This thesis is a critical analysis of the discourses used in online news headlines to report two events that took place during 2018 Russian Presidential debates (on February 14, 2018 and March 14, 2018) and focused on Ksenia Sobchak, the only female presidential candidate of the 2018 election. By analyzing 52 headlines published in Russia’s most popular and most read online news outlets, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether there are any gender stereotypes used by the journalists to create a particular representation of Sobchak, and to understand if, through this representation, a particular ideology is put forward. The framework used to carry out the research is based on Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis method combined with a sociolinguistic approach influenced by Halliday. The application of this framework resulted in studying the three interrelated elements of discourse: sociocultural practices, which explore the role of women in the Russian political arena and put headlines under analysis into an immediate context; discourse practices, which focus on the peculiarities of online news production, particularly headlines; and linguistic analysis of the headlines themselves, in which lexical choice, quotation patterns, and transitivity analyses were performed. The analysis revealed that headlines include hidden gender stereotypes, which align with Russia’s patriarchal ideology and which are used to represent Sobchak less favourably in comparison to her male opponents.