Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has intensified expressions of Russian nationalism, a dynamic that is particularly evident in popular music and its mediation on digital platforms. This paper examines the intersections of gender and sexuality in the articulation and contestation of national identity in Russia since the onset of the invasion. It focuses on the circulation and reception of songs and music videos by the Russian performers Shaman and Tatiana Kurtukova. Both artists occupy prominent positions within the contemporary landscape of Russian popular music and enjoy substantial visibility on social media, where users actively engage with their content in their own user-created videos. The analysis investigates how practices of (dis)identification with “Russianness” are enacted through popular music and underscores the symbolic power of popular music to normalize hegemonic conceptions of gender and sexuality, and legitimize narratives surrounding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It suggests that both original performances are instances of cisgender drag, which reifies binary notion of appropriate masculinity and femininity in line with state-sponsored ideas about Russianness. I further argue that the original videos as well as remixes negotiate the feeling of ressentiment, combining resentment toward outside world a sense of superiority. The paper demonstatres how popular music and digital media, such as Instagram and TikTok, become tools for producing and circulating nationalist sentiment during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
