The active phase of hybrid aggression of the Russian Federation which was started from the illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of the several regions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2014 has been accompanied by massive information and disinformation campaigns against Ukraine launched by the aggressor. They were accompanied by spreading fakes, deepfakes, propaganda messages, and manipulations.

The purpose of the article is to explore the basic principles of information policy formation in Ukraine in the context of hybrid information warfare; identification of features and problems of information policy and its impact on the public administration system. The results of the study show that since the beginning of Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine and the widespread hybrid information war, the state’s information policy has changed its vectors and priorities. Confirmation of this was the adoption of a number of legislative documents, which identified the external enemy of the aggressor and outlined directions for the protection of national interests. It is analyzed that one of the main tasks in the information confrontation of the hybrid war is the formation of appropriate information policy and information security. It was pointed out that in the conditions of a hybrid war, a systematic approach should be devised to adequately respond to the state’s power structures to the challenges related to information confrontation. In order to minimize the spread of manipulative influences in the national information space, the formation of practical mechanisms for implementing the country’s information policy, establishing communication with civil society and raising the overall level of media literacy of society is a necessary question.

The article conducts a comprehensive study of public information and communication space in Ukraine, analyzes its current state considering regulatory and organizational features, identifies key challenges for quality development and modernization of the industry, and identifies key dysfunctional problems that prevent high performance in domestic development of information and communication technologies. It is argued that an important role in the constructive formation of the public information and communication sector is played by the state information policy, which should be based on such principles as openness, system, equality of interests, priority of domestic producers, social orientation. It turns out that the formation of a quality public information space contributes to the development of civil society, information society and information democracy. Comprehensive digitalization of public communication will promote openness, transparency and accessibility of public information, the formation of partnerships between the public, business, and civil sectors. Three basic stages of formation of information and communication space have been identified: strategic, organizational and control ones.

The Constitutional Right to Information in the Practice of Voivodeship Self-Government in Poland – Research Results

The right to information and the degree to which citizens are informed about the activities of public authorities is of great importance for the quality of public life. The article analyzes the results of research on the manner of conducting information policy by voivodeship self-governments in Poland. They focus on the approach of self-government representatives to the information policy, as well as the communication tools used, which have an impact on the level of informing citizens about the activities of voivodeship self-government.

The research covers the early years of Ukraine’s and Poland’s cooperation in their bilateral relations in the context of building up security policies between the NATO and the CSTO in 1991–1994. Various information influences from state and non-state actors, internal and external, made it so the processes of the search for security guarantees ended up quite different between the two neighboring countries. Covering sources and literature that provide evidence for influences from sources such as the Kremlin, the non-lustrated “old guard” former Communist party functionaries in Ukraine, and the former opposition in Poland, the research shows how the two countries’ relations with the NATO differed, and why, though both countries joined the Partnership for Peace program at roughly the same time, Poland managed to start active Euro-Atlantic integration much earlier than Ukraine did. Using sources such as the text of the treaties, the establishing documents and legislature guidebooks of organization, public writings of diplomats and former policy makers, the research shows what exactly were the risks that the NATO assessed in the joining of former Eastern Bloc countries (with the unstated reasons for the small number of contacts of those countries with NATO in the 1991–1994 relevant to the West’s suspicion of post-Soviet intelligence and military), and which points of the first Ukraine-NATO proved “too much” for the former. Furthermore, Ukraine’s early success with the number of NATO exercises it partook in during the first years of the Partnership for Peace became an example to other Eastern Europe countries seeking better relations with NATO and defense sector reforms, including the Republic of Poland. The paper also highlights the tendencies of cooperation between Ukraine and the Republic of Poland in the context of NATO enlargement and the various aspects of Atlantic integration. The most important among them was cooperation in security and defense, both bilateral and within the framework of the NATO Partnership for Peace Program.