As Moldova and Ukraine celebrate their invitations to start accession negotiations, the EU nevertheless faces several substantial challenges regarding political communication and knowledge production about their prospective new candidates. Firstly, the bloc must challenge Russian-centric knowledge about the post-Soviet area, which is deeply ingrained in western parts of Europe. Russia has long been a gatekeeper of knowledge about Ukraine and other countries in the region.

With the emergence of new political identity formation in Ukraine, there is a pressing need for the EU to revisit its political, economic and social knowledge on Ukraine and Moldova. Secondly, Russia is continuing its campaign of disinformation about Ukraine, which the EU’s governance must make every effort to debunk and resist.

This panel will address these issues by bringing academics, civil society activists, and stakeholders together to effectively identify ways to mitigate fake news dissemination. It will identify reliable resources for its members and examine how best to make that information accessible to provide thought leadership regarding enlargement in the context of the rise of populism and technocratic governance in the EU.

It will also seek to comprehensively reframe the centrism in which we understand Moldovan and Ukrainian polity to shift away from Russocentric narratives and focus on the civil identity narratives in the context of European integration.

Overall, we will focus on the role, benefits, challenges and their antidotes to knowledge production, sharing of expertise, and media engagement of engaging Moldovan and Ukrainian civil society in European integration, vis-a-vis tackling Russian disinformation and its grip on the knowledge production of these frontier regions.