The Russian war in Ukraine has been accompanied, fuelled and legitimized by a Russian information war campaign that is unprecedented in its scope and nature. Increasingly lurid in form, sometimes surreal, the Russian state-media propaganda campaign has been surprisingly successful in disguising and distorting the nature of the war and shaping the way it is perceived and understood, both in Russia and beyond. This special issue sets out to launch an interdisciplinary discussion on the Russian information warfare being waged in parallel with the military war in Ukraine. How is the war being packaged and narrated for domestic and international audiences? How are these narratives being received in Russia and in the West? What new trends can be observed in the identification and construction of `enemies¿? How do we interpret and explain the imperial hysteria and hatred currently on display on Russian TV? What are the appropriate responses? How can we avoid the trap of allowing Kremlin propagandists to shape the terms and language in which the war is viewed? The JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY is a new bi-annual journal about to be launched as a companion journal to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society book series (founded 2004 and edited by Andreas Umland, Dr. phil., Ph. D.). Like the book series, the journal will provide an interdisciplinary forum for new original research on the Soviet and post-Soviet world. The journal aims to become known for publishing creative, intelligent and lively writing tackling and illuminating significant issues and capable of engaging wider educated audiences beyond the academy.

Julie Fedor is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne. In 2010-13, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the Memory at War project based in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge (www.memoryatwar.org). She has taught modern Russian history at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Melbourne, and St Andrews. She is the author of Russia and the Cult of State Security (Routledge, 2011); co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012); and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) and Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (Routledge, 2013). Andreas Umland (ku-eichstaett.academia.edu/AndreasUmland), CertTransl (Leipzig), AM (Stanford), MPhil (Oxford), DipPolSci, DrPhil (FU Berlin), PhD (Cambridge) is a researcher of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics with a focus on the post-Soviet extreme right at the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" (www.ukma.kiev.ua/ua/faculties/fac_soc/politology/index.php ), and the Eichstaett Institute for Central and East European Studies (http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/forschungseinr/zimos/ ). He is also initiator and co-director a Master`s program in German and European Studies administered jointly by Kyiv`s Mohyla Academy and Jena`s Schiller University (www.des.uni-jena.de/).