Introduction
Russia’s imperial view of Ukraine, rooted in centuries of domination and cultural hierarchy, continues to shape Vladimir Putin’s contemporary discourse. From Tsarist narratives of a ‘triune Russian nation’ to Soviet policies of Russification, Moscow has long framed Ukraine as a constituent part of a wider Russian-led civilisational whole.Footnote 1 Under Putin, this historical inheritance re-emerges as both political strategy and discursive weapon. His invocations of ‘fraternity’, ‘shared roots’, and ‘historical unity’ reproduce an imperial epistemology in which Ukraine appears as a derivative or incomplete state whose full legitimacy depends on alignment with Russia. Through this lens, Putin’s discourse functions as an attempt to convert hierarchical claims into hegemonic authority by presenting domination as natural, benign, and historically grounded.
While scholarship has examined the ideological content of Putin’s statements, it has paid less attention to how such narratives are received, interpreted, and negotiated by their intended audience. To address this gap, this essay develops the analytical concept of contextual resonance, referring to the extent to which the political meanings embedded within hegemonic discourse become compatible with the historical memory, political experience, and sovereign self-understanding of those it seeks to influence. By integrating Michel Foucault’s notion of the enunciative function, which highlights how claims to truth emerge within structured fields of discourse, with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and common sense, which explains how consent is socially reproduced, the paper develops a framework for assessing the limits of hegemonic projects when the meanings they seek to naturalise diverge from the lived political realities of their intended audience.
The central argument advanced in this paper is that Vladimir Putin’s discourse on Ukraine encountered the limits of contextual resonance not because Ukrainians rejected notions of shared history, cultural proximity, or fraternal ties, but because they interpreted these ideas differently from the subordinating political meanings embedded within Russia’s imperial discourse. For many Ukrainians, references to common roots or historical fraternity did not imply political hierarchy, the erosion of sovereignty, or the abandonment of an independent domestic and foreign policy trajectory. By contrast, Russian discourse increasingly framed Ukraine’s sovereign political choices, particularly the election of pro-European leaders, the Orange Revolution, and the Euromaidan uprising, as violations of an allegedly indivisible civilisational unity. As Ukraine deepened its democratic and European trajectory, the limits of contextual resonance became progressively exposed, revealing the incompatibility between Russia’s hegemonic claims and Ukraine’s evolving understanding of sovereign political agency.
As Ukrainian society deepened its democratic agency and pursued a European trajectory, Russian discourse increasingly framed these developments as externally orchestrated betrayals of an allegedly indivisible civilisational unity. Accusations portraying Ukrainian authorities as neo-Nazis, puppets, or usurpers expanded alongside a broader propaganda apparatus designed to delegitimise Ukraine’s sovereign political choices. Russia’s turn towards coercion beginning in 2014 did not simply follow the limits of contextual resonance; it progressively exposed them by transforming narratives of ‘fraternity’ and ‘shared history’ into instruments of political domination. Each successive act of coercion further intensified the incompatibility between Russia’s hegemonic claims and Ukraine’s evolving understanding of sovereign political agency, reinforcing Ukraine’s movement away from the Russian sphere and towards European integration. The full-scale invasion of 2022 marked the culmination of this trajectory, revealing that while references to shared history and cultural proximity could resonate socially, they could not sustain acceptance of the subordinating political order embedded within Russia’s imperial discourse. Although this article focuses primarily on the Ukrainian reception of Russian discourse, the parallel hardening of Russian public attitudes towards Ukraine after 2014 also underscores the relational character of contextual resonance and the extent to which coercion progressively displaced the possibility of consent-oriented hegemony in both societies.
Methodologically, the paper applies qualitative discourse analysis to Vladimir Putin’s officially published speeches, interviews, essays, and public statements between 2001 and 2022, drawing primarily on the Kremlin.ru archive. The analysis began with a broad review of Putin’s publicly available statements mentioning Ukraine, identified through keyword searches for ‘Ukraine’ across the archive. From this broader corpus, the study focused specifically on texts in which Ukraine was discussed in relation to ‘fraternity’, ‘shared history’, ‘one people’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘Western interference’, ‘civilisational unity’, ‘securitisation’, or the alleged illegitimacy of Ukrainian political actors. Statements primarily limited to technical economic relations, routine diplomatic exchanges, or negotiations over the implementation of the Minsk agreements were excluded where they did not substantially engage broader representations of Ukraine–Russia relations or Ukrainian sovereignty. For example, discussions surrounding the December 2019 Putin–Zelenskyy meeting were not examined in detail because they focused primarily on negotiations over the Donbas conflict rather than broader civilisational or hegemonic claims about Ukraine. Similarly, speeches such as Putin’s 2019 meeting with the public of Crimea and Sevastopol were excluded from close analysis where they largely repeated already established narratives that were more systematically articulated in the 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, which is treated here as a key synthesis of Putin’s discourse after 2014. Particular attention was instead given to texts produced during major geopolitical turning points, including debates over NATO enlargement, the Orange Revolution, the Euromaidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas. Rather than relying on isolated quotations, the analysis traces recurring discursive themes and shifts in how Ukraine was represented across different political moments.
The paper also uses longitudinal survey data from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and the Levada Center to assess indirectly audience reception towards discursive tropes such as ‘fraternity’ and ‘one people’. These surveys are intended not to measure directly how Ukrainians interpreted specific narratives but rather to examine the broader compatibility between the political meanings embedded within Russian hegemonic discourse and Ukraine’s evolving understanding of sovereignty, legitimate political order, and geopolitical orientation. Declining support for Russia and increasing support for the EU and NATO are therefore interpreted not as automatic rejection of shared cultural or historical references but rather as indicators of growing resistance to the subordinating political implications embedded within Russia’s imperial discourse.
Contextual resonance is therefore not treated as equivalent to favourable public opinion, cultural affinity, or ideological internalisation alone. Rather, it is identified through the extent to which the political meanings embedded within Russian hegemonic discourse remained compatible with dominant Ukrainian understandings of sovereignty, legitimate political order, and collective political agency. Empirically, the study examines this relationship through discursive shifts in Putin’s representations of Ukraine alongside broader political and societal developments, including reactions to Russian coercion, democratic mobilisation, attitudes towards Russian-led and Western integration projects, and changing geopolitical orientations reflected in longitudinal survey data. Public-opinion data are therefore used as not direct measurements of contextual resonance but rather indirect indicators of audience reception and the degree of compatibility between Russian hegemonic claims and Ukraine’s evolving political self-understanding.
In this article, the primary intended audience of Russian hegemonic discourse is understood as Ukrainian society broadly conceived, including both political elites and wider public opinion. The analysis proceeds from the assumption that hegemonic projects operate through not only formal political leadership but also broader attempts to shape collective understandings of legitimate political order and geopolitical orientation. Russia’s discourse of ‘fraternity’, ‘historical unity’, and ‘one people’ therefore sought not merely to secure geopolitical influence over Ukraine but also to naturalise a hierarchical relationship in which Ukraine’s sovereignty remained compatible only within a Russian-centred political and civilisational space. While Russian domestic audiences also constituted an important secondary audience for these narratives, the article focuses primarily on the Ukrainian reception of Russian imperial discourse and the limits it encountered within Ukraine’s evolving democratic and sovereign political trajectory.
The study proceeds in three stages: first, elaborating the theoretical concept of contextual resonance; second, tracing the evolution of Putin’s discourse from soft-hegemonic appeals to increasingly securitised and delegitimising narratives; and third, examining how these discursive shifts interacted with changing public attitudes and Ukraine’s evolving sovereign political trajectory. Through this design, the paper argues that Russia’s increasing reliance on coercion after 2014 and especially after 2022 progressively exposed the limits of the contextual resonance of Russian imperial discourse within Ukraine, particularly as Ukraine’s evolving understanding of sovereignty and political agency became increasingly incompatible with the subordinating political meanings embedded within that discourse.
Developing the framework for analysis
To develop a more precise framework for understanding how hegemonic discourse functions in geopolitical contexts, this paper brings together Michel Foucault’s enunciative function and Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and common sense. By integrating these traditions, it develops the analytical concept of contextual resonance to examine the extent to which the political meanings embedded within hegemonic discourse become compatible with the historical experience, political expectations, and sovereign self-understanding of its intended audience. In this framework, hegemonic projects are sustained through not simply the circulation of familiar historical narratives or cultural symbols but also their capacity to align with the audience’s understanding of legitimate political order and collective political agency.
Foucault’s concept of discourse is crucial to understanding how knowledge and truth are constructed within specific historical contexts. He defines ‘discourse’ as ‘a group of statements insofar as they belong to the same discursive formation […] endlessly repeatable’.Footnote 2 This definition underscores that discourse is not merely a collection of random statements but a structured system where each statement gains significance through its repetition and connection to others within the same framework. The idea that these statements are ‘endlessly repeatable’ reflects Foucault’s notion of enunciative regularities, whereby discourse reproduces particular configurations of meaning through historically conditioned repetition. Foucault further explains that a discursive formation is rooted in ‘a specific history that does not refer it back to the laws of an alien development’,Footnote 3 indicating that its logic emerges from internal, contingent historical conditions rather than any universal laws. This historical grounding does not simply reinforce authority by invoking the past but also enables discourse to determine what statements are accepted as meaningful, legitimate, and authoritative – thus shaping the archive of knowledge specific to that time and context.
Central to Foucault’s concept of discourse is the enunciative function: a mechanism by which statements acquire meaning and authority within a historically structured field of discourse. Foucault defines the enunciative function as a network of conditions, norms, and references that ‘turns a sentence or series of signs into a statement’ by situating it within a particular context and representative content.Footnote 4 Thus, statements are not isolated units: they derive their meaning through their relations with other statements within the same discursive formation. This interdependence is crucial, as each statement ‘plays a role among other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself through these connections’.Footnote 5
Power operates through this discursive interconnectedness, shaping what can be said, known, and accepted as ‘truth’ within a given regime of knowledge. As Foucault puts it, ‘truth’ is ‘a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements’ – one that is ‘linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it’.Footnote 6 As a result, ‘truth’ is not inherent or universal but rather produced within discourse, as the enunciative function embeds statements in specific contexts that render them naturalised and authoritative. This process is evident in Putin’s discourse, which draws upon and reconstructs Russian historical narratives of dominance within the post-Soviet space, particularly in Ukraine. These narratives are sustained as authoritative truths through a broader discursive network of cultural references and historical reinterpretations that reinforce contemporary Russian hegemony.
Additionally, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is essential for understanding how dominant ideologies, or what Foucault might call ‘Truths’, are internalised within society. He argues that the supremacy of a ruling class is maintained not by coercion alone but rather through a combination of ‘domination’ and ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, the latter being what he defines as hegemony.Footnote 7 This leadership is exercised primarily through civil society, where dominant ideas are normalised and rendered commonsensical. Gramsci conceptualises the state as not merely an apparatus of force but also ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’.Footnote 8 This consent is not simply spontaneous or freely given. Rather, it is historically shaped by the ruling class’s prestige and ideological influence: ‘spontaneous consent […] caused by the prestige […] which the dominant group enjoys’, while the apparatus of coercion remains in place to discipline dissent.Footnote 9
A central mechanism of hegemonic leadership is the shaping of ‘common sense’, a fluid and fragmented worldview absorbed through everyday institutions and experiences. Gramsci explains that this commonsense worldview is continuously restructured to reflect the dominant class’s evolving interests: ‘to transcend a particular form of common sense and create another which was closer to the conception of the world of the leading group’.Footnote 10 Because this form of consent is more stable than coercion, Gramsci emphasises that hegemony must be established ‘by means other than reliance on violence or coercion’.Footnote 11 As social values evolve, the dominant class must continuously adapt by incorporating elements of alternative or subaltern worldviews into its own ideological structure. This process is vital because, as Murray and Worth note, the ruling class must ‘forge consent among competing worldviews […] to build a cohesive state–society complex’ in which it can sustain its authority.Footnote 12 Through this adaptive strategy, the dominant class constructs an ideological environment in which its power appears natural, inevitable, and legitimate, thereby minimising resistance and reducing the need for overt coercion. In this way, hegemony becomes a lived system of belief, internalised even by those it subjugates.
A substantial critical IR and political theory literature has already explored how Gramsci’s hegemony and Foucault’s relational power can be applied in IR or read together. Robert Cox’s classic move brought Gramsci into international order, arguing that hegemony rests on a historically specific ‘fit’ among material capabilities, institutions, and ideas, consent at scale rather than mere domination.Footnote 13 Building on this, Stephen Gill showed how hegemonic authority is reproduced through disciplinary techniques embedded in institutions and everyday practices, implicitly drawing on Foucauldian insights into micro-powers while retaining Gramsci’s focus on consent and leadership.Footnote 14 More recently, Andreas Bieler and Adam D. Morton have explicitly reconciled Gramscian historical materialism with Foucauldian conceptions of dispersed power, emphasising that hegemonic projects endure only when their ideas resonate with the social forces they seek to organise.Footnote 15
Beyond these IR anchors, scholars have clarified the conceptual mechanics of a Gramsci–Foucault synthesis. Mark Stoddart maps the overlap between discourse, power, and hegemony, arguing that discourses become effective when they sediment into common sense.Footnote 16 Iver Neumann applies a Foucauldian discourse lens to Russia’s self/other formations vis-à-vis Europe, illustrating how identity construction underwrites its foreign policy claims.Footnote 17 David Campbell likewise demonstrates how state identities are constituted through security discourse, offering a template for linking rhetorical construction to political effects.Footnote 18 William E. Connolly refines the idea of hegemony through resonance: the affective and ideological interplay that binds diverse actors into a shared sensibility. Power, in this view, operates less through command than through emotional alignment that sustains consent.Footnote 19 Ernesto Laclau similarly conceives hegemony as a process of discursive articulation, in which empty signifiers such as ‘unity’ or ‘people’ momentarily link heterogeneous meanings into collective identity, enduring only while those symbols continue to resonate.Footnote 20
Existing analyses of Putin’s rhetoric illuminate how language legitimises aggression and reinforces authority. Tolz and Hutchings show how Russian propaganda maintains its ‘truth status’ by drawing on familiar imperial discourses that resonate within domestic culture. Both state and oppositional actors deploy the same floating signifiers, such as ‘the Russian people’, ‘historical Russia’, ‘the Russian world’, ‘Ukraine’, ‘fascism’, and ‘genocide’, but invest them with opposing meanings, revealing a struggle over the symbols of national identity.Footnote 21 Sagramoso demonstrates how the Russian elite’s attachment to a shared post-Soviet ‘civilisational space’ sustains imperial assumptions about regional unity and hierarchy.Footnote 22 Oksamytna reframes the invasion through a postcolonial lens, showing that Ukraine’s rejection of ‘brotherly’ ties exposed Russia’s need to reassert supremacy through violence.Footnote 23 Toal and O’Loughlin reveal how Russia’s geopolitical storytelling diverges from Ukrainian and Western interpretations, exposing competing ‘truth regimes’.Footnote 24 Plokhy situates this rhetoric within a longer tradition of imperial revivalism,Footnote 25 while Popova and Shevel show how Russia and Ukraine have pursued increasingly divergent political trajectories since 1991, ultimately placing them on a collision course.Footnote 26 Zaporozhchenko shows how Russia’s shift from consent to coercion marks the collapse of its ideological project in the post-Soviet space.Footnote 27 Together, this scholarship portrays Russia’s war narratives as an evolving hegemonic project whose legitimacy depends on the fading resonance of imperial myths, now eroding under Ukraine’s pluralist counter-discourse.
While existing studies draw valuable links between Gramsci and Foucault, they lack a systematic framework for assessing the limits of hegemonic discourse in specific geopolitical contexts. This article introduces the concept of contextual resonance to address that gap. Contextual resonance refers to the extent to which the political meanings embedded within hegemonic discourse are interpreted as compatible with the historical experience, political expectations, and sovereign self-understanding of its intended audience. The concept builds on Foucault’s insight that discourse derives authority through historically constituted regimes of truth and on Gramsci’s argument that hegemony depends on the production of consent rather than coercion alone. In this framework, hegemonic discourse achieves resonance through not simply the circulation of familiar cultural symbols, historical narratives, or positive affective identification but also its capacity to align with the audience’s understanding of legitimate political order and collective political agency. Contextual resonance therefore captures the relational interaction between hegemonic discourse and audience reception within historically contingent political contexts.
The analytical contribution of contextual resonance lies in providing an analytical framework for explaining the limits of hegemonic discourse when audiences recognise shared historical and cultural narratives while rejecting the subordinating political meanings derived from them. Rather than asking whether audiences recognise or identify with historical and cultural narratives, contextual resonance asks whether the political order implied within hegemonic discourse is interpreted as compatible with the audience’s own understanding of sovereignty and political agency. In doing so, it provides an analytical lens for explaining why familiar historical narratives and cultural symbols may continue to be recognised while losing their capability to sustain hegemonic influence. Unlike a simple mismatch between discourse and audience, contextual resonance explains whether shared historical and cultural references acquire the capacity to generate consent for a particular political order.
To clarify its analytical distinctiveness, contextual resonance should not be equated with legitimacy, ideological internalisation, social consensus, discursive effectiveness, or common sense. Whereas legitimacy concerns whether authority is regarded as rightful, contextual resonance examines whether the political order implied by hegemonic claims is interpreted as consistent with the audience’s understanding of sovereignty and political agency. Unlike ideological internalisation, contextual resonance does not require audiences to adopt or reject an ideology in its entirety; they may recognise shared historical or cultural narratives while rejecting the political hierarchy those narratives are intended to legitimise. Nor is it synonymous with social consensus, since resonance may remain partial, uneven, and contested across different social and political groups. Similarly, discursive effectiveness concerns whether discourse succeeds in persuading or mobilising audiences, whereas contextual resonance concerns whether those political meanings can generate consent for the political relationship advanced through the discourse. Finally, common sense refers to the background understandings through which people make sense of political and social reality. Contextual resonance, by contrast, examines the relationship between hegemonic discourse and that interpretive terrain, asking whether the political meanings advanced through discourse connect with those understandings in ways that can sustain consent.
Because contextual resonance is a relational property of hegemonic discourse rather than a directly observable variable, this study assesses it through two complementary dimensions: first, whether audiences interpret the political meanings advanced through hegemonic discourse in the manner the discourse seeks to establish; and second, whether those meanings generate consent for the political relationship the discourse seeks to legitimise. When these dimensions diverge – for example, when audiences recognise shared historical and cultural references while rejecting the political meanings of hierarchy and subordination derived from them – the limits of contextual resonance become visible.
This framework is particularly well suited to analysing Russia’s imperial project in Ukraine, where Putin’s rhetoric of ‘historical unity’, ‘fraternity’, and ‘one people’ sought to construct Ukraine as culturally and politically inseparable from Russia. Such claims functioned as not neutral historical descriptions but rather hegemonic discourses that attempted to naturalise a hierarchical political order centred on Russian leadership. Yet, while these narratives could resonate through shared cultural references, historical familiarity, and post-Soviet interconnectedness, they encountered important limits as Ukraine increasingly asserted its sovereign domestic and foreign policy trajectory, democratic agency, and distinct political identity. In this context, Russia’s recurrent denial of Ukrainian statehood reflected not the consolidation of hegemony but rather the growing difficulty of constructing consent-oriented influence through imperial discourse alone. Contextual resonance therefore demonstrates that hegemonic projects require more than the repetition of historical narratives or civilisational claims; they depend on whether the political meanings embedded within those narratives remain compatible with the audience’s evolving understanding of legitimate political order and collective political agency. This article does not claim that discourse alone explains Russia’s turn towards coercion or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Rather, it argues that the limits of contextual resonance constituted an important ideological and political constraint on Russia’s ability to build influence through consent-oriented forms of hegemony. Russia’s increasing reliance on coercion emerged through the interaction of discursive, geopolitical, strategic, and security-related dynamics, within which imperial discourse played a constitutive and legitimising role.
Bringing Foucault’s analysis of discursive truth-production together with Gramsci’s emphasis on consent and hegemony therefore provides a framework for not only examining how imperial narratives are constructed but also analysing how their political meanings are received, negotiated, and constrained within specific historical contexts. The following section applies this framework to the evolution of Putin’s discourse on Ukraine between 2000 and 2006, focusing on how narratives of ‘fraternity’ and ‘historical unity’ sought to establish the discursive foundations of Russian hegemony.
Putin’s discourse on Ukraine
Fraternal rhetoric and the discursive foundations of hegemony between 2000 and 2006
Between 2000 and 2006, Vladimir Putin’s discourse on Ukraine was marked by a careful balance between acknowledging Ukrainian sovereignty and asserting a shared civilisational identity rooted in historical unity. This period reflects the initial stage of Russia’s hegemonic ambition: relying not on coercion but on emotionally resonant language, institutional integration, and cultural proximity to maintain influence. From the perspective of contextual resonance, Putin’s discourse aligned with many Ukrainians’ post-Soviet ambivalence, generating soft consent for Russian partnership before the relationship began to fray following the Orange Revolution.
In his early speeches, Putin repeatedly framed Ukraine as a ‘fraternal’ nation. In 2001, after a mining tragedy in Donetsk, he expressed condolences to ‘the fraternal people of Ukraine’, a phrase that reactivated Soviet-era language of kinship and affective unity.Footnote 28 That same year, during Ukraine’s independence anniversary in Kyiv, Putin reaffirmed this sentiment by stating, ‘Our roots are in Kievan Rus. Our brotherhood is not a legend, but a historical fact.’Footnote 29 While framed in the language of mutual respect, Putin’s invocation of brotherhood and shared roots subtly reinforced a civilisational closeness that would later become a basis for more hierarchical narratives. During this period, such framing resonated with many Ukrainians, especially in eastern and southern regions, enabling Russia to build influence through emotional and economic appeals rather than coercion.
Throughout 2002 and 2003, Putin’s language emphasised strategic partnership and formal equality, but always against the backdrop of deep historical and cultural entanglement. In Sochi, he noted a ‘clear direction’ in Russia–Ukraine relations and downplayed concern over NATO: ‘Ukraine has its own relations with NATO… it is a matter for those two partners’.Footnote 30 At a NATO–Russia summit in Italy, he reiterated that Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO was its ‘independent decision’, suggesting a pragmatic acceptance of Ukrainian sovereignty.Footnote 31 In Yalta in 2003, he described Russian–Ukrainian ties as ‘unique’ and based on shared history and familial bonds: ‘Most Ukrainian citizens link their destinies with Russia.’Footnote 32 These statements reinforced Russia’s hegemonic strategy through emotional interdependence, projecting influence via cultural affinity and economic linkage rather than direct domination.
Yet beneath the surface of this cooperative language, signs of coercive intent were already emerging. On 9 September 2003, Russia began constructing a causeway towards the Ukrainian island of Tuzla in the Kerch Strait – territory within Ukraine’s recognised borders. Just ten days later, Ukraine signed the Common Economic Space (CES) agreement with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The proximity of these events suggested a calculated attempt to link territorial pressure with economic alignment.Footnote 33 The episode exposed a latent coercive logic in Russia’s approach, reminding Ukrainian elites that even soft-hegemonic frameworks could be reinforced by hard strategic leverage.
The symbolic high point of Putin’s discursive phase came in 2004, during the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the Pereyaslav Rada. Speaking in Kyiv, Putin celebrated Ukraine’s historical union with Russia as decisive for Ukraine’s success: ‘Had a different choice been made back then, it is unlikely that Ukraine would be the powerful European state that it is today.’Footnote 34 This statement reimagined Ukraine’s historical development as dependent on Russian tutelage, subtly undermining the idea of autonomous Ukrainian statehood.
That same year, the Orange Revolution disrupted this discursive framework. As mass protests erupted over the fraudulent 2004 presidential election and Russian-backed efforts to secure Viktor Yanukovych’s victory, Putin’s tone shifted from cooperative to cautionary. At an EU summit in The Hague, he warned against ‘unrest in the streets’ and insisted that Ukraine’s crisis must be resolved ‘through constitutional means’.Footnote 35 Though still formally respectful of sovereignty, Putin’s comments expressed discomfort with democratic mobilisation and hinted at a narrative that would later frame popular uprisings as foreign-instigated destabilisation. In a subsequent statement, he emphasised that ‘Russia is not indifferent to what is happening in Ukraine’ and warned that constitutional violations ‘could split the country apart’.Footnote 36 This marked the discursive onset of Russia’s guardianship posture, in which Ukraine’s internal developments were no longer framed as sovereign choices but rather as potential threats to regional stability and shared identity.
Despite this tension, Putin maintained a veneer of diplomatic engagement. In December 2004, he contrasted EU and NATO integration, stating that Ukraine’s EU aspirations were ‘a positive factor’, whereas NATO expansion brought no real security.Footnote 37 In early 2005, newly inaugurated Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko visited Moscow and emphasised continuity. Putin welcomed the visit as a sign of partnership, reaffirming that Russia ‘would work with any leader voted for by the Ukrainian people’.Footnote 38 Underlying these affirmations was a growing sense of unease. While emphasising trade, border agreements, and economic integration, Putin also subtly reframed Russia’s prior actions during the electoral crisis as non-interfering – a defensive discursive move revealing diminished trust.
This shift became more explicit in Putin’s 2005 annual address, where he made two key ideological statements. First, he famously declared that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century’, casting the post-Soviet space as a site of loss and unfinished history.Footnote 39 Second, he asserted that Russia should ‘continue its civilizing mission on the Eurasian continent’ and insisted that protecting Russians abroad ‘cannot be the subject of political and diplomatic bargaining’. These remarks reflect the revival of imperial imaginaries in which post-Soviet neighbours like Ukraine were no longer treated merely as independent partners but rather as part of a historical community Russia claimed a special right to guide and safeguard. In a subsequent interview with France 3, Putin stated that while Russia disapproved of NATO expansion, it would ‘respect the sovereign right’ of former Soviet states to determine their defence policy.Footnote 40 This ambivalence, between formal recognition and ideological discomfort, marked the end of the discursive flexibility that had characterised earlier years.
By late 2005, Russia’s discourse on Ukraine began to drift away from the conciliatory tone that had characterised earlier years. Although Putin had previously emphasised that Ukraine’s future was for its people to decide, frequently affirming Russia’s readiness to work with any democratically elected leader, this framing began to erode as he increasingly portrayed the Orange Revolution as not a legitimate civic uprising but rather a Western-orchestrated intervention. The collapse of the Orange Coalition, the resurgence of pro-Russian groups ahead of the 2006 parliamentary elections, and the new government’s growing aspirations for Euro–Atlantic integration triggered a recalibration in Russia’s strategy. The January 2006 gas crisis, in which Gazprom cut off supplies to Ukraine amid demands for a dramatic price increase, marked a turning point. While framed as a market adjustment, the selective use of subsidised pricing for allied states revealed the move as a political tool. Yushchenko’s government rejected deeper integration into the CES and instead prioritised integration with the EU.Footnote 41 Later that year, Putin began openly blaming the West for orchestrating Ukraine’s political trajectory and criticised Western powers for seeking political influence in Ukraine at Russia’s expense, stating:
Our European and American partners decided to support the Orange Revolution even against the Constitution. … First of all, the political result was very problematic and we see how the situation is developing in Ukraine. Second, if you already provided support and want to continue to provide support, then pay the bill. But you want to have political gains and want us to pay for them.Footnote 42
This rhetoric reflects a growing resentment towards Western influence and a shift from soft-hegemonic appeals to instrumental coercion. Energy resources had become a lever of geopolitical coercion used by the Kremlin to undermine the pro-Western Yushchenko government and create more favourable conditions for pro-Russian political groups ahead of the 2006 parliamentary elections.
Vladimir Putin’s discourse on Ukraine, particularly his portrayal of it as an inseparable, fraternal part of the ‘Russian world’, did not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, it drew heavily on deeply embedded post-Soviet Russian narratives that questioned the legitimacy of Ukrainian sovereignty and resisted the notion of Russia and Ukraine as separate geopolitical entities. As scholars such as Jade McGlynn have argued, these narratives were not confined to state elites alone but were also embedded within broader segments of Russian political and societal discourse.Footnote 43 Widely shared across political elites and public opinion in the 1990s, these assumptions laid the ideological foundation for the more explicit imperial discourses and strategic shifts that would follow under Putin.
Opinion polls conducted in early 1992, just months after the Soviet collapse, revealed widespread popular resistance in Russia to Ukrainian independence. According to the Moscow-based Public Opinion Foundation, nearly three-quarters of Russians supported a new union with Ukraine and Belarus, and close to half believed Russia and Ukraine should constitute a single state.Footnote 44 Other polls echoed these sentiments: 64 per cent supported a Russian–Ukrainian union, and over 80 per cent agreed that the two countries should unite.Footnote 45 These attitudes were mirrored in the political discourse of the Yeltsin era. Russian ambassador to Ukraine Yuri Dubynin described Ukrainians as not simply a neighbouring nation but also ‘kin and brotherly’, while President Boris Yeltsin admitted in 1997: ‘We cannot get it out of our system that Ukrainians are the same as we are… It is in our hearts that Ukrainians are our own people.’Footnote 46 Such statements romanticised cultural closeness while implicitly denying Ukraine’s separateness and equal statehood.
At the same time, Russian policy towards Ukraine remained ambivalent and often coercive. In December 1996, the Russian Federation Council openly challenged Ukrainian sovereignty by declaring the Crimean port city of Sevastopol Russian territory, reviving tensions over the division of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. High-profile political figures such as Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov further amplified territorial claims to Sevastopol as part of a broader campaign to assert Russia’s special rights over post-Soviet space.Footnote 47 It took President Yeltsin over five years after Ukraine’s independence to make his first official visit to Kyiv in May 1997, during which he signed the long-delayed Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership recognising Ukraine’s borders. Yet even then, it took nearly two more years for the Russian parliament to ratify the treaty, which did not occur until February 1999.
Ukraine, acutely aware of these imperial undertones masked in the language of ‘fraternity’, began to formulate strategic and discursive responses well before Putin’s rise. Spurred by Moscow’s claim to Sevastopol, Ukraine accelerated its diplomatic alignment with the West. In January 1997, it proposed a ‘special partnership’ with NATO, a move that reflected both security concerns and the desire to anchor its sovereignty in broader Euro–Atlantic structures. In 1998, President Kuchma signed the ‘Strategy on Ukraine’s Integration with the European Union’, formally declaring EU membership as Ukraine’s long-term strategic goal.Footnote 48 Five years later, amid mounting international isolation following the Gongadze murder scandal and the Kolchuga affair, Kuchma’s government adopted the 2003 law ‘On the Foundations of Ukraine’s National Security’,Footnote 49 which again identified EU and NATO integration as central to Ukraine’s future trajectory. Even when President Kuchma signed the CES agreement in 2003, he did so with a constitutional reservation: emphasising that Ukraine’s participation would depend on the actual establishment of a functioning free trade area and must not contravene the 1996 Constitution;Footnote 50 notably, officials like Deputy Prime Minister Mykola Azarov later maintained that participation in the CES remained compatible with Ukraine’s declared ‘European choice’.Footnote 51 These moves reflected more than strategic hedging – they signalled a sustained attempt to anchor Ukraine’s national identity outside the Russian sphere, even when Kyiv faced domestic crises and international pressure. Tellingly, in the same year he signed the CES agreement, Kuchma published a book titled Ukraine Is Not Russia, a discursive act that challenged the very ontological premise of Russian–Ukrainian unity. The title alone, deliberately declarative and oppositional, offered a clear counter-narrative to the Russian claim that Ukraine’s sovereignty was either artificial or transitional. Ukraine’s desire for Western integration only intensified under the pro-reform and pro-European leadership of Viktor Yushchenko, whose presidency after the 2004 Orange Revolution marked a decisive turn towards binding commitments with the EU and a clear departure from Moscow’s influence.
These early patterns reveal that Putin’s discourse in the 2000s was not a novel departure but rather a consolidation of long-standing Russian narratives that portrayed Ukraine as a culturally proximate, historically entangled, and therefore incomplete sovereign entity. What initially appeared as romanticised appeals to ‘fraternity’ and ‘unity’ gradually evolved into a normative framework that increasingly constrained Ukraine’s sovereign political agency. Yet this discourse did not go uncontested. Over time, Ukraine’s political and civic narratives developed in ways that articulated sovereignty as not merely formal independence but also a distinct identity project grounded in democratic choice and European integration. This emerging counter-narrative progressively exposed the limits of the contextual resonance of Russian hegemonic appeals, particularly as Moscow’s discourse shifted from partnership towards pressure and coercion. The next phase of analysis traces how, between 2007 and 2014, these limits prompted the Kremlin to recalibrate its strategy, moving from soft-hegemonic language towards increasingly securitised and delegitimising discursive frames.
The West as intruder: Reframing Ukraine’s turn as a security crisis (2007–14)
The shift was likely reinforced by Russia’s economic recovery and growing political stability, which allowed Putin to reassert influence with greater confidence. With a stronger economy, Putin could more forcefully shape the narrative, framing Russia’s dominance over Ukraine as inevitable and justified. He leveraged historical narratives to suggest that any deviation from Russian influence would disrupt an established social order, thereby justifying Russia’s renewed assertiveness in the region. This aligns with Foucault’s idea that ‘truth’ is produced by those in power, whereas Putin’s discourse increasingly sought to institutionalise a Russian worldview as the dominant paradigm. Through narratives of ‘fraternity’, ‘historical unity’, and ‘civilisational commonality’, Putin attempted to naturalise a hierarchical political relationship with Ukraine and render it compatible with accepted understandings of regional order, particularly among the Ukrainian audiences whose consent was necessary for advancing Russian influence.
Putin’s 2007 Munich speech marked a significant discursive shift, where he began to frame the West, particularly NATO, as a destabilising force encroaching on Russia’s historical sphere of influence. Recasting NATO expansion as a deliberate provocation, he declared: ‘NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. … On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’Footnote 52 By dissociating NATO from democratic choice, Putin dismissed the legitimacy of countries like Ukraine or Georgia seeking membership and instead portrayed Western involvement as a disruption to the regional balance Russia viewed itself as entitled to manage. In doing so, he repositioned Russia as not an aggressor but rather the victim of the Western hostility.
Crucially, Putin’s discursive strategy here was not only reactive but also constructive: he sought to reframe the dominant security narrative by asserting Russia’s truth claims. ‘Expanding infrastructure, especially military infrastructure, to our borders is not connected in any way with the democratic choices of individual states. And I would ask that we not mix these two concepts’, he argued.Footnote 53 By disentangling democratic choice from military alignment, Putin undermined Ukraine’s aspirations for Euro–Atlantic integration.
In early 2008, Ukrainian officials formally submitted a petition to the secretary general of NATO for granting Ukraine a Membership Action Plan at the NATO summit in April 2008 in Bucharest, prompting strong resistance from Russia. At the Bucharest NATO Summit, Putin reportedly told US president George W. Bush, ‘You don’t understand, George, Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.’Footnote 54 This moment crystallised Russia’s rejection of Ukraine’s sovereignty when aligned with Western structures. Later that year, Russia’s invasion of Georgia marked a turning point in post-Soviet geopolitics. Asked by CNN whether Russia would refrain from military action against its neighbours, Putin, then prime minister, responded, ‘We have not attacked anyone… It is we who are demanding guarantees from others that they will not attack us anymore and will not kill our citizens.’Footnote 55 In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, he firmly rejected suggestions that Ukraine would be the next target of Russian aggression, stating there was no ethnic conflict in Crimea and that Russia had recognised Ukraine’s modern borders.Footnote 56
The election of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, Moscow’s favoured candidate, appeared to restore Russian influence in Ukraine. Putin welcomed it as a return to the ‘greater force’ of the past, remarking that ‘Undoubtedly, when we were all together, we represented a much greater force. That’s why the country’s level-headed and patriotically minded state officials never even countenanced the dissolution and division of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.’Footnote 57 Yet the Orange Revolution continued to preoccupy the Kremlin as proof of Western interference. When protests erupted in Russia in 2011, Putin directly linked them to Ukraine’s uprising: ‘We know about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Certain members of the Russian opposition went to Ukraine back then and served as official advisers to President Yushchenko. Naturally, they are bringing these practices back here to Russia.’Footnote 58 By 2013, as Ukraine moved closer to signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, Putin intensified his historical appeals to unity. At a conference on ‘Orthodox-Slavic Values’ in Kyiv, he issued a reminder that ‘the Baptism of Rus was a great event that defined Russia’s and Ukraine’s spiritual and cultural development’, insisting that both nations shared ‘a common historic past…the foundation upon which we can build new integration ties’.Footnote 59 By claiming that ‘the unity of east and west changed the lives of Ukraine’s population and its elite for the better’, Putin framed integration with Russia as a restoration of historical harmony and prosperity: an authentic civilisational bond rather than political subordination.
Responding to the Euromaidan protests, Putin stated: ‘We have always considered Ukraine not only a neighbour but a brotherly neighbouring republic… I am certain that the Ukrainian military and the Russian military will not be facing each other; they will be on the same side in a fight.’Footnote 60 By invoking brotherhood and military camaraderie, he dismissed the protests as unnatural divisions within a single historical community. On Crimea, he declared: ‘In people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia…this firm conviction was passed from generation to generation’.Footnote 61 These statements reframed annexation as the restoration of historical justice and unity, portraying Russia’s actions as the fulfilment of shared destiny rather than aggression.
In his 2014 address justifying Crimea’s annexation, Putin insisted that Russians and Ukrainians were ‘one people’, declaring: ‘Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source, and we cannot live without each other.’Footnote 62 His discourse sought to portray the union between the two nations as a civilisational destiny rooted in shared history and faith. It is true that most Ukrainians held positive attitudes towards Russia in this period; however, this did not imply support for political unification. KIIS surveys from 2008 to 2014 consistently showed that 80–90 per cent of Ukrainians favoured the two states remaining independent, while only 10–20 per cent supported unification.Footnote 63
Contextual resonance was neither uniform nor simultaneous across Ukrainian society, but varied across regional, linguistic, and generational contexts shaped by differing historical experiences and geopolitical orientations. Nevertheless, survey data before Euromaidan already showed a society gradually leaning towards Europe despite these regional variations. According to the 2011 Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation survey, 46 per cent of Ukrainians supported EU membership and 32.9 per cent opposed it; even in Donbas and Crimea, where scepticism towards Europe was strongest, 51 per cent of respondents aged 18–29 favoured EU integration, compared to 22 per cent opposed. This generational pattern suggested that younger Ukrainians, including in traditionally pro-Russian regions, increasingly envisioned their future within Europe.Footnote 64 By November 2013, after three years under a pro-Russian government, the country remained evenly divided on economic alignment: 40 per cent preferred EU membership, while 41 per cent favoured joining the Russia-led Customs Union,Footnote 65 confirming that Ukraine’s strategic orientation was contested but not dominated by pro-Russian sentiment.
When in March 2014 the Federation Council authorised Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian troops in Ukraine, public reaction in Ukraine was overwhelmingly negative. According to KIIS, 83 per cent of Ukrainians condemned the decision, while only 9 per cent approved.Footnote 66 Even in the traditionally more pro-Russian south-east regions of Ukraine, only 11 per cent supported the introduction of Russian troops, compared to 74 per cent opposed.Footnote 67 The limits of Russian hegemonic discourse became particularly visible following Russia’s military intervention in Donbas. As Montana Hunter notes, many of the initial recruits to Ukraine’s volunteer battalions after 2014 originated from eastern Ukraine itself, demonstrating that linguistic or cultural proximity to Russia did not necessarily translate into acceptance of Russian political domination or military intervention.Footnote 68 This demonstrates that positive attitudes towards Russia did not translate into support for coercive measures against Ukraine. A similar pattern appeared earlier regarding Crimea: in a 2008 KIIS survey following Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s claim that the status of Sevastopol should be confirmed as a Russian city, only 4 per cent of Ukrainians supported transferring Crimea to Russia, confirming the broad societal rejection of territorial revisionism.Footnote 69 Even in 2013, a year before the annexation, 77 per cent of Crimeans opposed unification of Ukraine with Russia, while just 18 per cent supported it.Footnote 70 Hence, Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbas sharply reduced the remaining compatibility between Russian hegemonic discourse and Ukraine’s evolving sovereign political trajectory, pushing Ukrainians further towards the EU and NATO in response to Moscow’s increasing reliance on coercion rather than consent. Putin’s discourse of ‘one people’ failed to generate acceptance of the subordinating political order embedded within it, while the turn to coercion after 2014 progressively exposed the limits of contextual resonance. This shift was reflected in changing public opinion between 2014 and 2021, alongside Kyiv’s subsequent efforts to consolidate this broader societal reorientation.
From discursive failure to total war: The limits of contextual resonance, 2014–22
Alongside his long-standing claims that Russians and Ukrainians were ‘one people’, Putin began to shift his discourse after President Yanukovych fled Ukraine, turning from appeals to ‘fraternity’ towards delegitimising the new authorities. In his Crimea speech, he labelled them ‘nationalists’, ‘neo-Nazis’, ‘Russophobes’, and ‘anti-Semites’; portrayed them as puppets of ‘foreign sponsors’ and ‘smart mentors’; and thereby denied their political agency while justifying Russia’s coercive turn.Footnote 71 Putin’s delegitimising labels were rapidly absorbed into a broader propaganda ecosystem that operated across Russian, Ukrainian, and international media. Between 2014 and 2018, StopFake identified 178 outlets regularly disseminating false stories about Ukraine, with Russian media dominating this landscape (85 of 178). State platforms such as Zvezda, RIA Novosti, and Ukraina.ru shaped the narrative of Ukraine as a ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’, or Western-backed ‘junta’, while allegedly Ukrainian outlets amplified these messages, most notably the Kharkiv News Agency, directly linked to the St Petersburg ‘troll factory’. This information offensive was reinforced on the ground in Crimea, where Russian-backed authorities shut down all Ukrainian broadcasting from early March 2014, ahead of the pseudo referendum, and completed the takeover by closing the last independent station, Chornomorska TV, in August.Footnote 72 This system operated as an integrated ‘information weapon’, with fake stories circulating through state media, marginal separatist outlets, bloggers, trolls, bots, and sympathetic European and American activists. StopFake’s research showed three persistent narratives – Ukraine as a Western-backed coup, a ‘fascist state’, and a ‘failed state’ – all centrally coordinated through weekly editorial directives from the Kremlin.Footnote 73 Together, this orchestrated environment ensured that Putin’s delegitimising labels were not isolated remarks but instead part of a sustained, multi-level campaign targeting domestic, Ukrainian, and international audiences.
Ukrainian civil society reacted more rapidly and flexibly than the state to Russia’s escalating information warfare. Within days of the Crimea crisis, initiatives such as StopFake (launched March 2014) began systematically debunking disinformation and collaborating with international fact-checking networks. Other volunteer-led projects – InformNapalm, Information Resistance, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, and Euromaidan Press – expanded the effort by documenting Russian military activity, countering hostile narratives, and communicating developments to foreign audiences. Over time these initiatives evolved into broader media-literacy campaigns, including VoxCheck and school-based programmes such as ‘Learn to Discern’, reflecting a societal commitment to strengthening resilience against propaganda.Footnote 74
From 2014 onward, the Ukrainian state complemented these civic efforts with its own institutional and legal measures aimed at protecting the information space. Kyiv introduced public broadcasting and advanced media reform and adopted sanctions restricting Russian state media, channels, and propaganda outlets from operating in Ukraine. Parliament also passed laws enabling the blocking of hostile broadcasts, limiting the distribution of propaganda films and printed materials, and establishing quotas to expand Ukrainian-language content.Footnote 75 Broader policies, including restrictions on Russian social networks, de-communisation legislation, and transparency requirements for media ownership, were similarly framed as security measures intended to reduce Russia’s informational influence. While controversial from the perspective of freedom of speech, these measures marked a significant shift in state policy by reinforcing civil society initiatives and further constraining the contextual resonance of Russian narratives within Ukraine.
These dynamics were crystallised in Putin’s 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, which most fully articulates the position he had reached after 2014 and prefigures his later escalation. In the essay Putin reiterates his long-standing claim that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people: ‘Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole… It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.’Footnote 76 He frames the present division as a historical tragedy and locates Moscow as the centre of reunification: ‘the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine…to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy’. He then narrates Moscow’s historical role on unification of Russia and Ukraine: ‘It so happened that Moscow became the center of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood. Moscow princes…cast off the foreign yoke and began gathering the Russian lands’.Footnote 77
The essay works to delegitimise alternative Ukrainian trajectories by framing the West as the force that allegedly fractured what Putin describes as a once-unified ‘Russian Orthodox’ civilisational space. He cites the 1596 Union of Brest, when ‘part of the western Russian Orthodox clergy submitted to the authority of the Pope’, as the start of ‘Polonization and Latinization…ousting Orthodoxy’. He then portrays the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement as a voluntary return, claiming that after Poland ignored their appeals, ‘the Cossacks turned to Moscow’, whose rulers ‘took their brothers in faith under patronage’, casting unification as both requested by Ukrainians and historically destined. From this premise, he argues that Ukraine’s modern borders were constructed by Soviet administrators: ‘Modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era…shaped, for a significant part, on the lands of historical Russia’.Footnote 78 Ukraine’s post-Soviet decline, he asserts, stems from its own leaders’ decisions to distance the country from Russia: ‘Ukraine is Europe’s poorest country… [its authorities] wasted and frittered away the achievements of many generations’. He concludes by blaming Western actors for cultivating an ‘anti-Russia’ project designed to turn Ukraine ‘into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia’.Footnote 79 Putin’s claim that ‘true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia’Footnote 80 represents both the apex and the undoing of his hegemonic narrative. By defining Ukrainian independence as valid only under Moscow’s patronage, he recasts the rhetoric of ‘fraternity’ into a logic of subordination. His declaration that ‘together we have always been and will be many times stronger…for we are one people’Footnote 81 no longer appeals to shared identity but instead conditions Ukraine’s sovereignty on compliance, revealing a discourse that has shifted from seeking consent to demanding acquiescence.
In his 24 February 2022 address announcing, ‘I made a decision to carry out a special military operation’,Footnote 82 Putin confirmed that coercion, not consent, had become central to advancing his imperial objectives. He framed the invasion as a mission to restore historical unity, yet resorting to force underscored the failure of his rhetoric to generate the ideological alignment needed to keep Ukraine in Russia’s orbit. Between 2014 and 2021, support for EU membership rose to 52–58 per cent, while backing for the Russia-led Customs Union, roughly equal to EU support before Moscow’s coercive turn in late 2013 (40 per cent vs. 41 per cent), collapsed to 11–13 per cent,Footnote 83 marking a decisive civilisational shift away from Russia. What Putin portrayed as a natural civilisational bond increasingly lost its capacity to build consent-oriented influence, exposing the limits of Russian hegemonic discourse in Ukraine. Military intervention therefore reflected not hegemonic consolidation but rather a growing reliance on coercion as Ukraine’s sovereign political trajectory became progressively incompatible with the subordinating political meanings embedded within Russia’s imperial narratives.
Limitations of discourse in advancing hegemony
As previously mentioned, a Gramscian conception of hegemony involves the process by which a governing power ‘wins consent to rule from those it subjugates’, distinguishing it from ideologies that ‘may be forcibly imposed’.Footnote 84 This consent is crucial for a successful hegemony, where the state’s power is enforced through not just political and military means (political society) but also cultural and ideological leadership (civil society). Gramsci states that ‘the general notion of State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society’, where ‘State = political society + civil society’, highlighting that hegemony is maintained by not only force but also cultivating consent within civil society.Footnote 85 As George Lipsitz further clarifies, dominant groups must not only secure institutional control, the ‘war of manoeuvre’, but also sustain a ‘war of position’ within society, where legitimacy depends on resonance with people’s lived experiences.Footnote 86 This ongoing negotiation requires concessions and alliances across diverse social groups, exposing hegemony’s fragility when official narratives diverge from everyday realities. In a successful hegemony, the ruling class aligns its interests with those of society, embedding them into cultural and ideological practices that the populace adopts as their own. This process makes the power structure appear natural and inevitable, ensuring stability by minimising the need for overt coercion.
The limits of Putin’s hegemonic discourse become clear when viewed against public attitudes before 2014. Despite their so-called shared historical and cultural proximity, Ukrainians overwhelmingly envisioned their future within European rather than Russian-led structures. As noted earlier, even before 2014, opinion polls indicated that Ukrainians consistently leaned towards integration with the European Union, while Russia sought to promote its own Eurasian projects. In response, the Kremlin initiated an anti-Ukrainian media campaign that eroded any sense of ‘fraternity’ on the Russian side. During Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency (2005–10), Russian attitudes towards Ukraine deteriorated sharply. According to the survey conducted by the Levada Center and KIIS in 2009, Ukraine had become one of the most disliked countries in Russia, with 62 per cent of Russians expressing negative views.Footnote 87 The Ukrainian ambassador in Moscow warned that Russians were coming to see Ukraine as ‘an enemy state’, while Russian analyst Boris Kagarlitsky observed that ‘the anti-Russian mood in Ukraine is much weaker than the anti-Ukrainian mood in Russia’.Footnote 88 In contrast, despite the pro-European Yushchenko administration, 91 per cent of Ukrainians continued to hold positive views of Russia in 2009,Footnote 89 summarised by one Kyiv analyst as ‘We like them, but they do not like us’.Footnote 90 These figures demonstrate that Putin’s discourse of ‘one people’ was conditional: it operated only as long as Ukraine remained within Russia’s orbit. Once Ukraine’s democratic movements aligned with European values, Moscow’s own propaganda dismantled the emotional and cultural affinity on which any consent-based hegemony might have rested.
Putin’s long-standing claim that Western influence had turned Ukraine against Russia proved untenable when measured against public attitudes. It was, in fact, Russia’s own aggression that triggered Ukraine’s rapid alienation. Following the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea, positive attitudes towards Russia collapsed across all Ukrainian regions. In May 2015, positive perceptions of Russia among Ukrainians plummeted to 30 per cent, reaching the lowest level up to that point.Footnote 91 By 2016, only 10 per cent of Ukrainians believed in the possibility of normalising relations in the near future, while 49 per cent thought it could occur only in the distant future and 24 per cent no longer believed in such a prospect at all.Footnote 92 As Volodymyr Kulyk observes, this transformation reflected not merely a political rupture but also a broader identity shift: Ukrainians increasingly embraced pride in citizenship, attachment to national symbols, and readiness to defend their state.Footnote 93 Rooted in the experiences of Euromaidan and intensified by the annexation of Crimea, this emergent civic nationalism deepened the sense of distance from Russia and undermined Putin’s narrative of a shared destiny. Continued hostilities, such as the closure of the Sea of Azov (2018), passport distribution in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk, and renewed invasion threats (2021), further solidified this divide. By May 2021, 71 per cent of Ukrainians believed their country was at war with Russia, 53.5 per cent identified the Donbas conflict as ‘Russian aggression with the use of local proxies’, and 62 per cent concluded that peace was impossible due to Russia’s unwillingness to cooperate.Footnote 94
This shift in perceptions occurred against a broader transformation of attitudes: whereas between 2008 and early 2014 positive views of Russia among Ukrainians consistently stood at around 80–90 per cent and negative views at only 5–15 per cent, these proportions reversed after the annexation of Crimea, stabilising between 2014 and 2021 at roughly 35–50 per cent positive and 40–55 per cent negative. A parallel pattern unfolded inside Russia. Between 2008 and early 2014, positive attitudes towards Ukraine generally ranged between 60 and 70 per cent, but following the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in Donbas they fell by roughly half, stabilising largely in the 25–40 per cent range, while negative attitudes rose to approximately 50–70 per cent. The full-scale invasion in 2022 completed this deterioration. In Ukraine, negative attitudes towards Russia exceeded 90 per cent while positive views fell to approximately 2–5 per cent. In Russia, positive attitudes towards Ukraine declined further to around 15–25 per cent, while negative views frequently surpassed 70 per cent and at times approached 80 per cent, mirroring the dramatic shift in Ukrainian public opinion.Footnote 95 By October 2024, 93 per cent of Ukrainians reported negative attitudes towards Russia,Footnote 96 reflecting the total erosion of the fraternal image once central to Putin’s discourse. This alienation was equally visible in Ukraine’s geopolitical preferences: support for EU membership, which had risen gradually after 2014, surged to 90 per cent after the full-scale invasion, while support for NATO, only 15–20 per cent before 2014,Footnote 97 reached 84 per cent after 2022.Footnote 98 These shifts reflected not simply changing geopolitical preferences but also the growing incompatibility between the subordinating political meanings embedded within Russian imperial discourse and Ukraine’s evolving understanding of sovereignty, democratic agency, and independent political choice.
This progression demonstrates how each phase of Russian coercion further constrained the contextual resonance of Moscow’s hegemonic discourse within Ukraine. In Gramscian terms, Russia increasingly relied on domination as coercion displaced the possibility of advancing influence through consent-oriented forms of hegemony. Rather than reinforcing Russia’s civilisational claims, successive acts of aggression intensified the incompatibility between imperial narratives of ‘historical unity’ and Ukraine’s evolving understanding of sovereignty, democratic agency, and independent political development.
The results of Russia’s coercive approach are tragically tangible. Since the launch of the full-scale invasion, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has verified 15,172 civilian deaths and 41,378 civilian injuries. Civilian casualties have been documented across nearly the entire territory of Ukraine, with 87 per cent occurring in areas under Ukrainian government control. The human toll has been compounded by mines and explosive remnants of war, which have killed 483 civilians and injured 1,196 more, demonstrating that the consequences of the invasion will continue long after active hostilities cease.Footnote 99 Beyond these figures, Russia’s coercive actions, including war crimes in occupied territories such as Bucha, Mariupol, and Izium, the abduction of Ukrainian children, and daily air strikes on civilian areas, further demonstrate how the resort to force has supplanted the pursuit of consent, revealing the complete collapse of the Gramscian notion of hegemony through discourse. The scale of violence deepens Ukraine’s rejection of Russian influence because each act of force reinforces the incompatibility between Putin’s discourse and the lived reality of Ukrainians. Continued military aggression has rendered the notion of a ‘shared history’ and an inescapable ‘common destiny’, the central pillars of Putin’s discourse, progressively hollow for Ukrainians, whose focus is now on affirming their sovereignty and securing their place within the European family.
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated the limits of hegemonic power through an analysis of Vladimir Putin’s discourse on Ukraine. By integrating Michel Foucault’s enunciative function with Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and common sense, the study developed the concept of contextual resonance to explain how hegemonic projects depend upon the compatibility between political discourse and the historical experience, political expectations, and sovereign self-understanding of their intended audience. In this framework, hegemonic discourse succeeds through not simply the repetition of historical narratives or civilisational claims but also its ability to generate consent-oriented influence within specific social and political contexts.
Applied to Russia’s imperial project in Ukraine, this framework demonstrates that Putin’s discourse sought to naturalise a hierarchical political relationship through narratives of ‘shared history’, ‘fraternity’, and ‘one people’. Yet these narratives encountered significant limits as Ukrainian society increasingly linked sovereignty with independent political choice such as democratisation and European integration. While many Ukrainians continued to recognise cultural and historical proximity to Russia, this did not translate into acceptance of the subordinating political meanings embedded within Russian imperial discourse. Russia’s growing reliance on coercion after 2014 therefore reflected not hegemonic consolidation but rather the increasing difficulty of developing influence through consent-oriented imperial discourse alone.
The article has also shown that contextual resonance was neither uniform nor simultaneous across Ukrainian society, but instead varied across regional, linguistic, and generational contexts. Nevertheless, even in regions traditionally considered more culturally or politically sympathetic to Russia, coercion progressively exposed the limits of Russian hegemonic claims. The turn towards military force, disinformation, and political pressure increasingly transformed Russian discourse from narratives of ‘fraternity’ into instruments of domination, accelerating the erosion of compatibility between Russia’s imperial claims and Ukraine’s evolving sovereign political trajectory.
Theoretically, the article demonstrates how the synthesis of Foucault and Gramsci provides a framework for analysing not only how hegemonic ‘truths’ are discursively constructed but also how their political meanings are received, negotiated, and constrained within specific historical contexts. Contextual resonance thus offers a tool for examining the limits of hegemonic discourse by focusing on the relationship between political narratives and audience reception rather than reducing hegemony to coercion or public approval alone. While this study has focused primarily on the Ukrainian reception of Russian imperial discourse, the parallel radicalisation of Russian public opinion after 2014 further suggests that contextual resonance remains relational in nature and increasingly erodes when coercion replaces consent.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Henry Hale and Gerard Toal, who served as discussants, for their substantial and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this article presented at the DC Area Postcommunist Politics Social Science Workshop, hosted as part of the Petrach Program on Ukraine at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), George Washington University. We also thank the workshop participants for their valuable comments and critical engagement, which helped strengthen the article.
The authors made use of ChatGPT (OpenAI, GPT-5.1) to assist with language refinement and the formatting of references and citations in accordance with the journal’s style during the preparation and revision of the manuscript in 2025–6. The tool was accessed through ChatGPT (OpenAI), and its outputs were reviewed and modified by the authors as appropriate. The authors are entirely responsible for the scientific and substantive content of the article, and the article adheres to the journal’s authorship policy.
Competing interests
The authors declare none
Ibrahim Muradov is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a fellow with the Petrach Program on Ukraine at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, for the 2025–6 academic year. Prior to joining UBC, he was a faculty member at Dnipro University of Technology in Ukraine until Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 forced him to leave the country. His research focuses on international security, the Russia–Ukraine war, hybrid warfare, alliance politics, and post-Soviet security, with particular attention to Ukrainian agency and responses to Russian aggression. His recent academic work has appeared in Europe–Asia Studies and Defence Studies.
Micah Matsuno graduated with a BA (Honours) in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in 2024, receiving the Jean Laponce Memorial Award for the best undergraduate thesis in political science. Their research interests include political theory, power relations, phenomenology, poststructuralism, and Marxism, with particular attention to the ways in which power, discourse, and ideology shape political and social relations. Their work engages with thinkers including Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, and Gramsci.
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