Assessment of the Friendliness of Communication Regimes in Post-Soviet Countries: Results of Monitoring in 2025

This article analyses the dynamics of communication regimes in post-Soviet countries, based on the fifth monitoring conducted by the National Research Institute for Communication Development in 2025. Communication regimes are seen as institutionalized systems of rules, actors and practices that regulate information production, communication channels and cross-border interactions. A comprehensive methodology has been used to assess 12 communication groups and 74 indicators of friendliness, resulting in an integrated ranking of countries according to favourable conditions and opportunities for interaction with Russia. The empirical basis for the study includes regulatory legal acts, strategic documents, public discourse, media discourse, interstate interaction and expert assessments. The findings demonstrate the stability of groups of friendly and unfriendly communication regimes. Key trends identified include the development of humanitarian multivector approaches, the pragmatisation of external communications, increased government regulation of the media and civil communications spheres, and the growing securitization of the Russian presence in a number of countries. It is shown that institutionalization of rules and practices has a stronger impact on communication quality than public political rhetoric. The results obtained allow us to consider communication regimes as indicators of sovereignty models and mechanisms for the formation of new interaction configurations in the post-Soviet space. The author studies in detail the factors determining dynamics of interstate and intrastate interactions to identify key trends in transformation of communication models. Analysis yields substantiated forecasts about prospects for development of these relations providing a comprehensive view of current state and future directions of cooperation at regional level.

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