The Dynamics of Narratives in Vladimir Putin’s Political Discourse Under Conditions of a New Geopolitical Reality (February 2022 — February 2025)

Abstract

The article presents the results of narrative analysis of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public speeches in the period from February 2022 to February 2025. The empirical base of the research includes speeches, addresses, letters from the head of state (the total number includes 37 texts with the total volume of over 1,500,000 characters). The text processing was carried out in three stages: 1) familiarization with the document and context, compiling a worksheet for each text with vivid quotes as an illustration; 2) encoding texts using QDA Miner 4 Lite tools in the form of propositions; 3) detailed coding, whose objectives were to identify cross-­cutting and specific propositions. to bring the repetitive codes to a common form; and to calculate the representation of each category in the text by summing up the shares of the codes-­entries that make up a given category. Other researchers’ observations about the high “narrativity” of V. Putin’s speeches, his ability to explain political processes and decisions in a clear form have been confirmed. The results highlighted 11 of the most important problematic topics, whose frequency and depth of disclosure varied. Thus, in 2022, the dominant themes were devoted to ensuring the security of the country and the formation of a new world order; in 2023 they concentrated on the protection of the cultural identity of Russia as the state-­civilization; and in 2024, on economic growth and the renewal of the political elite. Since late 2024, the topic of negotiations initiated by U. S. President D. Trump has come into focus. The analysis has shown that Russian President Vladimir Putin is willing to search for a compromise solution in the face of threats to Russia.