Abstract
This article examines how, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has adapted its digital diplomacy strategy to promote anti-Western narratives for global audiences. Drawing on data from Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, we analyze the circulation and mutation of a “counter-hegemonic” narrative across distinct platform infrastructures. We focus on how motifs such as the “Golden Billion” condense geopolitical grievances into a flexible symbolic repertoire that aligns with broader critiques of liberal internationalism. Combining critical engagement metrics with discourse analysis, we show how these narratives gain traction not simply through content but through infrastructural attunement and affective resonance. We propose the concept of ambient parapolitics to capture how strategic narratives are embedded in the communicative logic of platforms—circulating less through persuasion than through participatory cues and symbolic compression. The article contributes to debates on platform governance, strategic narrative, and the infrastructures of geopolitical influence.
Keywords
Introduction: The Kremlin versus “the West”
Following the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, governments, corporations, and financial institutions—especially, but not only, in Western Europe and North America—moved to isolate Russia from the rest of the world. The blocking of Kremlin-sponsored outlets such as RT, which had long sought to cultivate a reputation as an “alternative” yet “legitimate” news source, likely hastened Moscow's turn to new strategies for defending its position abroad. Notably absent from the unprecedented Western bans were the social media accounts of Russian ministries and embassies, which platforms granted a special—although not legally mandated—status (Lima-Strong and Oremus, 2022). Through these remaining channels, the Kremlin began to circulate content couched in diplomatic language yet inflected with critical concepts such as “(neo-)colonialism,” “(neo-)imperialism,” “multipolarity,” and the “Global South.” By invoking these terms on dozens of its embassy accounts, Moscow strategically aligned its goals with historic grievances against Western dominance among disparate communities worldwide. This platformized infrastructure of “digital diplomacy” (Bjola and Manor, 2024) illustrates the “mounting dependence” of state actors on Big Tech (Van Dijck, 2024: 1), yet it has received surprisingly little scholarly attention.
Most research on Russian political communication has focused on covert influence operations such as those associated with the Internet Research Agency (Poliakoff, 2024; Rid, 2020). When attention turns to official Russian information campaigns, the emphasis is usually on the strategies and (online) reach of Kremlin-backed news outlets like RT or Sputnik (Kling et al., 2022; Kuznetsova, 2023; Yablokov and Chatterje-Doody, 2021) or on “boots on the ground” influence operations (Boichak, 2023). By contrast, this paper examines the overt mobilization of official Russian government social media accounts, tracing one major anti-Western, “counter-hegemonic” narrative across Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram in the wake of the invasion. Circulating alongside memes and culture-war rhetoric, these narratives do not resemble classic propaganda; instead, they invite ambient participation in multidirectional flows of affective and symbolic alignment (Noordenbos and Tuters, 2025). Typical of this type of communication is a widely circulated tweet from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), featuring a sunglasses-clad Vladimir Putin and the caption: “
The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system.” Surfaced through our data analysis as one of the most highly engaged-with posts, this meme-like message exemplifies the Kremlin's effort to condense its strategic narrative into symbolically charged, platform-native formats—a point to which we return in detail below.
Scrutinizing this new dynamic of political messaging, our inquiry is guided by a twofold research question. First, we ask how Russian ministries and embassies contribute to the construction of a more or less coherent strategic narrative of “counter-hegemony.” Second, we ask how this narrative is co-shaped by the specific affordances and vernaculars of different platforms. In other words, we treat the narrative not only as a message disseminated on platforms but also as a phenomenon partly produced by them—or at least by the Russian government's attempt to navigate platform-specific architectures and algorithmic dynamics while harnessing these for its own purposes.
Our premise is that platforms matter: They regulate interaction not through law but through technical protocols (Bratton, 2015). Following Finlayson and Topinka’s insights into “reactionary digital politics,” we treat the “ethos” of social media as “always already ‘in the machine’” (Finlayson and Topinka, 2024: 208). That is, the invitation to “heroically” participate in the circulation of anti-establishment content is already built into systems that profit from user participation. On Russian Embassy accounts, this ethos converges with the Kremlin's counter-hegemonic narrative, which casts Russia as participating in a global resistance against a liberal Western order.
To theorize this convergence, we introduce the concept of ambient parapolitics. Historically, “parapolitics” referred to covert soft power strategies—most famously, the CIA's funding of modernist art and jazz through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Saunders, 1999). These operations worked by aligning Cold War geopolitics with an ambient ethos of individual freedom. Today, we argue, a comparable logic unfolds through the affective infrastructures of digital platforms. Social media's participatory environments and anti-elite ethos provide fertile ground for government messaging that appears spontaneous, culturally resonant, and ideologically infused. Ambient parapolitics thus describes a contemporary mode of state influence that operates not through overt control, but through attunement—by political actors and common users alike—to the ambient dynamics of digital circulation—that is, to participatory online environments that are governed by the modularity and virality of meme-based communication, as well as by forms of symbolic compression 1 that maximize emotional resonance and solicit further reproduction and multidirectional dissemination (Noordenbos and Tuters, 2025). Ambient parapolitics denotes the middle layer between the Kremlin's strategic narrative and the platform affordances that modulate its global reach. This results in a form of official communication entangled with the platform's own incentives to amplify counter-cultural skepticism—an ethos embedded in infrastructures of sharing, reacting, and recirculating, and already inculcated within global communities of the platforms’ users. With this dual focus, we analyze the interplay between a Kremlin-backed narrative that predates social media and the platform architectures through which it is refracted and reshaped.
The narrative itself frames Russia as waging not only a kinetic war in Ukraine but also a cultural, political, economic, and ideological struggle against “Western hegemony”—a confrontation described as a “new Cold War” (Sanger, 2024). Nurturing a “postmodern” skepticism toward “official” diplomatic narratives (Craik, 2019: 13), the Kremlin casts Western dominance as both military-economic and cultural-ideological, hinging on the alleged imposition of liberal values that erode national and cultural traditions. Thus, Western aggression and global interventions are allegedly accompanied by “softer” yet no less aggressive efforts to impose a set of liberal values onto the rest of the world. In this way, the Kremlin's narratives recast Nye's (1990) notion of “soft power” as an ideological weapon of liberal imperialism.
Within this frame, the Kremlin positions itself as the victim of a US-led system of domination, targeted by a “rabidly Russophobic” “collective West” intent on preserving a “unipolar world order” and blocking the emergence of new, non-Western centers of power (Lavrov, 2022). Yet Russia also casts itself as a heroic challenger of Western hegemony, embedding this role within a broader narrative of Western “extraction” and “neocolonialism.” This narrative thus weaponizes victimhood as a self-exonerating political resource (Chouliaraki, 2024), which provides the affective glue for outreach to the Global South (Chatterjee and Petrone, 2024). As Putin (2023) declared: “The stronger Russia is, the more consolidated our society is, the more effective our efforts to defend… the peoples who fell victim to Western neo-colonialism.”
The narrative is hardly new in the Kremlin's communication. Long before the 2022 invasion, Russian officials framed the West's “hegemony” as a continuation of colonial and imperial projects imposed on the “Global Majority” (De Luca and Giungato, 2024; Rogers and Tyushka, 2017). Yet the rhetoric is deeply contradictory: To mobilize support, Moscow now appropriates anti-colonial and anti-imperialist language while waging what many see as a neo-imperialist war. It is a narrative that reframes the war in Ukraine as part of a larger civilizational struggle of the West versus the rest—where Russia positions itself as defender of traditional values, sovereignty, and multipolar order. In strategic terms, this approach reflects a doctrine of
This contradiction is not simply ideological but also infrastructural: The same platforms that afford the Kremlin narrative its visibility also compress it to simplified meme-like forms (Hernández Aguilar, 2023). In addition to this simplification and compression, this narrative also tends to collapse two distinct senses of the concept of “hegemony”: The realist IR understanding of state dominance and the Gramscian sense of ideological-cultural formation (Gramsci, 1977). The new element in this situation lies in the transformations that the “counter-hegemony” narrative underwent after February 2022, when it was reconfigured into a systematic information operation conducted through a proliferating network of ministry and embassy accounts. This amounted to a repackaging of an established “soft power” propaganda narrative for new media environments, as well as for diverse, emphatically global, audiences (cf. Ikenberry, 2018; Sanger, 2024).
In what follows, we trace this reconfiguration across platforms, analyzing both the Kremlin's strategic narrative and the ambient dynamic that co-shapes it. The first part of the article maps engagement dynamics on Twitter and Facebook to surface key patterns of amplification and alignment. The second turns to Telegram for a more granular reading of a discursive cluster that condenses these themes into a modular communicative form. Taken together, these sections show how strategic narratives—far from being static—travel across platforms, adapt to their constraints, and accrue resonance through repetition, affect, and infrastructural fit. We begin by situating the concept of counter-hegemony within the tradition of strategic narrative theory.
Framework: Counter-hegemony as strategic narrative
We treat strategic narratives as instruments of soft power that seek to impose coherence on world events, aligning stories of the past, present, and future in ways that advance political interests. This understanding builds on how the concept has been developed in International Relations (IR), where it denotes how political actors “construct a shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics to shape the behavior of domestic and international actors,” while also reshaping “the discursive environment in which [these actors] operate” (Miskimmon et al., 2013: 2). A major vehicle of soft power in the twenty-first century (Roselle et al., 2014), strategic narrative operates flexibly across multiple but interconnected levels. Scholars distinguish among system narratives, identity or national narratives, and issue narratives (Miskimmon et al., 2017; Roselle et al., 2014). System narratives describe who the principal actors are and how the international order is structured; identity narratives pivot on national traditions, values, and goals; issue narratives, finally, focus on specific developments and the policies they demand. Together, these (sub)narratives are part of a form of “strategic communication management,” which hinges on the dissemination of “deliberate message(s) through the most suitable media to the designated audience(s) at the appropriate time to contribute to and achieve the desired long-term effect” (Bockstette, 2008).
In the context of Vladimir Putin's “hybrid war,” strategic narratives have been widely recognized as a central instrument through which the Russian establishment seeks to set agendas and shape public opinion, both domestically and internationally (Fridrichová, 2023; Kuzmenko, 2025; Snygir, 2024; Zakharchenko, 2025). Olena Snygir, analyzing recent official Russian communication, identifies three major strategic (sub)narratives advanced since the full-scale invasion, all subsumed under an overarching preoccupation with hegemony: [T]he Russian strategic international system narrative is ‘The international order is changing and the West (the liberal world) is trying to maintain its hegemony’; the national narrative is ‘Russia is a sovereign and self-sustained, original civilization, based on traditional values, a center of the Russian world/leader of regional integration’; and the issue narrative is that ‘The new world order requires conceptual, systemic and structural changes’ (Snygir, 2024: 4–5).
Resisting the common academic tendency to apply the label “narrative” loosely to a wide array of themes and tropes in political communication, we take the narrative element seriously. Narrative in this sense entails the temporal sequencing of events across past, present, and future—a feature often overlooked in notions of “framing” in Russian political communication (cf. McGlynn, 2022). One of the strengths of the counter-hegemony narrative may lie precisely in its capacity to provide a schematic interpretive and affective account that accommodates, and causally sequences, both current and historical events. This emphasis on narrativity aligns with recent work that distinguishes narrative from other persuasive registers, such as argumentation, showing how stories persuade not only through explanation but also by generating emotional resonance and transporting audiences into a story world (Colley, 2020). In this respect, the concept of strategic narrative also differs from other widely cited notions such as the Kremlin's “fog of falsehood” (Pynnöniemi and Rácz, 2016), its “firehose” information strategy (Paul and Matthews, 2016), or its “disinformation” campaigns (Pomerantsev, 2019)—all of which emphasize the undermining and disorienting effects of inconsistency, volume, and low informational quality.
While the strategic narratives employed by the Russian political elite often contain pronounced conspiratorial elements (De Luca and Giungato, 2024; Madisson and Ventsel, 2020; Yablokov, 2018), “counter-hegemony” cannot be reduced to conspiracy theory. Its appeal frequently lies in a selective use of conspiratorial tropes combined with more widely accepted modes of storytelling and sense-making. This distinction matters: We resist the tendency to relegate all official Russian communication to “disinformation” or “conspiracy theory.” Moreover, while some analysts have characterized the Kremlin's discourse on hegemony as an “anti”-strategy, we deliberately frame it instead as a “counter”-narrative. In their 2017 study, James Roger and Andriy Tyushka argued that the Kremlin sought to “de-articulate” the West—sowing discord among allies and distorting perceptions of Russia's actions in neighboring states. For them, Russia pursued not a competing framework but an “anti-hegemonic” spoiler strategy, a “deeply negative” offensive (Rogers and Tyushka, 2017: 35, emphasis original). While this captures Moscow's vilification of the West, what we observe in the explicitly global post-2022 campaign is an attempt to solicit sympathy and support by articulating more “positive” visions of a reconfigured international order.
Before turning to the narrative's platform-specific manifestations, we situate it within a Putin-era brand of nationalism and neo-imperialism. While “counter-hegemony” is not a fully-fledged ideology of Putin's rule, it condenses an eclectic set of ideological, affective, and rhetorical motifs central to the regime's pursuit of legitimacy and popular consensus. First, the narrative builds on a rhetoric of outrage and humiliation—often paired with conspiratorial revanchism—over Russia's (allegedly Western-orchestrated) loss of great-power status. This resentful discourse, which recycles Soviet-era propaganda paradigms depicting the West as predatory and imperialist, gained prominence during Putin's third presidential term and was endlessly repeated by state media (Yablokov, 2018: 50–78). The vilification of what Russian officials typically call “the collective West” also has a softer, cultural dimension that can elude analytic frameworks focused on detecting and debunking instances of Russian mis- and disinformation. Seeking to endow their leadership with moral gravitas, the Putin administration, for instance, portrays Russia as the last bastion of “tradition” against a degenerate, ostensibly “global” but in fact US-led liberal culture. This “pushy” liberalism allegedly destroys the patriarchal family, uproots “natural” gender roles, and imposes “wokeness” or political correctness—motifs that also help explain Putin's counterintuitive appeal among US conservatives (Borenstein, 2019: 133–179).
Second, on the level of what Snygir (2024) identifies as the “national narrative,” this rhetoric of Russian victimhood is paired with grandiloquent claims of civilizational uniqueness, Russia's exceptional world-historical role, and its mission to lead Eurasia. This outlook draws on neo-Eurasianist philosophy, which posits Russia's multiethnic composition, traditions, and geography as the foundation of its natural role as a regional leader of Eurasia and a pioneer of a post-Western, multipolar order. Philosopher Alexander Dugin has famously recast early twentieth-century Eurasianist thought—blending it with neo-conservative, ultra-right, and fascist elements—into a philosophy of neo-Eurasianism (Laruelle, 2019: 95–133; Skladanowski, 2019), a loose doctrine described as a modern “Russian version of antiglobalism” (Laruelle, 2008: 115). While the extent of Dugin's influence on Kremlin policy remains debated, his vocabulary of terms like Western “hegemony” and a future “multipolar” world clearly resonates in Putin's discourse, where these notions often function as thinly veiled shorthand for neo-imperialist ambitions (Clowes, 2011: 43–67).
It is clear, then, that the counter-hegemonic narrative is deeply entwined with self-declared Russian victimhood and neo-imperialist messianism, as it advances claims to imperial, regional, and global power under the rhetoric of counter-hegemony. Analysts have described this paradox in terms of cynicism. Ilya Kukulin, examining Russian officials’ speeches (including those of foreign press secretary Maria Zakharova), identifies an attitude of “messianic cynicism” that pivots on inconsistency: “the discrediting of moral and idealistic motivations for political action is presented as a defense of Russia's unique historical mission to implement universalist moral values forgotten by the ‘West’” (Kukulin, 2018: 231; cf. Lipovetsky, 2018). Messianic cynicism—which combines counter-cultural reference points with patriarchal authoritarianism, sarcasm with ideological commitment—characterizes the digital information campaign we trace below.
Methodology: Using “engagement” to surface strategic narratives
This study employs a mixed-method approach combining computational topic modeling, platform-specific content sampling, and interpretive close reading. Our goal is to examine how Russian embassies and ministries adapted a “counter-hegemonic” narrative across social media platforms after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We begin by operationalizing engagement—metrics such as likes, shares, replies, and views—as a heuristic for identifying messages that performed well and thus warrant closer interpretive scrutiny.
While we refer to this interpretive element as “critical discourse analysis” (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997), it is operationalized through close reading of official posts and their multimodal content, attending to rhetorical strategies, ideological framings, temporal structuring, and affective cues. The emphasis is not on the consistency of beliefs or full ideological systems but on how strategic narratives are composed, adapted, and made resonant within specific platform environments.
Our data collection drew on an official list of Russian MFA-linked embassy and ministry accounts. We assembled three datasets:
Twitter (n = 10,000 posts, December 2022, collected before the shutdown of the academic API) Facebook (n = 10,000 posts, September 2023, via the now-discontinued CrowdTangle tool) Telegram (n = 315,603 posts, April 2024, via the OpenAPI)
These corpora represent a coordinated yet differentiated digital diplomacy strategy, with the first two datasets used for exploratory mapping and the third (Telegram) for deeper thematic and narrative analysis. We began with Twitter and Facebook, applying the approach of critical analytics (Rogers, 2018)—repurposing engagement metrics to identify prominent patterns and voices. In our case, the “dominant voice” was not emergent from the crowd but pre-established, as it was articulated top-down through the official channels of the Russian state. Instead, what we aimed to trace through critical analytics were the dominant narrative patterns, that is, those stories that generated the most traction—especially in non-Western contexts—on platforms designed for interaction and amplification.
Meanwhile, we recognize that engagement metrics do not always reflect authentic and organic interactions, as they can be artificially inflated by bots, coordinated campaigns, or algorithmic quirks (Hagen et al., 2022). Still, they matter symbolically: They simulate resonance, legitimate certain messages, and help surface what is being prioritized or boosted in a given infosphere. Rather than treating engagement as a proxy for audiences’ genuine beliefs, we treat it as a signal of strategic attention. If content is being amplified—organically or artificially—that tells us something about its perceived and intended function within the Kremlin's broader communication strategy. This approach aligns with broader media-theoretical accounts of participatory culture (Carpentier, 2011; Jenkins, 2006), while also resonating with more recent accounts of “participatory propaganda,” in which engagement becomes a mechanism not of deliberation, but of alignment and affective signaling (Wanless and Berk, 2021).
Among the three datasets, the Telegram corpus—collected via the open API and covering over 129 ministry and embassy channels—provided a comprehensive archive of more longform and less interactive diplomatic messaging. Consequently, engagement was less useful here as an identifier for dominant narratives. While the Twitter and Facebook datasets helped us surface and map widely circulated content, the Telegram corpus offered a different kind of insight—enabling us to trace how such counter-hegemonic narratives were temporally sequenced and symbolically compressed.
To analyze this Telegram corpus, we used topic modeling (specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)) to detect thematic clusters. The model was trained using unigrams only, based on TF-IDF weighted document-term matrices. While we generated 30 topics overall, we did not mechanically optimize for coherence scores. Instead, we selected one topic cluster for further analysis based on its narrative relevance—especially the presence of the term “Golden Billion,” which condensed multiple themes within the counter-hegemonic narrative (anti-Westernism, global resistance, and elite conspiracy, which will be addressed below). While the model was not tuned for coherence optimization, the thematic coherence of this selected topic was assessed through manual review of its top-weighted terms and exemplar posts. The post most representative of the topic (by highest cosine similarity score) was attributed to Alexey Drobin of the Russian MFA and featured across multiple embassy channels. We treat this post as a narrative condensation point—selected not statistically but heuristically—for qualitative analysis, drawing on the tradition of critical discourse analysis as developed by Fairclough and Wodak (1997). A separate BERT-based analysis of the same dataset (Willaert and Tuters, 2025) similarly identified the “Golden Billion” as nested within a broader topic of multipolarity and anti-imperialism, further corroborating its narrative centrality.
This second phase revealed how platform infrastructures shape not only message visibility but also narrative form. Telegram's affordances favored detailed, serialized posts—akin to diplomatic communiqués—while Twitter and Facebook were dominated by memeified, emotionally compressed, or culturally attuned content. These differences illustrate how the counter-hegemonic narrative was channeled through the dynamics of ambient parapolitics: It was modulated across platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015)—styles and logics that guide expressive possibilities on each medium, while soliciting platform-specific modes of engagement and amplification, and maximizing affective resonance.
While this may suggest a highly centralized propaganda machine, our findings point to a semi-coordinated model. We observed substantial cross-posting, but also variation in tone, frequency, and stylistic inflection. Rather than a purely top-down messaging hierarchy, Russian platform diplomacy appears to operate as a flexible network—calibrating the same overarching narrative to diverse audiences, in divergent formats, via different infrastructures of attention.
Analysis
Twitter: engaging audiences through platformed counter-hegemony
Using a full list of Russian Embassy accounts, we queried Twitter's academic API to retrieve 10,000 randomly sampled posts in December of 2022. These posts were drawn from all embassy tweets over the preceding four months, roughly half a year after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We organized this corpus using key engagement metrics: likes, retweets, and replies. When sorted by replies, the most commented-on tweet was the “cool Putin” post (Figure 1) by the MFA (n = 4125). The second most replied-to tweet—since deleted—came from the Russian Embassy in the UK and featured a political cartoon depicting Volodymyr Zelensky as Bart Simpson copying out a sentence onto a chalkboard: “I will not fire missiles into Poland anymore” (replies n = 4051). Beyond messages of congratulations for Putin's 70th birthday, the other highly replied-to tweets (mostly by the MFA) all concerned the war. By contrast, sorting the dataset by likes and retweets revealed a different narrative—that of platformed counter-hegemony. These differences in engagement type—replies versus likes and retweets—are suggestive of Twitter's communicative affordances: virality via retweeting, ambient approval via liking, and adversarial contestation via replies. This differentiation helps us understand how the same post may employ platform affordances differently, eliciting different types of engagement and consequently different types of affective attunement.
The MFA tweet (
When sorted by likes (n = 59,630) and retweets (n = 17,361), the single most engaged-with post in our corpus, by a large margin, came from the Russian Embassy in Canada (Figure 2(a)). It featured an LGBTQI+ flag superimposed with a “no” symbol and the caption: “Family is a man and a woman and children.” This and similar, highly engaged-with posts (cf. Russian Embassy in Canada, 2022; n = 9575 likes) coincided with major Canadian policy announcements on gender equality and immigration (Government of Canada, 2022), suggesting a tactical play to stoke reactionary backlash.
Tweet by the Russian Embassy in Canada (2022) receiving an exceptionally high number of likes and retweets. A bipartite network graph showing where retweets originated with country labels sized according to in-degree.
Beyond these overtly anti-“woke” messages, other high-engagement tweets channel a broader current of anti-liberal and revisionist sentiment. Putin's October 2022 declaration that “all states that aspire to genuine strategic sovereignty are declared enemies by the West” (n = 1165 likes) reduces complex geopolitics to a platform-native soundbite. Meanwhile, a recurring series of #OTD (On This Day) posts repackage Soviet World War II history as a mythic civilizational clash—collapsing past and present, while aligning the USSR and non-Western nations against Western imperialism. Taken together, these tweets extend the culture-war repertoire into a civilizational counter-narrative that fuses moral traditionalism, historical revisionism, and geopolitical defiance—engineered for maximum resonance within the fast-scrolling, low-commitment attention economy of the platform.
In this sense, the embassies’ use of Twitter enacts a form of cultural defiance that folds moral conservatism into geopolitical revisionism. Offensive and confrontational speech is a necessary asset within this attention economy and is commonly practiced by Russian officialdom, which also often uses transgressive satire to express what it considers “bitter truths” (Kukulin, 2018: 228; Kurowska, 2020). Its appearance indicates how Russia's counter-hegemonic narrative (and specifically its “cultural” variant, which is counter-liberal and anti-political correctness) overlaps with a broader reactionary, “heroic” posture against the liberal order–an ethos that, as Finlayson and Topinka (2024) note, is to some extent already built into social media's algorithmic infrastructures.
Subsequently, we shifted our focus from narrative content and communicative vernaculars to circulation, asking what the retweet trail of this particular post could tell us. Specifically, where did this engagement come from? Had our analysis surfaced a vocal anti-woke, Russophilic community in Canada, to which this type of content then presumably catered? Twitter's API provided information on the geographic regions (city and country-level). Using this data, we created a bipartite network visualization, showing where the retweets of the gender-themed Russian Embassy posts originated, with the text sized to represent relative frequency (Figure 2(b)). 2 This geolocation data was available only due to a short-lived feature of the Twitter API at the time of collection, and its reliability is partial at best—users may spoof or obscure location data.
With this caveat in mind, we noticed a clear pattern of engagement originating not from Canada itself, as could be expected, but from nations of the Global South, from Nairobi to Riyadh. This pattern underscores the infrastructural reach of Twitter's retweet functionality, which facilitates global circulatory flows. The same message can be refracted across different cultural contexts, aligning affectively with pre-existing grievances or norms—even without local tailoring. Such circulation advances the Kremlin's efforts to cultivate sympathy among audiences worldwide, particularly in the Global South (cf. Tocci, 2023), by promoting an anti-liberal—and by implication, anti-Western—strategic narrative. The Twitter-driven spread of culture-war tropes thus allows Moscow to project its ambition as a leader in a multipolar, post-Western world order while also sidestepping contentious debate over the war in Ukraine.
In his book The Twittering Machine, Seymour (2020) persuasively argues that the platform's design undermines thoughtful, nuanced conversation, instead fostering a culture of quick reactions, hot takes, and performative outrage. One of Twitter's most distinctive design features, the retweet function, is a “low-commitment” type of action that has been central to the platform's enormous reach (Kwak et al., 2010), but that has also facilitated the notorious mobbing behavior of its users. We might read the retweet network behind these various forms of counter-hegemonic content as a case of Russian officialdom not just creating a strategic narrative but also of amplifying sentiments (or “vibes”) that already circulate on platforms and that align with their strategic interest—a model of political communications that has been referred to as “ambient propaganda” (Noordenbos and Tuters, 2025).
Facebook: Crafting vernacular counterpublics in the global south
Having initially surfaced the Russian state's anti-liberal, culture-war messaging on Twitter, we subsequently collected a Facebook dataset via Meta's (now defunct) CrowdTangle tool, which effectively gave access to all public data published by 137 Russian embassies across the world. While the Twitter dataset spanned four months, the Facebook dataset covered a longer period—from the beginning of February 2022 until September 2023. CrowdTangle caps the size of a dataset at 10,000 of the most engaged-with posts, which we treat as a representative sample of Russian diplomatic activity on Facebook.
In comparison with the Twitter API, CrowdTangle provides more potential engagement criteria by which to sort the data including “likes,” “comments,” “shares,” “views,” different “emojis” (e.g., “love,” “wow,” and “haha”) and a metric referred to as “total interactions”—the latter combining various metrics to offer a general assessment of a page's relative significance (
Total interactions on the Russian Embassy Facebook pages.
Post to the Embassy of Russia in Bangladesh's Facebook page with high engagement.
Russian Embassy Telegram channel’s messages over time.
The profile-oriented design of Facebook differs fundamentally from Twitter's broadcast-oriented format and affords a friend- as opposed to stranger-oriented social experience (cf. Theocharis et al., 2023). This relational affordance fosters a more insulated and homophilic communicative ecology—one that is more conducive to the cultivation of parapolitical counterpublics than Twitter's high-velocity spectacle. We see this difference reflected in how some of the Russian embassies use Facebook, with some pages resembling digital community centers—frequently posting photos and flyers for local events hosted or sponsored by the embassy. The Embassy of Russia in Bangladesh's Facebook page exemplifies this. When we applied other metrics to this page's posts, we noted that it had by far the highest proportion of “original” content rather than reposting MFA content.
Specifically, we found the Embassy of Russia in Bangladesh's Facebook page to have published memes, political cartoons, and conspiratorial content, such as a cartoonish animation video which claimed to offer “a better understanding of the situation in #ukraine and #Donbass” (
One of the posts by the Embassy of Russia in Bangladesh's Facebook page (Figure 4) to receive the highest number of total interactions repeats the anti-liberal theme seen in our Twitter analysis but incorporates it into a more elaborate version of the counter-hegemony framework. The post's image is seemingly based on the Eastern Orthodox notion of the shelter offered to believers by the Virgin Mary's protective cloak (celebrated in the Orthodox feast of the Intercession of the Theotokos). It shows figures of humans and angels huddled around a vulnerable sprout growing from the earth and protected under an umbrella with the colors of the Russian flag, shielding them from bombs marked with symbols of Nazism, the USA, EU, NATO, and LGBTQI+ pride. The image is accompanied by a text written by the neo-Eurasianist thinker Alexander Dugin, with a link to his Telegram channel. The text champions Russia's role as “uniting believers of different faiths” in a “decisive battle” against the “modern West,” which it accuses of abolishing traditional values and replacing them with “virtual reality, extreme individualism, the destruction of gender” (
Introduced above, Dugin has long framed the Ukraine conflict through the civilizationist lens of his Eurasianist interest, i.e., as a “Great War of Continents,” in which Russia plays the role of an “Empire of conservative values” pushing back against the hegemony of “the Atlanticist West” (Livers, 2020: 159–160). That such messaging can effectively generate (cross-national, cross-religious) engagement through a Facebook post—layering visual symbolism, religious allegory, and geopolitical commentary—demonstrates how, unlike Twitter, Facebook's semi-private, relationship-based affordances facilitate hybrid forms of ambient parapolitics.
Telegram: broadcasting multipolar civilizationist ideology
For the next phase of our research, we turned to Telegram. The platform is owned and operated by the Russian expatriate entrepreneur Pavel Durov. Because Telegram's API remained accessible, we were able to use it to collect a complete dataset of all 129 channels. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Russian embassies and ministries use Telegram in a less participatory, more unidirectional, and conventional format. Telegram, we found, is used to create “broadcast” channels with a one-to-many style of communication, used to circulate “talking points” and speeches by Russian officials, such as Lavrov, Zakharova, and Putin. The participatory possibilities of channel subscribers are limited to posting emojis (e.g., 
) in response to the messages. Embassy posts themselves also frequently included emojis—“
” for speeches, “
” and “
” to mark key arguments or quotations. We identified a systematic pattern of Telegram channels seemingly designed to propagate the Kremlin's messaging after the 2022 invasion. Notably, over 80% of these channels were launched within a week after 24 February 2022 (Figure 5). These data suggest that the Russian government created a coordinated global network of digital diplomacy on Telegram, the launch of which was made to coincide with the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine.
Telegram does not offer as many possibilities for critical analytics as the other platforms. The only engagement metric for sorting the Telegram dataset is “views.” To explore dominant strategic narratives more systematically, we employed LDA topic modeling—a computational technique that identifies word co-occurrence patterns across a large corpus. Our model generated 30 topics based on unigram word distributions.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive analysis of all topics, we focused on one topic whose top keywords—world, country, Russia, West, international, new, order, global, economic, and interest—aligned closely with the counter-hegemonic discourse already identified in our earlier cross-platform analysis (Willaert and Tuters, 2025). From this topic, we selected the post with the highest probability value—identified by cosine similarity within the topic distribution—as a representative articulation of this narrative. The post features a speech by Alexey Drobin, Director of the Department of Foreign Policy Planning at the MFA, and was circulated across multiple embassy channels.
When we graphed the locations of the embassies most associated with this topic, a clear pattern emerged: The embassies were largely situated in the Global South—for example, Bangladesh, Botswana, and Peru. Drobin's speech, shown below in the bullet-point format in which it circulated on Telegram, functions as a kind of strategic condensation, articulating Russia's geopolitical ambitions in explicitly multipolar and anti-Western terms:
The post reproduces the (Dugin-inspired) civilizationist thinking and antiglobalism of the “anti-hegemony” narrative. It also articulates the narrative's conspiratorial elements, favoring a focus on intentionality and orchestration over a structural mode of analysis (e.g., “[n]eocolonialism was designed to ensure…”). Unlike the more interactive ethos of platforms like Twitter—where users perform their alignment through likes, retweets, and replies—Telegram offers fewer participatory affordances. In this post, we see how the Kremlin adapts even a top-down “broadcast” environment to channel an affectively resonant, combative stance toward Western globalism—one that invites alignment through recognition rather than interaction.
The world is moving from globalization to the formation of many civilizational platforms (they can also be called power centers or “poles”) and then to interaction and integration between them. This is a long historical process, a whole era we are entering.
The decolonization of the 1960s did not give the new independent states full economic and political sovereignty. Neocolonialism was designed to ensure the continued transfer of resources from the developing world to the “Golden Billion.” After the collapse of the USSR and the Socialist Economic Community, this system spread almost throughout the world under the banner of globalization.
The awareness that the rules of the game are changing could, in principle, be an incentive for everyone to find an agreement. But so far, we have seen how the Anglo-Saxons, or rather their ruling elites, have aimed to forcefully restore the “unipolar moment” of the early 1990s. To this end, they seek to dismember civilizational communities into easy-to-assimilate segments, according to the “divide and conquer” formula.
The Telegram channels’ bullet-point style, punctuated with emojis, enables a symbolic compression, distilling complex ideological content into emotionally resonant slogans. The phrase “Golden Billion”—a borderline conspiracist trope recurring in the above-quoted Drobin post—exemplifies this tendency. Our upcoming qualitative case study of this phrase shows how the quasi-formal, “press-release” tone of embassy Telegram channels, combined with emoji-based pointers and conspiracist innuendo, produces a hybrid register: one that merges official communication with the vernacular idioms of online conspiracism.
Case study: The Golden Billion
In the Kremlin's post-invasion strategic communication, references to a “Golden Billion” condense key talking points of the counter-hegemonic narrative. Analyzing the recently globalized dissemination of the “Golden Billion” trope and offering a discourse analysis of its ambiguous and cynical invocations in digital diplomacy on Telegram, we wrap up our analysis of the Kremlin's strategic narrative of counter-hegemony. As Craik (2019) argues, this kind of strategic ambiguity exemplifies the Kremlin's “weaponization of postmodernism,” where irony, contradiction, and epistemic relativism are not incidental, but central to the communicative logic of Russian influence campaigns.
A shorthand term for related developments within Western-dominated global capitalism, the phrase “Golden Billion” originated in late-Soviet culture, popularized by the conservative public intellectual Sergei Kara-Murza, and was partly inspired by conspiratorial interpretations of the notorious Limits to Growth report, commissioned by the Club of Rome in the early 1970s (Meadows, 1974). The theory posits that a global elite—predominantly from “northern” and Western nations—recognizes the risk of global resource depletion and believes that the planet can only sustain their wealthy lifestyles if the global population, or at least its privileged segment, is capped at a so-called Golden Billion. To achieve this, elites seek to control the distribution of resources, goods, and services, restricting populations’ access to the best living conditions. As a consequence, entire countries and regions are relegated to mere extraction zones, with inequality deliberately orchestrated and maintained to serve the needs of this elite. Some variants allege more sinister measures—such as population reduction or planned viral depopulation—as part of a hidden agenda to manage resources and maintain elite supremacy. As such, the “Golden Billion” presents a particularly dark version of the counter-hegemony narrative.
Originally a Soviet-Russian manifestation of New World Order-type narratives, the imaginary of the “Golden Billion” has been understood as a conspiracy theory (De Luca and Giungato, 2024). It can be viewed more specifically as a “superconspiracy” theory—that is, an interpretation that hierarchically integrates a diverse array of (supposed) injustices and manipulations into an overarching conspiratorial framework (Barkun, 2003: 7). Consistent with conspiracy thinking, it explains complex, structural, and global systems of inequality—such as those wrought by late capitalism (Jameson, 1992)—as the result of deliberate interventions orchestrated by malevolent elites.
However, the “Golden Billion” theory also rests on real material asymmetries in the global political economy. The central assertion that the West disproportionately benefits from global resources is also made by mainstream political economists such as Piketty (2014). This ambiguity—between critique and conspiracy—is central to the narrative's power. The ambiguity and adaptability of the “Golden Billion” may, in fact, be its greatest strength. It functions as a lay version of ecologically-oriented globalization critique and simultaneously as a fear-mongering narrative of an impending apocalypse (Borenstein, 2019: 96–98) and as a social critique of (neo-)colonialism and a classic “world domination”-style conspiracy theory. In that sense, the theory is part of a wider phenomenon in global conspiracy culture by which left- and right-wing globalization critiques increasingly converge (Birchall and Knight, 2023).
Most important for our purpose here is that, at least until quite recently, the “Golden Billion” narrative was almost entirely restricted to the Russian-speaking world. The conspiracy theory fits in with a whole array of late- and post-Soviet narratives about various Western agendas to gain control over Russia's natural, cultural, and spiritual resources. First mentioned by Putin in a speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit held in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, on 15 November 2000 (
In the Telegram dataset, the phrase “Golden Billion” appears almost exclusively in English (n = 115), rather than in Russian (zolotoi milliard) or other embassy languages (n = 15). A close reading of this sub-corpus shows that—as in Drobin's speech above—the term is typically paired with other counter-hegemonic tropes such as multipolarity and decolonization. We argue that “Golden Billion” functions here as shorthand for the broader counter-hegemony narrative, and its occurrence in the corpus is not confined to quotations from senior Kremlin officials. Ambassadors also amplify and embellish the term themselves, as in a post by the Russian ambassador in Mexico titled “Multipolarity or Neocolonialism?”, which claims: “The gap between the Global North and South, between the ‘Golden Billion’ and the rest of humanity, persists despite all efforts to bridge it, even half a century after the collapse of the colonial system.”
Many of the “Golden Billion” posts recycle the resentful discourse central to the Russian counter-hegemonic narrative. Casting the “Golden Billion” as a central actor in a narrative that links the colonial past, an unjust present, and the battle for an alternative future, such posts denounce the West's attempts to “establish the end of history and the final and irreversible dominance of the ‘golden billion’.” One post, based on Lavrov's remarks and circulated on 15 Russian Embassy accounts, lamented: “Why should this golden billion, which is only [a] part of the global population, dominate everyone else and enforce its rules of conduct that are based on the illusion of exceptionalism?” Another post adopted a tone of conspiratorial revelation remarking, after introducing the “Golden Billion” theory, that “[t]oday all these manifestations are clearly visible” and “[n]obody is hiding this fact anymore.” However, in addition to such cynicism around the intentions of the powers that be, these posts also typically express a sense of messianist anticipation regarding “Russia's unique historical mission to implement universalist moral values” (Kukulin, 2018: 231). One post, for instance, sketched the emergence of an “equal, socially minded and sustainable multipolar architecture.” Others, circulating in multiple languages and versions across the embassy accounts, identified “a genuine opportunity” for a mode of global development “outside the ‘master and slave’ paradigm imposed by the former colonial powers.”
This messianic cynicism (Kukulin, 2018) is also reflected in the varying levels of ironic distance in the use of the “Golden Billion” phrase. Often, the term is written in quotations, accompanied by a 
dollar bag emoji, or is preceded by linguistic qualifiers like “the so-called,” “the notorious,” or “the fabled.” All of this makes it hard to assess the extent to which Russian officials commit to a full-blown conspiratorial version of the Golden Billion theory. The use of “scare quotes” specifically is reminiscent of recent digital permutations of conspiracy discourse that Rosenblum and Muirhead (2020) have called “the new conspiracism.” The authors describe a mode of conspiratorial speculation that pivots on amplification rather than substance. Wild claims of deceit and manipulation are shared and circulated, while the online amplifiers feel no need to back up their insinuations with proof, or even to piece together a coherent conspiracy narrative. This type of “conspiracy theory without the theory” (Rosenblum and Muirhead, 2020: 19) typically does not fully commit to the circulated conspiracy content, using caveats like “a lot of people are saying.”
However, unlike Trump's often reactionary and vulgar rhetoric (which inspired Rosenblum and Muirhead's “new conspiracism”), Russian embassies’ references to the “Golden Billion” are typically embedded in relatively sophisticated analyses of international relations, albeit inflected with cynicism. As one post from the Russian Embassy in South Africa, paraphrasing Putin, put it: “[i]t was no accident that the ‘golden billion’ attained its gold and achieved quite a lot, but it got there not because it implemented certain concepts. It mainly got to where it is by robbing other people in Asia and Africa.” This position, which corrodes belief in the possibility of sincere politics, exemplifies the Kremlin's cynical-messianic narrative of counter-hegemony. As we have argued, this narrative weaponizes distrust of political power precisely to legitimize Russia's own claim to regional dominance and global leadership.
The “Golden Billion”'s related contradictions—between meme-like shorthand, valid macro-economic critique, and official-sounding policy rhetoric—are structurally enabled by Telegram. As a hybrid platform, Telegram allows for broadcast-style messaging in which meme aesthetics (emojis, repetition, irony) coexist with state diplomacy. This hybrid format affords a tone of strategic ambiguity: The posts simultaneously parody and promote, speculate, and assert, distancing themselves from the full conspiratorial commitment even as they circulate it. In this way, Telegram becomes an ideal infrastructure for narrating the “Golden Billion”—allowing embassies to amplify distrust and pro-Kremlin alignment, without requiring coherence.
Conclusion: Ambient parapolitics
This article has examined the Russian state's strategic use of social media platforms to disseminate its counter-hegemonic narrative, particularly in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Through a multi-stage empirical approach combining critical analytics with qualitative methods of narrative and discourse analysis, we traced how a single strategic narrative morphs across platforms with distinct affordances, publics, and vernaculars.
The article's dual focus reflects both our methodological and analytical interests in what narratives are being circulated and how they circulate—specifically, how they are attuned to and amplified by the infrastructures of platform media. To capture this mode of influence, we proposed the concept of “ambient parapolitics”: a politics whose participatory, infrastructural, and memetic dynamics are fueled by platforms’ algorithmic affordances, which invite audiences into affective, resonant online atmospheres; a politics, moreover, that compresses complex worldviews into content that is easy to remix, memeify and emotionally resonate with; and that, finally, interpellates platform users as heroic challengers of the status quo.
The Kremlin's counter-hegemonic digital diplomacy is a prime example of such ambient parapolitics. By portraying itself as a defender of “traditional values” and an ally of the “Global Majority” against alleged Western “neocolonialism,” the Kremlin strategically repackages its geopolitical ambitions in a language calibrated for platform-based amplification and emotional uptake. This rebranding exploits historical grievances and contemporary inequalities, often filtered through the conspiratorial and memetic vernaculars of what we, following Finlayson and Topinka (2024), describe as a reactionary ethos of heroic resistance. Our findings show that this ethos is not merely expressed but affordanced: Platforms enable its repetition, compression, and circulation. What circulates, in other words, is not just content but a posture—an antagonistic orientation toward liberal modernity that is stylized, shareable, and emotionally legible, while never attaining complete consistency Even when the Kremlin's digital diplomacy offers a comprehensive strategic narrative that straddles past, present, and imagined futures, it relies less on a coherent ideological blueprint, than on its ambient diffusion across culturally specific online publics. Consequently, this mode of politics may accommodate the seemingly irreconcilable: anti-imperialist and neo-imperialist claims, utopian hopes for a just world order, and a cynical disbelief in genuine politics.
This strategic narrative itself blurs the line between legitimate geopolitical critique and conspiracist innuendo—a collapse made visible in the trope of the “Golden Billion.” As we showed, this phrase condenses diverse ideological appeals into a single meme-like concept: a modular semiotic unit that circulates across languages, platforms, and publics. While our empirical focus remained on the state-level dissemination of such messaging, emerging research also highlights bottom-up uptake and vernacularization—especially in Arabic- and Spanish-language contexts (Alwaday, 2022). Here, the trope is further refracted through local concerns, giving rise to culturally specific interpretations of the Kremlin's global messaging.
The bottom-up, participatory ethos behind this dynamic reflects a broader shift in global information politics. As Ikenberry (2018) notes, the liberal international order is fraying—not simply institutionally but communicatively. Its norms of deliberation and procedural authority struggle to compete with symbolic compression and emotional immediacy. The Kremlin's messaging is not the cause of this shift, but its adept exploiter—hacking into what Harold Innis (1951) might have called the communicative “bias” of digital infrastructure. This double scope reflects our observation that the Kremlin's counter-hegemonic messaging operates through modular elements—narrative signposts, meme-based tropes, and symbolically compressed imagery, all of which acquire their affective salience in ways different from the more straightforward persuasion efforts of classic propaganda strategies. Ambient parapolitics, we argue, also marks a move away from the curated circuits of (post-)Cold War cultural diplomacy toward a looser, more infrastructural logic—one that embeds narrative cues within the participatory rhythms of platform communication.
Footnotes
Funding
One of the authors, Boris Noordenbos, disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council (grant number 949918).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.