Can ‘traditional values’ shield Russia from ChatGPT?
For Russia, AI and “Traditional Values” Are Part of the Same Security Logic
Russia wants to ban ChatGPT to protect “traditional values.” It sounds absurd, but what else should we expect from a country that once launched an official investigation into a rainbow-colored ice cream brand for corrupting children’s minds? A chatbot threatening the soul of Russian civilization fits right in.
Except this isn’t an absurdity. It’s a Russian military doctrine laid bare for everyone to see.
What They Actually Said
On March 20, Russia’s Ministry for Digital Development published proposals to ban or restrict ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The official justification: protecting citizens from “covert manipulation and discriminatory algorithms” and upholding “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”
The logic was already explicit. Two years before the proposal, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told an international forum that the “brains” of Russian GigaChat and Western ChatGPT represent “fundamentally divergent worldviews — a different understanding of good and evil.” Not different features or data policies — different understandings of good and evil.
That framing sounds grandiose, but it is also precise. And it comes directly from a doctrine that Russia’s military establishment has been developing for years, one that identifies the formation of values and beliefs not as a cultural question but as the central battlefield of modern warfare.
Where It Started
In the winter of 2011, tens of thousands of Russians gathered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow — the largest public demonstrations since the fall of the Soviet Union. They were young, urban, digitally connected. They organized on social media, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy, human rights, individual dignity.
The vocabulary of the West.
Russian President Vladimir Putin drew a conclusion. Not that the protests reflected legitimate grievances, but that Western values had become a vector for regime destabilization. A cognitive instrument pointed at Russian society’s most reachable layer: its young, its educated, its connected.
The response was systematic. By 2012, so-called traditional values, loosely defined as a state-endorsed mix of Orthodox morality, conservative social norms, and loyalty to the nation, moved to the center of state ideology. By 2013, the first legislation followed. By 2014, Russia’s Military Doctrine formally identified information activity aimed at undermining “historical, spiritual and patriotic traditions” among the country’s youth as a military threat requiring a military response.
Doctrine rarely translates directly into coordinated execution. What it does is establish the frame within which decisions get made.
In Russia, protecting “traditional values” was never just cultural policy. It was framed as a security measure and written into military doctrine — twelve years before anyone laughed at the chatbot ban.
Not the Cracks. The Foundation.
Western analysis has a standard frame for what Russia does in the information space. It widens divisions. It amplifies existing fault lines — race, immigration, elections, identity. It throws matches into arguments already burning.
That frame is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
Widening divisions is the visible mechanism. The actual target is something underneath — the common values that make divisions survivable. Healthy democracies have always had disagreements. What allows them to function is the presence of something beneath the arguments. A shared sense of “we.” A belief that despite the conflict, there is a country worth arguing about.
That belief is not just sentiment. It is load-bearing infrastructure.
Whether the erosion of common identity is a deliberate target or an observed effect that gets exploited is a distinction that matters, and one the doctrine itself doesn’t fully resolve. What the doctrine does make clear is the strategic value of that layer. Destroy the common values, disable the collective “we,” and the divisions take care of themselves.
A building can stand with cracks in the walls. It cannot stand without a foundation.
Russia is not throwing matches. It is working on the floor joists.
The Mental Sphere
Russia’s military establishment has a name for what Mishustin was describing. The mental sphere, which is the layer where values form, where beliefs about the world take shape, where the sense of collective identity either holds or dissolves.
Russian generals have mapped this as a battlefield for years. A 2023 article in Voennaya Mysl — Military Thought — Russia’s military journal published under Ministry of Defense oversight, makes the theory explicit.
Common values are the mechanism through which societies mobilize in crisis, three serving officers argued. The state that controls that layer controls something more durable than territory. And the adversary that erodes it does not need tanks.
The same journal identifies the target of Western cognitive operations as the destruction of common values — the shared beliefs that hold a society together. The defense against this, the authors argue, is identity. A national ideology strong enough to resist external penetration. Traditional values as armor, not culture.
That is what the AI ban is. Not technophobia. Not protectionism dressed up in ideological language. The logical extension of a doctrine that treats the formation of worldview as a security imperative — and foreign AI models as the most powerful worldview-formation technology ever built.
AI models are becoming the gatekeepers of the base information layer — the primary interface through which people access knowledge, form beliefs, and understand the world. What feels true, what feels normal, what history means, who we are. The answers increasingly come filtered through here first.
This is not a fight over information. It is a fight over the framework that gives information meaning. Control that layer and you don’t need to control the facts. The facts will mean whatever the framework says they mean.
Russia’s generals wrote their doctrine before large language models existed. ChatGPT didn’t create that battlefield. It moved into territory Russia already claimed.
The Same Weapon, Two Directions
Here is what makes the proposal more than defensive posturing. While Russia moves to restrict foreign AI at home, it has been deploying the same tools offensively abroad.
OpenAI documented it. A Russian network connected to the military blogger operation Rybar used ChatGPT to generate disinformation content in Russian, English, and Spanish, targeting audiences across Africa and beyond. The tool Russia wants to ban at home was being used as a weapon pointed outward.
This is a strategy. The pattern is identical to what Russia did with Telegram. Restricted domestically, throttled, strangled, replaced with a state-monitored alternative, because it enables coordination the Kremlin cannot control. Meanwhile RT mirror networks continued using it to reach millions of Europeans. Same platform. Two directions. Seal your own cognitive space. Exploit everyone else’s.
The AI restriction follows the same logic. Protect Russian citizens from foreign gatekeepers shaping their values and worldview. Meanwhile use those same gatekeepers to shape everyone else’s.
The Mirror Image
The AI restriction and the Telegram ban are part of an architecture that runs in two directions simultaneously. Whether by design or by convergent logic, the pattern is consistent.
Domestically, Russia has spent years hardening its cognitive space: traditional values legislation, patriotic education programs in military academies designed to build psychological resistance to what its generals call mental warfare, the sovereign internet project, state-controlled platform mandates. Each piece serves the same function.
The Russkiy Mir concept — the Russian World — is the offensive projection of that same logic. Language, Orthodox faith, shared historical memory deployed as political instruments across neighboring populations. Not nostalgia. Identity as a weapon pointed outward.
Externally, the operation runs in reverse. Russia’s own Military Thought authors state the goal: undermine trust in any social processes, phenomena, and state institutions. Not specific institutions. Any. The target is trust itself as a social operating system.
When trust erodes, divisions stop being political disagreements and become existential ones. You don’t compromise with a system you believe is fundamentally illegitimate. You don’t sacrifice for a country you no longer believe in.
A society in that condition cannot mobilize. That is the point.
The question is what that doctrine looks like when it finds its most powerful target.
The Most Vulnerable Identity
The American Dream is not an ethnic identity. It requires no shared ancestry, language, or religion. It is a civic proposition — the most radical common identity project in history, held together entirely by belief. The belief that striving is rewarded. That the system is fair enough to participate in. That tomorrow can be better than today.
That belief is load bearing. It is what allows Americans to accept losses — electoral, economic, personal — because the system that produced them is still worth believing in.
Which is why the numbers matter regardless of their cause.
Gallup’s latest data shows American optimism about the future at its lowest point in nearly two decades. Only 25% of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, a record low going back to 1987. Among young Americans, Pew Research found that the share who say the Dream is out of reach tripled in seven years — from 11% in 2017 to 36% in 2024.
The reasons are many and mostly homegrown. But civic identity is more resilient than any doctrine can fully account for — people resist, adapt, maintain shared purpose under pressure. The concern is not that erosion is inevitable. It is that the substrate requires active maintenance that is rarely treated as a security priority.
When belief falters, for any reason, the foundation weakens. A society that has lost faith in its own proposition cannot mobilize around it, cannot defend it, and cannot project it.
That is a problem with or without a foreign adversary. With one, it is also an opening.
Russia’s doctrine targets exactly this layer. Not the arguments Americans have with each other. The shared belief underneath them that makes the arguments worth having.
You don’t build a theory of identity warfare without knowing what the most powerful identity is.
Anna Varfolomeeva is a strategic communications analyst specializing in Russian information operations and cognitive warfare. She also serves as Head of Communications at the Cognitive Security Institute. Anna holds graduate degrees from Saint Petersburg State University and Tsinghua University. The views expressed are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations with which she is affiliated.