<p>The article analyzes states’ media visibility in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It shows that verifiable and transparent factors, such as states’ donations to Ukraine’s war efforts, do not adequately explain the variation in the frequency of references to states in media discourses after controlling for the impact of political discourses and foreign media. The interplay between war propaganda and the logic of cross-referencing inherent to mass media, according to differentiation theory, emerged as a principal explanation for states’ media footprint. To the extent a mass medium is subject to censorship, it walks the line drawn by the leaders. To the extent that the mass medium maintains some autonomy even during wartime, it tends to be involved in cross-referencing and is influenced by what other media say. China emerged as one of the keywords that distinguished various sources of discourse. The reported results indicate the lack of transparency in geopolitical matters and support a critical view of geopolitics. The unique corpora of media and political discourses, as well as statistical data, inform the analysis. The corpora contain more than 213 million words in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French. The study covers the first two years and two months of the all-out war in Ukraine, from February 2022 to April 2024, and five countries: Ukraine, Russia, the USA, the UK, and France.</p>