Moscow Now Seeking to Kill Off Finno-Ugric Peoples in Russian Federation, Estonian Deputy Warns

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 16 – Russia has a long history of repressing Finno-Ugric nations; but since Putin began his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has intensified this effort to the point where one can now say Moscow is seeking to kill off these nations by depriving them of their languages and their contacts with Finno-Ugric countries abroad, Juku-Kalle Raid says.

            Moscow has always worried about the Finno-Ugric nations within its borders, despite their small size, because they sit on top of some of the largest reserves of natural resources in the Russian Federation, the head of the Finno-Ugric support group in the Estonian parliament says (elu24.postimees.ee/8116261/elu25-juku-kalle-raid-venemaa-spikker-kuidas-tappa-meie-sugulasi and mariuver.com/2024/10/17/kak-ubivat-nashih-rodstvennikov/#more-79033).

            And it believes that Western attention to them is intended to deprive Moscow of its access to these resources and thus weaken the Russian state, a view that has been pushed not only by Russian commentators but increasingly by Russian officials as well as they have undermined both the languages and contacts of these groups.

            Moscow has cut back the study of these languages in schools in Finno-Ugric republics to an hour a day and that is available only to pupils whose parents apply for it, something that ensures these parents will be closely followed by the FSB. But even that possibility is not available to many members of these nations who live beyond their republic borders.

            Consequently, Raid continues, Moscow has seriously reduced the number of Finno-Ugric nations within the current borders of the Russian Federation who speak their native languages. And over the last five years and especially over the last three, Moscow has focused on isolating these nations from the three Finno-Ugric countries – Estonia, Finland and Hungary.

            Since 2020, Moscow has blocked Finno-Ugric groups from participating in conferences on the Finno-Ugric world in Estonia, the country that has organized the most frequent meetings, and has declared groups inside the Russian Federation who attempt to maintain ties extremist, Raid says.

            Despite these Russian efforts, the Estonian parliamentarian suggests, it is critically important for Estonia, the two other Finno-Ugric nations and the West more generally to continue to support the Finno-Ugric nations within Russia lest Putin use his war in Ukraine as cover for the ethnocide of those peoples.