A substantial literature has analyzed Kremlin political speeches to assess the relative weight of diverse ideological talking points over time. These include strategic narratives (modernisation, “civilization-state”, “Katechon”, defender of traditional values, antifascist power, leading anti-colonial force) and recurring topoi (gayropa, cultural skrepi, greater Eurasia, Ukronazis, collective West, Russophobia, genocide, double standards). While official texts from Kremlin.ru and state sites have been widely studied, many analyses lack a clear conceptual or methodological framework to determine whether ideological components have grown more consistent and coherent.This paper adopts Michael Freeden’s definition of ideology as a “particular arrangement of political concepts” whose meanings are “decontested”, combined with a post-structuralist view of ideology as discursive structures built on antagonistic us/them juxtapositions legible only in reference to an imagined political community. Coherence is measured by the clarity of political concepts and friend-enemy distinctions; continuity by the frequency of stable ideological components over time. Regime discourse serves as a primary site of ideological production, sending signals and cues to lower-level actors and groups.Using a data-driven approach, we map the frequency of key nodes and apply political discourse analysis (PDA) to governmental texts from two periods: 2012–2022 and 2022–2026. Building on an existing NUPI dataset and in-house corporaexplorer software, we trace how concepts (order, sovereignty, security, Greater Eurasia) are operationalized into keywords. This provides an empirical foundation for assessing the stability of political concepts in state discourse and their relative weight as core or peripheral to regime ideology. The final stage tracks how these concepts, narratives, and topoi link to specific policy domains, as operationalized by actors on other media platforms, thereby giving substantive content to the regime’s empty signifiers.

Scholarship typically frames Russia’s sovereignty within the antagonistic Kremlin narrative of defending the nation and its people against Western threats such as liberalism, individualism, and cultural decadence. While this negative discourse dominates official communications, focusing solely on it risks overlooking the concept’s contingent and symbolically productive functions. This paper addresses this gap by demonstrating that post-2022 articulations of sovereignty extend beyond geopolitics or defense to the administrative level through positive policies.Drawing on Glynos and Howarth’s framework of fantasmatic logics in critical policy analysis, the paper examines post-2022 amendments and implementation mechanisms in patriotic education, with primary focus on compulsory public schools and youth movements. Empirical materials come from Russia’s educational agencies and their communication channels (Telegram/Vkontakte) targeting teachers, patriotic advisors, and students. The analysis argues that these narratives translate the negative concept of sovereignty into concrete welfarist fantasies about state-society relations.The paper identifies three key productive fantasies generated by Russia’s consolidated post-2022 sovereignty for participants in the educational process: (1) professional esteem, (2) career growth, and (3) refined social order. These fantasies illustrate how sovereignty is digested into everyday administrative and pedagogical practices, offering positive incentives that complement defensive rhetoric and help sustain ideological alignment at the grassroots level in wartime conditions.

This paper explores how ideological elements within Russia’s strategic culture shape its readiness to use military force internationally during the 2020s. While debates persist over whether Putin’s regime has a full-fledged ideology, this study sidesteps binaries by treating Putinism as a flexible yet systematically patterned ideology expressed through interconnected variations of statism. Three configurations are identified: (1) patriotic statism, viewing the state as the ultimate value; (2) welfare statism, positioning the state as guarantor of citizens’ well-being; (3) nationalist statism, instrumentalizing the state to advance national interests. These variants inform strategic culture differently, forming distinct constellations by purpose and context.Methodologically, the paper employs a social-semiotic approach, reconceptualizing strategic culture as a “logonomic system” of rules constraining international behavior. This enables systematic multimodal analysis across genres (speeches, policy documents, visuals, songs, videos, embodied practices) and semiotic layers (signs, meanings, habits). Empirically, it combines close reading of foundational policy texts with broader public and media discourse.The analysis finds that decisions on military interventions primarily entangle nationalist-statist and patriotic-statist elements. Nationalist-statist imaginaries—of the “Russian World”, “historical Russia”, and civilizational incompatibility with the West—fuel escalatory, civilizationist foreign policies. Patriotic-statist elements support realist strategies such as multi-vector diplomacy or engagement in “pluralist unipolarity”. For domestic mobilization in the Ukraine conflict, the Kremlin uses a hybrid: nationalist-statist appeals to anti-Western civilizational struggle and “fraternal” rhetoric about Ukrainians combine with patriotic-statist emphasis on sovereignty/security and welfare-statist incentives (salaries, social benefits) for soldiers. Overall, the paper shows how these entangled statist ideologies structure Russia’s strategic culture, influencing external readiness for force and internal legitimation of military action amid the broader wartime ideologization of Putinism.

Since the early 2010s, the Russian regime has increasingly consolidated “traditional values” as a central ideological nodal point, institutionalised through law, policy, and media. While existing scholarship has examined this ideological turn primarily through elite rhetoric, legal discourse, and foreign policy narratives, less attention has been paid to how ideologization operates beyond formal political speech—through affective governance and mass-media formats that translate abstract ideological claims into moral common sense. This paper conceptualises moral panic as a technology of ideologization, through which wartime Russian ideology is operationalised and stabilised across society. Empirically, the paper analyses the long-running Russian reality television series Pregnant at 16, later rebranded as Mother at 16, drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of a purposive sample of 30 episodes across nine seasons. The analysis identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which gendered governance is ideologically consolidated: (1) the progressive elimination of abortion as a legitimate narrative outcome, culminating in the program’s rebranding in 2024; (2) the disproportionate moralisation of reproductive choice, whereby structural violence and abuse are normalised while abortion and non-normative sexuality are rendered taboo; and (3) the affective valorisation of early motherhood as civic virtue in the context of demographic decline intensified by wartime losses. Situating these media narratives within the legislative trajectory of the 2013 “gay propaganda” law and its 2024 expansion, the paper demonstrates how episodic media discourse functions as a downstream ideological signal, aligned with legal and policy interventions. Rather than treating reality television as neutral entertainment, the analysis conceptualises it as an auxiliary ideological apparatus embedded within a broader ecosystem of ideological production involving state-aligned broadcasters, regulatory institutions, legislative signalling, and moral entrepreneurship associated with the Orthodox Church. By linking mass-media narratives to the codification of “traditional values” into law, the paper shows how moral panic operates as a mode of ideological consolidation—transforming gendered and reproductive governance into a stabilising pillar of Russia’s wartime political order. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on ideologization in contemporary autocracies by highlighting the role of popular culture in sustaining ideological coherence beyond elite discourse.