Friends, Foes, and a Floating Signifier:

Rhetorical Framing in Russia’s Primetime Information War

This study combines close reading, framing analysis, and AI-assisted corpus linguistics to examine the rhetorical strategies of Vladimir Putin’s leading primetime propagandist, Vladimir Soloviev, across 210 episodes of Evening with Vladimir Soloviev (October 2024–September 2025). Using qualitative discourse analysis validated through statistical collocate testing, the project maps how Soloviev constructs competing frames for Russia, Putin, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States––revealing a propaganda ecosystem built on narrative accumulation, dehumanizing invective, civilizational binaries, and the uniquely mercurial figure of Donald Trump as rhetorical “floating signifier.”