Foreign policy and youth orientation: information support and impact

Background. In the current conditions of the information war unleashed against Russia, un precedented pressure in connection with the tough foreign policy pursued to defend its national inter ests, our country found itself in difficult conditions. The degree of information pressure is constantly growing. And ordinary citizens are faced with huge flows of information, which often contains false information that discredits our country, the army, and the government. In these circumstances, a situa tion may arise when our fellow citizens succumb to attempts of active informational influence, which negatively affects the general state of Russian society, and protest sentiments appear, which is unac ceptable today due to the extremely important need to unite Russians in the face of external challeng es. The purpose of the work is to study the information influence on the foreign policy orientations of modern youth. Materials and methods. The work is based on the results of surveys conducted by VTsIOM and FOM, as well as materials from author's research among young people, including stu dents, conducted in Penza, Saratov, and Tyumen (2023–2025). Results. The article provides a theoreti cal analysis of the main parameters of foreign policy, information warfare, the features of information influence on youth, presents a sociological perspective of information support for foreign policy, and a study of information influence in the foreign policy sphere on the orientation of modern youth. Con clusions. According to surveys, young people today show an active interest in political events, and for the most part it is noticeable among international students. Young people get information about inter national events from online sources, demonstrating a fairly high level of trust in them. Most of the young people support the ban by the authorities on the dissemination of false information about the ac tions of the Russian military in their own zone, and also note the increase in the dissemination of this kind of information. At the same time, according to the survey data, the information impact that un friendly actors are trying to implement has virtually no effect on the patriotic components of the for eign policy orientations of modern you.