Shifting priorities? Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in Central European online news media (2022–2026)

Media coverage plays an important role in shaping people’s understanding of wars and conflicts. To understand how the emphasis of war reporting shifts over time, the article analyses the bureaucratic, defence, economic and humanitarian dimensions of Russia–Ukraine War coverage between January 2022 and February 2026. Drawing on previous research on issue dynamics, framing and war fatigue, it asks how salience of the war and these dimensions changed over time, and whether outlets’ national contexts and political leanings influenced their reporting. It applies computational social science methods to an original dataset of eight Central European news outlets. We find no evidence of war fatigue in the thematic salience of war-related coverage; instead, the war became a routine issue in Central European media. National contexts and political leanings shaped the temporal dynamics of the four dimensions, but not their overall salience.