Analysis of the main threats and risks to the traditional values of the Russian people: problems of counteraction and ways of resolution

Abstract

Elevating the protection of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values to the status of a separate strategic national priority has produced a gap between the declarative completeness of the legal framework and the incomplete operationalization of the mechanisms for countering threats to the value sphere. The subject of the study is the system of threats and risks to the traditional values of the Russian people fixed in the Foundations of State Policy, together with the adequacy of the legal and sociocultural instruments meant to neutralize them. The aim is to determine whether the existing mechanism for protecting values possesses internal consistency and where its defects are localized. The study relies on a formal-legal and comparative-legal analysis of the National Security Strategy, the Foundations of State Policy in the 2026 redaction and the 2020 constitutional amendments, supplemented by a structural-functional examination of the channels of destructive influence. It is established that the normative construction of threats remains predominantly descriptive and has not been translated into measurable indicators, so that the monitoring of adherence to values stays fragmentary. A shift of the centre of gravity of protection from prohibitive-protective means towards formative ones is recorded, while a gap persists regarding the subjects of responsibility and the criteria of effectiveness. The revision of the definition of traditional values in March 2026 moved the emphasis from the list towards the function of values as the foundation of all-Russian civic identity, which changes the logic of threat assessment: influence destroying identity is recognized as destructive, whereas the former model reacted mainly to deviation from the named pattern. Consistency of the priority is achieved through a transition from a list-based to a functional model of protection with measurable parameters of the rootedness of values, rather than through the multiplication of prohibitions.