Authors

Iuliia Treshchenok¹;  ¹ Aleksanteri Institute, Helsinki University, Finland

Discussion

The ongoing global polarization has turned the media sphere into an arena for competing narratives. The Russian-Ukrainian war has intensified scholarly and public attention to Russian disinformation and propaganda campaigns. A growing body of research indicates an existing convergence between Russian and US narratives, especially those promoted by US right-wing media. Yet, the specific role of U.S. alternative media in disseminating and amplifying Russian narratives remains underexplored despite the attention to the issue outside academia. The presentation addresses this gap by examining the overlaps between Russian and US framing of the war in Ukraine, the role of U.S. right-wing alternative media in circulating Russian war narratives, and the discursive mechanisms that enable Russia to embed its narratives into US political discourse and present these narratives as commonsensical truth.
By addressing the issue of indirect informational influence that exploits local media resources of the target audience, the paper investigates how right-wing alternative media mediates Russian strategic communication in the US. To indicate Russian war narratives that infiltrate the US conservative media the paper analyzes right-wing channels on social media platforms with wide audience: Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Valuetainment. By examining how strategic narratives align with the collective imaginary of the target audience, it is possible to conclude to what extent do local myths influence the potential of Russian narratives to be absorbed into local political discourse and eventually to encourage policy change. The paper advances the debate on narrative effectiveness and contributes to the understanding of the factors that make conservative and far-right groups more susceptible to Russian narratives. Collective imaginary provides a symbolic framework for perceiving and interpreting narratives. Studying local political myths allows for demonstrating how collective imaginary facilitates or constrains building Russian war narratives into US political discourse. The paper explores what political myths are involved to reinforce effectiveness and moral justification for Russian foreign policy; what images/myths work as nodal points in both Russian and US discourses and what signifiers cluster around them. The paper bridges Strategic Narrative Theory, Discourse analysis and Collective Imaginary Studies. Strategic Narrative Theory provides a framework for analyzing Russian strategic communication, while Discourse Theory and Collective Imaginary Studies explain why it works or fails. The combination of perspectives on a narrative as an instrumentalized construct, a product of discourse and a symbolically charged temporal structure provides a nuanced analysis of Russian influence abroad, exposes structural vulnerabilities in democratic information environments, and contributes to strengthening democratic resilience.