The role of Western experts in Russian political talk shows [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

The dissertation analysed the role of Western expert figures1 in Russian political talk shows during the first three and a half years following the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Political talk shows are an essential tool in the hands of the Putin-regime, used to convey ideological messages to domestic audiences in an entertaining and engaging way (Tolz and Teper, 2018). Earlier research documented that the Russian media space is carefully orchestrated (Pomerantsev, 2015; Pomerantsev and Weiss, 2014) and that Russian propaganda uses TV shows to shape public opinion about the West (Knobel, 2020). While Russian disinformation is widely studied within the Western academic community, Russian domestic disinformation about the West often remains disregarded. These disinformation campaigns often use ‘foreign experts’ who are presented as renowned experts from abroad, whose narratives tend to coincide with those of the Kremlin. Investigative journalistic pieces uncovered numerous Western experts of this kind, yet this phenomenon lacks academic research (‘Von Beruf Putin-Fan: Russlands “West-Journalisten”’, 2022). This research found that their performances do underpin the Kremlin’s strategic narratives and reinforce the Kremlin’s anti-Western ideological messages for Russian domestic audiences. Given that Russia is going to stay a permanent threat to Europe’s security, understanding and tracing the way the Kremlin’s ideology impacts Russian domestic audiences is of key importance. While researchers analysed certain Russian talk-show episodes earlier, their focus was not on the Western experts’ performances and narratives. Furthermore, their sample sizes were small, which allowed them to carry out in-depth analysis of singular episodes, but not presenting the big picture, the phenomenon of Western experts featured in Russian political talk shows (Binder & Kaltseis, 2023; Gulenko, 2021, 2026; Kaltseis, 2023; Rabbia, 2025). This dissertation did exactly that. It observed the entire phenomenon, and traced how these Western experts legitimate, normalize and justify the Kremlin’s strategic narratives. The sample size was large enough to draw conclusions and identify patterns, as the coverage of 14 key events from the first 42 months of the full-scale invasion, altogether 114 days was analysed.