In this chapter I agree with Henry Hale's double argument that Putin has generally avoided making nationalism a central element of his popular appeal, and that the majority of the population has not interpreted Putin as a standard-bearer of nationalism – other, competing political groups are more distinctly associated with the nationalism niche. I share the view that in his third presidential term, marked by a sharp decrease in popular support and the anti-regime protests of 2011/12, Putin has been advancing a conservative value agenda in order to reinforce some of the regime's constituencies and to marginalise the liberals – and the nationalists. However, I challenge the view, advanced in several chapters in this volume, that Putin has suddenly brought nationalism into the picture, despite what is widely said about his ‘shift’ toward ethnonationalism during the Ukrainian crisis.

I interpret Putin's use of the term russkii in his 18 March 2014 speech justifying the annexation of Crimea as simply reflecting what had already become the mainstream use of the term. The term russkii is employed in a very blurry way to define both what is Russian by culture (and culture has always been more important than ethnicity: Russian culture is russkaia, not rossiiskaia, even if Gogol is of Ukrainian origin and Vasilii Grossman from a Jewish family) and in relation to the state in general. While rossiiskii is still used by those who identify with ethnic minorities to dissociate their ethnic from their civic identity, for most of the 80 per cent of those citizens who are both russkie and rossiiane, rossiiskii has a purely official flavour: it is used in speaking about Russia in terms of citizenship, legal system and what pertains to the state as an administration, whereas russkii is increasingly associated with ‘everything Russian’, and therefore also as the Russian state understood in its historical longue durée.