The paper is devoted to analyzing different ways to present the instruments of Russia's “soft power” in Venezuelan, Mexican and Chilean media discourse in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Various manipulative strategies and methods of influencing the reader, both verbal and visual (creolized texts, Internet memes), are considered. A comparative analysis of publications on the Russian culture and science permits identifying a change in the axiological context and detects a clearly marked positive trend in evaluating the image of Russia associated with the success of the Sputnik V vaccine, which turned out to be one of the most important instruments of Russia's soft influence on the Latin American continent.