By Design, Putin’s War in Ukraine Hitting Numerically Smallest Nations in Russia Hardest

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 10 – The smaller the nationality in the Russian Federation, the greater the percentage of its men Moscow’s mobilization for the war in Ukraine takes and the larger the number of them who die in combat, ever more activists and observers report (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/02/war-in-ukraine-hitting-russias.html).

            This pattern appears to reflect three things: first, such groups are so small that they often have no way to get the word out as to what is happening; second, their members often lack the resources to resist; and third, the numbers involved while critical for them appear insignificant to outsiders.

            All that works to the benefit of the Putin regime but against the life and well-being of the roughly 50 nations in the Russian Federation who are already so small in number that almost all of them are on international endangered lists. Removing young men from their ranks only accelerates this process.

            Now, in a report to the ongoing session of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERN), the Memorial anti-discrimination committee and the International Committee of the Indigenous Peoples of Russia brings together data about just how widespread this pattern has become.

            In a 25-page report (adcmemorial.org/wp-content/uploads/adc-memorial-icipr-report-to-un-cerd-109-session-april-2023-eng.pdf summarized in Russian at adcmemorial.org/novosti/glavnoe/rasizm-v-rossii-doklad-adcz-memorial-i-mezhdunarodnogo-komiteta-korennyh-narodov-rossii-v-klrd-oon/),  the two Russian groups offer the following data:

·       Mobilization data show that Moscow planned to take 1.66 percent of the males in Sakha and 1.415 percent of those in Kalmykia but only 0.27 percent of those in the predominantly Russian Novosibirsk Oblast.

·       In the Olenek Evenk district in Sakha, 39 percent of all Evenks aged 18 to 35 were mobilized.

·       In a single Udygey village, 26 of the men were mobilized.

·       Among the Orochi of Khabarovsk Kray, six of the men of that nationality which numbers under 600 were mobilized.

·       As of February 9, 2023, 116 representatives of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation have been killed in the war, according to the list of the Indigenous Peoples Organization, which acknowledges that its numbers are incomplete.