Other than in the Occupied Donbass, Fewer Ukrainians than Central Asians Now Taking Russian Citizenship, New Statistics Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 23 – The Kremlin has encouraged Russians to think that ethnic Ukrainians dominate the numbers of people from the former Soviet republics taking Russian citizenship, but except for Ukrainians in the Donbass, that is not true. This year, more Central Asians are taking Russian citizenship than Ukrainians.

            That means two things. One the one hand, it means that the new citizens are changing the ethnic face of the Russian Federation in ways that many Russians find uncomfortable, making it less Slavic and more Muslim. And on the other hand, it is another reason why the Donbass is so important for the Kremlin: Only control of that area allows Putin to claim otherwise.

            Compared to the first nine months of 2020, the number of people who have taken Russian citizenship in the same period of 2021 rose from 450,000 to 541,000. The number of Ukrainians doing so also increased from 291,000 to 292,000; but only 51,000 of the latter were Ukrainians living in Russia or elsewhere in Ukraine in 2021, down from 72,000 a year earlier (forum-msk.org/material/news/17487882.html).

            At the same time, the number of Tajik residents taking Russian citizenship rose by 60 percent between 2020 and 2021 and now amounts by themselves to 40 percent more than Ukrainians. The numbers doing so from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan also rose, from 14,000 to 24,000 in the case of former and from 8,000 to 13,000 in the latter.

            That means that the number of Central Asians who became Russian citizens was more than twice the number of Ukrainians. (This analysis ignores Kazakhstan because there those taking Russian citizenship are almost exclusively ethnic Russians.)

            Almost certainly, the increasingly negative image of Ukraine and Ukrainians the Russian media present is alienating Ukrainians and making it unlikely that this trend will change, simultaneously boosting the importance of the Donbass for Russian demographic figures and challenging Putin’s claim that Russians and Ukrainians are really “one people.”