Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decree on protecting the rights of Ukrainians in Russia looks like a tit-for-tat response to Kremlin rhetoric on defending Russian-speakers in Ukraine. With the fighting on the frontlines having entered a stalemate, Kyiv is casting around for other ways to demonstrate that it is standing firm against the Putin regime.
In practical terms, however, the Ukrainian minority inside Russia is ill-suited for such lofty goals. Years of pressure from the Russian authorities have destroyed any formal Ukrainian organizations there, while the assimilation accelerated by the war is rapidly reducing the community’s size.
The new presidential decree on the protection of the Ukrainian minority in Russia designates several Russian regions close to the Ukrainian border (including the Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, and Rostov regions) as territory “historically populated by Ukrainians,” and calls for the rights of the Ukrainian minority living there to develop their language and culture to be upheld.
How Ukraine actually intends to apply this policy in practice is unclear, but the propaganda value of the decree is plain to see: if Putin insists that Ukraine contains “Russian lands” unfairly “given away” by Lenin or Khrushchev, then two can play that game. After all, there are plenty of historical examples to draw on, from the resettlement of Zaporizhian Cossacks to Russia’s Kuban region to the existence of a vast colony of Ukrainians in Russia’s Far East (Zeleny Klyn). If the Kremlin won’t accept the internationally recognized borders from 1991, then Kyiv can also cite the mythology of “historical rights.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has already denounced the decree as amounting to territorial claims, but it’s clear that talk of “Yugorussia”—a state formation that would consist of parts of Russia and carve a path from Ukraine to the Caucasus and Central Asia—is the fantasy of individual Ukrainian politicians rather than anything remotely approaching concrete plans. Quite apart from anything else, such plans are hardly likely to garner sympathy in the West, where the new decree has raised eyebrows.
According to the most recent census in 2021, about 900,000 Russian nationals—0.6 percent of the population—identified as ethnic Ukrainian, making them the country’s eighth biggest ethnic group. But they are distributed fairly evenly across the country: even the heaviest concentration, in Russia’s Belgorod region, still only amounted to 1 percent of the population.
In addition, their number is dwindling drastically. In the 2002 census, there were about 3 million ethnic Ukrainians: 2 percent of the population. In other words, an accelerated process of assimilating Ukrainians is taking place in Russia, driven by official policy and propaganda that insists that the two peoples are identical and were artificially separated by hostile forces. The more negative the official rhetoric on Ukrainians, the faster that assimilation is taking place.
Since the outbreak of war, the number of Ukrainians in Russia has again risen sharply thanks to the influx of refugees and forcibly displaced persons: up to 2.8 million people, according to UN data. But it’s hard to say how those people will identify themselves, having found themselves entirely at the mercy of the Russian state, which has even outlawed the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Even before the full-scale war, the atmosphere in Russia was hardly conducive to displays of Ukrainian identity. According to Levada Center polls conducted in 2018–2021, just 10 percent of people living in Russia were prepared to accept Ukrainians as members of their family, while 38 percent expressed openly xenophobic opinions about the Ukrainian nation.
The Russian authorities have long felt threatened by the potential disloyalty of hundreds of thousands of its nationals of Ukrainian descent. Cultural societies of Russian Ukrainians set up in the 1990s began closing their doors following the 2004 Orange Revolution, despite not being engaged in any political activity.
The routing of Ukrainian organizations began in earnest at the start of the 2010s. Back then, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych was still president of Ukraine, and the prospect of a war between the two neighboring countries appeared to be limited to the pages of lowbrow dystopian fiction. That did not stop the Russian government from launching a brutal crackdown on Ukrainian organizations in Russia.
In 2010, the Federal National Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians of Russia, whose mission was to popularize Ukrainian culture, was closed down by a court ruling, followed by the Association of Ukrainians in Russia in 2012. In 2018, Russia’s only library of Ukrainian literature was permanently shuttered in Moscow, and its director given a four-year suspended sentence for possessing “extremist literature.”
By 2018, there was not a single school teaching Ukrainian in the whole of Russia. In March 2022, the month after the full-scale invasion, Ekho Moskvy radio station was fined for using the Ukrainian language during a program about Ukrainian culture.
The Kremlin’s distrust of the Ukrainian minority is so great that even after the start of the war, the authorities did not call on its representatives to make some kind of collective gesture of loyalty, as might have been expected as part of the Putin regime’s multicultural window-dressing. Instead, they are expected to keep quiet and show no sign of any organizational capacity at all, or risk being collectively labeled a fifth column.
Nor has the presence within Russia’s ruling elite of numerous senior politicians of Ukrainian descent helped, such as Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko and Kremlin deputy chief of staff Dmitry Kozak. If anything, their Ukrainian heritage likely adds to their irritation that their historical homeland is now a separate country. In any case, any notions of Soviet-era “people’s friendship” are out of fashion within the Russian elite, in favor of imperialist rhetoric about the “aggregation of historical lands.”
That was confirmed by Putin’s decision in the fall of 2022 to announce the outright annexation of four occupied Ukrainian regions, rather than trying to create a buffer zone of quasi-Ukrainian statehood. Any hopes in the Kremlin that a “good Ukraine” would prevail were dashed when even the regions considered to be pro-Russian failed to greet the invading Russian army with open arms and cheers. Accordingly, Moscow’s primary tactics now consist of annexation and forced assimilation.
Kyiv, for its part, stopped trying to engage in dialogue with Ukrainian nationals living in Russia long ago, having stripped them of the right to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections back in 2019 in order to prevent pro-Russian forces from getting more votes from the diaspora, which is assumed by Kyiv to be disloyal.
Ukraine’s new law on the holding of additional nationalities allows ethnic Ukrainians from any country in the world to obtain Ukrainian citizenship, but bans them from voluntarily obtaining Russian citizenship. It makes no allowances for Russian Ukrainians. In this light, Kyiv’s apparent concern for the cultural and linguistic rights of Ukrainians in Russia looks like pure propaganda, rather than being aimed in any way at solving the genuine problems faced by that minority, which has become a hostage of the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.
Indeed, at any other time, the Ukrainian diaspora could have been a key mediating influence between the two countries. But the harsh reality of war means that Russia’s Ukrainians are condemned to either assimilate fast, which will be seen by the authorities as a sign of loyalty, or move back to their historical homeland which, given the Ukrainian government’s suspicion of anything to do with Russia, will not be an easy option either.
