“Brussels – On the Line!” – Get to Know the EU

The process of Ukraine’s European integration can be shown in different ways. It is long, demanding, and needs cooperation on both sides of Ukraine and the EU.

According to a survey organised by the Center for Social Indicators in 2018, 72% of Ukrainians need more information about the EU and European integration. And this is exactly the promotion our media platform does. But together with students of the Ukrainian Catholic University, we created a new approach to this important task. Now we offer you an opportunity to learn about our new project – a podcast “Brussels – On the Line!”

Why is it unique?

Well, first of all, “Brussels – On the Line!” is a Ukrainian podcast where we analyse the three latest news stories in the context of the domestic and foreign policy of the European Union and Ukraine’s European integration.

Moreover, it is an umbrella project of the UCU POLITclub student organisation (Lviv, Ukraine), the non-profit and non-governmental organisation UCU Alumni Association (Lviv, Ukraine), and Promote Ukraine (Brussels, Belgium).

This approach allows us to accomplish two important goals: to combine theoretical knowledge gained by the UCU students during their university studies with practical experience of Ukrainian diplomats, economists, lawyers, and journalists of “Promote Ukraine”, and work abroad.

Another podcast feature is that POLITClub journalists collect comments from three experts on various topics for each episode. The UCU students communicate with experts, do text writing, audio recording, and final editing. For our part, we try to provide contacts with people who would reveal specific topics of a particular episode as best as possible.

If talking about the content, the journalists of “Brussels – On the Line!” write a scenario focusing on topics like Law, Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Religion, Economics, and Medicine. This fact helps to cover a wide range of issues, starting from the geopolitical meaning of Islamic terrorist attacks in France and ending with the economic consequences of inventing the coronavirus vaccine.

The cooperation of UCU students with Promote Ukraine turned out to be very effective because the idea of producing the podcast was implemented: three episodes have already been released.

In the first episode, we talked about Ukraine’s European integration; а violation of the freedom of speech in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary; and Catalan separatism. The second one covered the issues of EU general government debt, the promotion of vaccination, and how the EU deals with troubled political parties. The third one was just as interesting as the previous ones because our listeners had the opportunity to hear expert opinions on the EU’s fight against “online terrorism,” the implementation of vaccine passports, and how things are going with Nord Stream-2.

Therefore, the podcast “Brussels – On the Line!” perfectly deals with its main goal: to improve Ukrainians’ political competence about geopolitical tendencies and issues connected to the EU and Ukraine’s European integration.

What we need now is your support because important ideas deserve to be spread.

Where can you listen to “Brussels – On the Line!”?

Here is the list of online platforms:  Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,  Castbox,  Anchor, YouTube. Choose your favourite one and enjoy the podcast.

After all, promoting the European Union in Ukraine is our main concern.

Khrystyna Dmytryshyn, a journalist of POLITclub UCU