Can there be a political current to the right of a regime often described as fascist and as eliminating or crowding out all dissent? We argue that differences in Russia’s political landscape are still discernible and important: distinguishing between the regime and currents to its right allows understanding the ideologization of the Putin regime as the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the regime and factions acting simultaneously as loyalists and critics. The right is an autonomous actor with a historically constituted agenda and ideological coherence that the regime only recently matched. It has provided the Putin regime with many of the concepts and narratives that justify Russia’s current aggressive international posture – while at the same time constituting the country’s most important source of pro-war regime criticism. We explain how the right was able to achieve such influence by discussing how the “geopolitical” current gradually subordinated ethnonationalist positions in the 2010s while joining forces with Russia’s Christian Right.