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Extant research in media and migration has been largely apolitical, focusing on how migrants use media to culturally connect with their homeland and keep their family ties. However, in times of increasing international conflicts and polarisation, such as the years leading up to the Russia's war against Ukraine in 2022, migrant audiences find themselves in a situation when the coverage of national and international politics in the homeland and host country media can differ dramatically. Against this backdrop, this study investigated how Russian speakers living in Germany create and navigate their transnational news repertoires. Grounded in 42 semi-structured interviews with the Russian speakers of the 1 and 1.5 generations in Germany, conducted between May and October 2021, this article identifies three types of transnational news repertoires: (1) politically-motivated news repertoire, (2) truth seeking-motivated news repertoire and (3) situation-motivated news repertoire. The results show that all the news repertoires of all participants are transnational. I argue that in the context of international conflict, not only language but also the participants' political beliefs play an essential role in their news choice. Future research on migrants in political communication should distinguish research not only along with the language of the media outlets but also along with the political ideologies that they project.

Extant research demonstrated that the algorithms of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex, compared to those of its US-based counterpart Google, frequently produce results that are biased toward the interests of Russia’s ruling elites. Prior research, however, audited Yandex’s algorithms largely within Russia. In contrast, this study is the first to assess the role of Yandex’s web search algorithms as a resource for Russia’s informational influence abroad. To do so, we conduct a comparative algorithm audit of Google and Yandex in Belarus, examining the visibility and narratives of COVID-19-related conspiracy theories in their search results. By manually analysing the content of 1320 search results collected in mid-April to mid-May 2020, we find that, compared with Google, (1) Yandex retrieves significantly more conspiratorial content (2) that close to exclusively suspects US plotters to be behind the pandemic, even though the virus spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan across the globe.