The war in Ukraine has dominated news cycles since Russia invaded on February 24th.* But after five months of headlines, the world is growing weary. Online coverage of the conflict is now below the peak of reporting on Kabul's fall to the Taliban last August and on the bloody conflict in Gaza last May, according to the GDELT project, a database tracking international news articles. Analysis of social-media posts by NewsWhip, a media-monitoring platform, suggests that Americans were more interested in the recent defamation case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, two actors, than in this war, let alone other conflicts that drag on around the world.

GDELT’s database can compare up to four global online news searches using its own global news monitoring infrastructure and additional sources such as Google News, collecting all online news published every 15 minutes in the 65 different languages it live-translates. In this instance, it compared four sets of keywords on countries affected by conflict around the world including Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and Gaza. Two months before Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, sample keywords such as ‘Ukraine’, ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Ukrainian’ only appeared in 4% of all GDELT-monitored articles collected in the project’s database on December 31st, 2021. This grew to 7% as Russian forces began massing near Ukraine’s border at the end of January and then leapt to 13% when Mr Putin announced his “special operation” in Ukraine on February 23rd, a day before the invasion began. This jumped to a remarkable 30% on February 24th when the Russian forces entered Ukraine in full force and peaked at 35% on the third day of the war. 

At its peak, Ukraine’s war had 23% more online coverage when compared to the day that GDELT-monitored articles on Afghanistan hit their biggest peak when the Taliban seized power last year. This is likely due to Ukraine’s location, the effect the war has had on global supply chains, and Ukraine’s position as a major geopolitical flashpoint between NATO and Russia. It was only on May 11th, 76 days into Ukraine’s war, that online news including the sampled keywords for Ukraine fell below Afghanistan’s online coverage peak. For Gaza, hit by a short but bloody war last year, it was 90 days until Ukraine coverage fell below peak coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. 

However, as the wars in Afghanistan and Gaza demonstrate, online news coverage of conflicts follows a similar trajectory, and on average decline roughly one to two weeks after their peak. Ukraine is now doing the same, albeit at a slower pace. After Russian forces initially threatened to seize Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in the early stages of the war, interest has begun to slide, though not as rapidly as that in Gaza and Afghanistan. The subsequent withdrawal of forces from around Kyiv, and the discovery of Russian war crimes in Bucha in early April mark when interest in the war began to decline, only stymied by the fall of Mariupol to Russian soldiers. 

The shock of the invasion is subsiding and, with it, international media coverage. The conflict has become a war of attrition, currently focused on the city of Severodonetsk, in eastern Ukraine. It could drag on for years. The data suggest that the global news audience will lose interest despite its global ramifications.

*This article was originally published on 23rd June, 2022