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The " Russian world" () is a concept and a political doctrine usually defined as the sphere of military, political and cultural influence of Russia.Valery Tishkov, The Russian World—Changing Meanings and Strategies, Carnegie Papers, Number 95 , August 2008Tiido, Anna, The «Russian World»: the blurred notion of protecting Russians abroad In: Polski Przegląd Stosunków Międzynarodowych, Warszaw, Uniwersytet Kardynała S. Wyszyńskiego, 2015, issue 5, pp. 131—151, It is a vague term, mostly used to refer to communities with a historical, cultural, or spiritual tie to Russia. This can include all ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in neighboring states, as well as those who belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. The concept of the "Russian world" is linked to Russian neo-imperialism. President Vladimir Putin established the government-funded Russkiy Mir Foundation to foster the idea of the "Russian world" abroad. The concept is sometimes also called the Pax Russica, as a counterweight to the Pax Americana after WWII.
In the 1990s, Russian neo-fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin began writing about Russia as a unique Eurasianism. Dugin was later an adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Other authors behind the development of the concept in post-Soviet Russia include , Yefim Ostrovsky, Valery Tishkov, Vitaly Skrinnik, Tatyana Poloskova and Natalya Narochnitskaya. In 2000, Shchedrovitsky presented the main ideas of the "Russian world" concept in the article "Russian World and Transnational Russian Characteristics", among the most important of which was the Russian language. Andis Kudors of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, analyzing Shchedrovitsky's article, concludes that it follows ideas first laid out by the 18th century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder about the influence of language on thinking (which has become known as the principle of linguistic relativity): those who speak Russian come to "think Russian", and eventually to "act Russian".
Observers describe the concept as a tool of Russian soft power. According to assistant editor Pavel Tikhomirov of , many Ukrainians see the "Russian world" as neo-Sovietism under another name. The Financial Times described the "Russian world" as "Putin’s creation that fuses respect for Russia's Tsarist, Orthodox past with reverence for the Soviet defeat of fascism in the Second World War. This is epitomised in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, 40 miles west of Moscow, opened in 2020".
The Economist says that the "Russian world" concept has become the basis of a crusade against the Western world's "Liberalism" culture and has fed a "new Russian cult of war". It says that Putin's regime has debased the "Russian world" concept with a mixture of obscurantism, Orthodox dogma, anti-Western sentiment, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism.
Putin visited the Arkaim site of the Sintashta culture in 2005, meeting the chief archaeologist Gennady Zdanovich. The visit was widely covered in Russian media, which presented Arkaim as the "homeland of the majority of contemporary people in Asia, and, partly, Europe". Nationalists called Arkaim the "city of Russian glory" and the "most ancient Slavic-Aryan town". Zdanovich reportedly presented Arkaim to the president as a possible "national idea of Russia", a new idea of civilisation which Victor Schnirelmann calls the "Russian idea".
Putin decreed the establishment of the government-sponsored Russkiy Mir Foundation in 2007, to foster the idea of the "Russian world" abroad. It "has largely served as a way to push a Russian-centric agenda in former Soviet states".
Patriarch Kirill's 2009 tour of Ukraine was described by Oleh Medvedev, adviser to Ukraine's prime minister, as "a visit of an imperialist who preached the neo-imperialist Russian World doctrine".
Following this, among the Orthodox from the Pentarchy, two have condemned the ideology as contrary to the teachings of Jesus, linking it to phyletism, an ideology condemned as an heresy by a General Synod in Constantinople in 1872. The first to do so was the Church of Alexandria and all-Africa and their Patriarch, Theodore II. They were followed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the first Orthodox Church in rank and honor.
In their epistolary exchange of early 2023, the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I and the Archbishop of Cyprus, George III, discussed the issue extensively.
On 25 December 2022, in an interview for national television, Putin openly declared that Russia's goal is "to unite the Russian people" within a single state. In June 2023, Putin said that Russian soldiers killed in the invasion of Ukraine "gave their lives for Novorossiya New and for the unity of the Russian world". In 2023, Putin said that Russian soldiers killed in the invasion of Ukraine "gave their lives to Novorossiya New and for the unity of the Russian world". In 2025, he claimed Russians and Ukrainians were "one people" and that in a sense, "the whole of Ukraine is ours".
Orlando Figes defines the invasion as "imperial expansionism" and writes that the Russians' sense of superiority may help to explain its brutality: "The Russian killings of civilians, their rapes of women, and other acts of terror are driven by a post-imperial urge to take revenge and punish them, to make them pay for their independence from Russia, for their determination to be part of Europe, to be Ukrainians, and not subjects of the 'Russian world.
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