Russian Invasion into Ukraine and Lithuanian Public Agenda in 2022-2023: Victim and Persistent Issues

Focusing events (Kingdon, 2014) have the power to become dominant issues on any agenda including public agenda. They may become "killer issues" (Brosius & Kepplinger, 1995) that either replace or restructure attention to issues on agendas. Therefore, some issues may become "victim issues" that may disappear completely from some agenda or may lose a lot of attention. Other issues may be identified as more persistent and lose only some attention (or none at all). Yet, other issues may receive facilitating support from attention to the focusing events and become more prominent on the agenda. In this article we aim to show how Russia’s war in Ukraine restructured attention to issues on the Lithuanian public agenda. Specifically, our objectives are to study issue priorities among Lithuanian public and reveal changes of issue attention on the Lithuanian public agenda between years 2022 and 2023 (at the beginning of the Russian invasion and a year after the invasion). For the purpose of analysis, we used data from two nationally representative surveys conducted in Lithuania on March, 2022 and May, 2023. They included an open-ended question asking respondents to identify (up to three) national level problems that the Government should pay the most attention to during the year of the survey. The answers were registered and coded according to the topic classification developed in the Comparative Agendas Project. This scheme contains 21 major topics (such as, Macroeconomics, Social Welfare or Defense) and 220 subtopics (such as, Price Control, Gender Discrimination, or Human Rights). Though the answers were coded on the level of subtopics, in this article we analyzed data only on the major topic level. Also, every answer and identification of a problem was coded whether it was directly related to Ukraine. For the analysis we employed descriptive and multivariate statistical analysis.