Is the Kremlin’s propaganda “fascist”? A discourse analysis of RT Russia’s portrayal of the nation in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a vibrant debate has emerged among political theorists on whether, and in what sense, contemporary Russia is to be considered “fascist”. In parallel, communications scholars have investigated empirically how various facets of Russia’s propaganda narratives changed. With the aim of bridging these two strands of research, this article presents the first in-depth analysis of how the Russian nation has been portrayed in one of the regime’s domestic, “mainstream” propaganda outlets post-February-2022, with a specific focus on discursive patterns that might be considered “fascist”. Adopting Ekkehard Felder’s method of linguistic discourse analysis, the study scrutinises approx. 240 theoretically sampled articles published by a flagship propaganda outlet, RT Russia, in 2022. The analysis highlights six agonal centres that explicitly convey fascist discursive patterns, while no patterns could be identified in this corpus that strikingly deviate from how fascist discourses are widely conceptualised. In conclusion, it is argued that any debate about how to label the regime’s official propaganda should not distract observers from the discourse’s ideological substance which (whether labelled “fascist” or not): glorifies war and killing as vitalising forces, explicitly rejects anything compatible with representative democracy and Enlightenment humanism, and singles out multiple groups for exclusion or physical extinction.