The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of a Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian territory for the most of the European countries and beyond. De facto this city is a new subject of the Russian Federation. A pilot study conducted in November 2017 demonstrates that in spite of its contested status, the semiotic landscape of Sevastopol signals a true and undoubtful alliance with the Russian state. Its public space is instrumentalized as a medium to exercise power, to set the agenda, and to influence the opinions and values of the locals in socio-political issues. Nation-building discourses “top-down” as well as expressions of loyalty to a new regime “bottom-up” co-create a new Russian reality in the region. A number of nationalist discourses realized in various semiotic modes such as language, writing, colour, layout and material have been found since the Crimean annexation in March 2014. The presentation is a part of a larger doctoral research project entitled “Ideologization of Space: Crimean Conflict in the Language and Symbols of the Urban Landscape”. In this project, the ethnographic and discursive approaches are applied to explain the relationship of language, ideology, and power in the post-socialist urban landscape.  By adopting a multimodal approach to the analysis of semiotic landscape, this project goes beyond the solely descriptive quantitative study, what enables an in-depth analysis of different linguistic and visual resources used in the public space. The semiotic resources (Halliday 1978; van Leeuwen 2005) under investigation are advertisement signs, posters, billboards, graffiti, monuments and street names.Following the lead of scholars like Jaworski and Thurlow (2010), Pavlenko (2009) and Sloboda (2009), the dissertation project contributes to the issue of discursive construction of Russianness in the public space in the contested territories. Understanding of how the public space is instrumentalised by specific decision makers or co-shaped by individual actors, sheds light on the established power relations, dominating discourses and imposed ideologies in the affected region.