, delay, or perceived insufficiency of speech is transformed into moral accusation in digital publics. Wartime communication intensifies struggles over political belonging, turning speech and silence into markers through which democratic alignment is evaluated. In the context of wartime mobilisation and digitally mediated publics in Central and Eastern Europe, expectations that public actors must publicly position themselves become particularly visible and contested.

The paper explores silence as a relational category within digital visibility infrastructures, rather than merely the absence of speech. By treating digital platforms as sociotechnical infrastructures, it presents a three-level model for understanding silence in mediated environments. The first level addresses infrastructural visibility, making speech and its absence observable and comparable. The second level examines the moralisation of silence, in which public expectations transform ambiguity or neutrality into morally significant actions. The third level examines contestation, highlighting how accusations of silence and judgments about speech become subjects of public debate.

Empirically, the study draws on qualitative content analysis of media discourse between 2022 and 2025, including YouTube programmes, journalistic commentary, and online resources that monitor public figures’ statements about the war. The findings suggest that conflicts in wartime digital publicity revolve not simply around silence versus speech, but around the sufficiency, timing, and recognisability of political positioning.