Authors

Discussion

The 2014 crisis in and over Ukraine was in many ways a turning point in Russian politics. From the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 to the launch of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (and afterwards), Russian state officials have incorporated nationalist arguments into their rhetoric. The (undeclared) war in Ukraine seems to have acted as a nationalising force not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia. The paper argues that the Russian regime’s use of nationalist rhetoric helped preparing the ground for the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by framing the armed conflict that began in 2014 as much in terms of collective identity (a nationalist logic) as in terms of national security (a balance of power logic) and political change (a fear of democracy logic). The paper examines the uses of nationalism by the Putin regime to legitimise the war in Ukraine. It draws on content and discourse analysis of material scraped from the websites of the Kremlin, the State Duma, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Based on these three corpora, we explore how the meaning of selected nationalist tropes, such as “Russophobia”, “de-Russification” and “national traitors”, as well as their referent, have gradually changed. By marshalling the identity dimension, the regime has sought to foreclose nationalist criticism and, at the same time, mobilise against foreign and domestic anti-regime forces–all while preparing the ground for waging war against Ukraine.