Moscow Fails to Publish Ethnic Composition of Compatriot Returnees and Russians are Upset, Shustov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 23 – Sometimes, the Putin regime’s choice to stop publishing data has an effect very different than the Kremlin intends: it leads Russians to make conclusions at odds with the ones their country’s leaders want them to draw and prompts them to question what their government is doing.

            That is what is happening now regarding the number of people coming to Russia under its compatriots program which seeks to have people with roots in Russia to return. This year, as the number fell (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/02/fewer-compatriots-returned-to-russia-in.html), Moscow highlighted the country of origin rather than the ethnicity of those doing so.

            Since most of those coming back now are returning to Russia from the countries of Central Asia, many Russians now assume that their country is being flooded with Muslim Central Asians, and they don’t like that at all, Aleksandr Shustov says (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2026-02-23--kakie-sootechestvenniki-pereseljajutsja-v-rossiju-86021).

            A careful examination of data from a variety of sources, the Rhythm of Eurasia commentator says, shows that most of those returning to Russia from Central Asia are in fact ethnic Russians not Muslims, just as has been true every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

            But by not publishing and highlighting that data on a regular basis, Shustov says, the government has gotten itself into trouble with many Russians who draw conclusions at odds with reality. And the invariable supporter of the Kremlin says that “the state has a simple means of dispelling the concerns of society” about what is going on.

            All it needs to do, he continues, is “to add in reports an indication of the nationality of those involved and regularly publish data in quarterly monitoring reports,” something Moscow used to do but in the last several years has stopped doing, a change that has not had the intended result.

            The problems the Russian authorities have landed themselves in by cutting back on the release of such data, of course, reflect not so much concerns about statistical transparency but an obsession about nationality among Russians and the way in which demographic change is leading to a decline in the percentage of the titular nationality in their country.