Putin Plans to Extend Assimilationist Policies He’s Imposing on Occupied Ukrainian Areas to Non-Russians within Russian Federation, Levchenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 6 – The new nationality strategy document shows that Putin intends to extend the assimilationist policies he has been pursuing in Russian-occupied Ukrainian areas to non-Russian nations within the current borders of the Russian Federation, according to Russian cultural commentator Yan Levchenko.

            In an article in The Moscow Times provocatively entitled “One People, One Reich and One Fuhrer,” he argues that this presages greater chances within the Russian Federation than most have yet understood (moscowtimes.ru/2025/12/06/odin-narod-odin-reih-odin-fyurer-natsionalnaya-politika-rossii-kak-instrument-polnogo-i-okonchatelnogo-edineniya-a182122).

            When the previous nationality policy paper was released in 2012 and even when Putin amended the Russian Constitution after that, the Kremlin leader hid his intentions with talk about the multi-national people of his country apparently to avoid disturbing his Western “partners” and non-Russians inside Russia.

            But a war going on and producing a patriotic upsurge, Levchenko continues, “there is no longer any need to pretend to be some kind of ‘transitional society’ where at least outward tolerance is cultivated and the semblance of a concern for diversity is created” because “the aggression against Ukraine sanctions the cleansing of all ‘others’ within Russia.

            Up to now, he argues, “representatives of the national minorities have been outraged by the normalized racism in society, they have been raising their voices and demanding respect. But now they must seriously consider the consequences of too native an understanding of equality and the right of peoples to preserve their identity.”

            In the future, Moscow will work to “suppress at the very outset any potential hotbeds of separatism which is now going to be declared to include any manifestations not only of political or social subjectivity but even cultural subjectivity by representatives of the country’s national minorities.”

            This shift has happened because “the experience of protecting the Russian-speaking population of the ‘reunited’ regions of eastern Ukraine from discrimination is a demonstration to everyone about how peoples everywhere are to be treated in times of trial,” the Russian culturalist says.o

            And what makes this even clearer is the fact that “none of the other languages and peoples of Russia are even given a mention in the strategy document. It only refers to the Russian language which is openly declared to be an instrument for the assimilation of the population of the regions of Ukraine occupied by the Russian Fedeation since 2014.”

            After all, Putin has long declared that Russians and Ukrainians are one people; and he insists in the new strategy document that almost all the peoples of the Russian Federation must share a common identity by 2036. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the assimilation he has pushed in Ukraine will now be redoubled inside Russia itself.