Paula Espírito Santo ^*

• Higher Institute of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

This study, based on an anticipatory approach and from an agenda-building perspective, explores the role of the press as a key player, especially in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. The research question is: how can communication and the press play a role during war to break a reactive response cycle? The anticipatory approach has been extremely useful in many fields-even more so when considering the urgency of several policy domains where greater evidence and research is urgently required. This is the case with democracy and decision-making processes (Bezold, 1978;Caillol, 2012;MacKenzie, 2023) as well as what refers to war (Hegre, 2014)-a complex domain that encompasses multiple factors such as human capacity for vision, creative thinking, strategy, politics, governance, communication, information, etc. A field that can be viewed as the last layerperceived directly by the population-is communication; especially, the role of press during war. The agenda-building approach has been a key tool to understand news-making processes. According to Vu (2020), "the agenda building approach refers to the process in which salience of an issue is formed in the news agenda through reciprocal interactions between actors including the news media, the public and political figures." From an anticipatory-approach perspective, media-coverage analysis enables the examination of the inter-influence between policy-makers, the results of decision-making, and different social and media agents.Methodologically, this study applies the content-analysis technique to a set of selected Portuguese newspapers (daily and weekly) for the period 2014-2023. The news selection criteria included articles providing political and strategic information regarding the Ukraine war, referring to international organizations and European Union actors, along with the Russian and Ukraine actors. The expected results aim to provide empirical evidence of the relationship between different regimes and how policymakers and political processes are placed in a dynamic perspective of future action, considering the role of the press.