In June 2026, US far-right figures and manosphere influencers appeared at Russian state-linked events and in military propaganda. These moments, argues Anya Kuteleva, reveal a mutually beneficial alliance. Russia offers legitimacy, platforms, and refuge, while the anti-gender right normalises authoritarianism by recasting it as culture war
In early June 2026, far-right commentator Candace Owens sat on a panel at Russia's St Petersburg International Economic Forum entitled 'A Big Family, A Big Reach: New Demographics and Narratives for Media Leaders'. Around the same time, manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate arrived in Moscow to a ceremonial bread-and-salt welcome. 'Family values and dialogue between audiences of different countries' was Russia's official framing of their visit. Within days, the Tates were filming themselves training with the Russian army.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has supported Western anti-feminist and far-right actors. It has offered them legitimacy, platforms, and, increasingly, formal residence. Putin's August 2024 executive decree created a fast-track residency pathway for foreigners who reject what the decree calls 'destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes'. By 2025, around 1,500 'ideological immigrants', in Russian mediaspeak, had applied, including 127 US citizens. The decree formalised Putin’s deliberate strategy.
Presenting Russia as the sole global defender of 'traditional values' is a hypermasculine leadership performance directed at domestic and international audiences simultaneously
I define Putin's Russia as a 'norm antipreneur'. The Kremlin's anti-gender and anti-feminist politics are neither reactive nor merely domestic. Presenting Russia as the sole global defender of 'traditional values' is a hypermasculine leadership performance directed at domestic and international audiences simultaneously.
The transnational infrastructure linking Western anti-gender actors to Moscow is older than the current war. The World Congress of Families – a US-Russian co-founded organisation dating to a 1995 Moscow meeting – spent two decades flying US evangelical activists into the Russian Duma's orbit. This helped forge the networks through which Russia's 2013 'homosexual propaganda' law travelled westward. Western anti-gender rhetoric, meanwhile, returned home, sanctioned by Russian state authority.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's two Moscow visits – in February 2024, when he interviewed Putin, and December 2024, when he interviewed Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – are the highest-profile recent chapters of this history. They provided the philosophical scaffolding for much of the Kremlin's 'traditional values' project, in what the Wilson Center described as a Kremlin-orchestrated introduction. In turn, Carlson claimed Aleksandr Dugin's ideas had struck him deeply.
September 2025 brought the most organised expression yet of this convergence. Far-right and neo-Nazi groups from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Brazil, and elsewhere gathered at St Petersburg's Mariinsky Palace for the founding congress of the 'Paladins' league. The event was organised by Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, opened by Malofeev and Dugin, and preceded by a religious procession led by Patriarch Kirill. Delegates signed a memorandum pledging to fight 'non-traditional and satanic propaganda'. They agreed to share media platforms and offer sanctuary to persecuted members across borders. The congress opened with a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.
What holds these actors together is a shared discursive grammar rather than a single organisational structure. It is one in which anti-feminism and anti-gender politics function as what scholars have termed 'symbolic glue', binding together religious conservatives, far-right nationalists, manosphere influencers, and authoritarian states into a loose but functional coalition. The Paladins congress espoused defending 'Christian tradition' and contesting 'the LGBT movement'. Owens praised Russia's 'Christian heritage and expression' and spoke on a panel about demographic renewal and family-values media. The Tates’ Moscow visit listed 'family values' as an official theme while they posed with Russian military equipment.
This grammar has a specific function within Russia’s own political order. The regime's legitimacy depends structurally on maintaining a rigid gender order. It suppresses queer visibility, enforces hyperfeminine womanhood, and performs militarised masculinity as the natural expression of national sovereignty. The prosecution of theatre director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk – convicted of 'justifying terrorism' in a feminist play – is one domestic expression of this order.
The Russian regime's legitimacy depends structurally on suppressing queer visibility and enforcing hyperfeminine womanhood as the natural expression of national sovereignty
Another is Putin's pardons of imprisoned women on International Women's Day. Those pardoned are selected each time by the same criteria: pregnant women, mothers of under-16s, women with relatives serving at the front. Punishment and clemency are distributed through the same grid of compliant femininity. Western visitors who perform alignment with this order praise Russia's 'cleanliness', its 'family-friendly' streets, and its Orthodox churches. In doing so, they legitimise the gender regime that produces these realities, including its violence against women, queers, and feminists.
The feedback loop matters too. Trump's Executive Order 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism, framed restricting trans life as protecting women and the nation. That is the same grammar Russia had been deploying for over a decade. The discursive pathways run in both directions, and Western anti-gender actors who visit Moscow accelerate the circulation.
This convergence is a geopolitical project, and it has material consequences. Russian feminist activists are working inside a system that criminalises their politics, destroys their organisations, and now courts their ideological opponents from abroad as allies. The isolation of Russian feminist and gender equality movements from their transnational counterparts, documented in my earlier research, has only deepened since 2022. The invasion hardened the regime's anti-feminist backlash and drove opposition further underground.
Russia is not a passive backdrop for Western culture warriors seeking attention. It is a strategic host, and the terms of hospitality are always ideological
For feminist scholars and activists in democratic contexts, the presence of Owens on a panel at an economic forum in Russia, or of the Tate brothers filming military cosplay on Russian ranges, may read as farce. It is worth resisting that reading. Russia is not a passive backdrop for Western culture warriors seeking attention. It is a strategic host, and the terms of hospitality are always ideological. What Russia offers these actors – a stage, legitimacy, the authority of state – is what it extracts from them in return: the normalisation of a political order in which feminism is a civilisational threat, women's bodies are state property, and anti-gender politics are the common language of a would-be international.
