Once Large and Active Ukrainian Diaspora in Russia Currently ‘Lost to Ukraine,’ Former Kyiv Diplomat Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 22 – Since 2010, Moscow has worked to suppress or take full control over all organizations in Russia involving Ukrainians as part of its effort to force members of that community to give up their language and identity or face the near certainty of repression and the inability to get and keep good jobs, a former Ukrainian diplomat who worked in Russia says.

            Speaking to Radio Liberty on condition of anonymity, he says that as a result of these Moscow actions, “the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is lost for Ukraine” however much Kyiv might like to change that (svoboda.org/a/ukraintsam-opasno-vyskazyvatjsya-otkryto-ukrainskaya-diaspora-v-rossii/33711715.html).

            Moscow began by targeting organizations involved in political or even public life, banning their operation, driving activists into emigration, or in some cases even killing their leaders – and then replacing them with “puppet” groups that the FSB totally controlled even though they retained references to Ukrainians in their names.

            The survivors are now typically led by retired military officers who came from Ukraine in Soviet times, served in the Red Army, and then retired in the Russian Federation. They appear sufficiently Ukrainian to fool some in Russia as well as many in Ukraine and in western countries.

            But the greatest pressure against ethnic Ukrainians inside the Russian Federation came in 2018-2019, the diplomat says. At that time, many ethnic Ukrainians were informed that they would lose their jobs or at least any chance for advancement unless they gave up their Ukrainian citizenship and became ethnic Russians.

            Many of these people lined up at Ukrainian consulates to take the necessary steps, thus allowing Moscow to claim on the basis of the census in 2020-21 that the number of Ukrainians in Russia had fallen by more than half in the last decade, although it is likely many avoided identifying as Russians but were among the 11 percent not declaring a nationality at all.

            Irina Klyuchkovskaya, the director of Lviv’s International Institute of Education, Culture and Ties with the Diaspora, provides additional information on the trends the anonymous diplomat has talked about. She says that the Russian authorities have been successful in suppressing organized life of the Ukrainians inside Russia and of their use of Ukrainian.

            Russian oppression of ethnic Ukrainians, including in some cases the murder of their leaders, was “a test for the reaction both in Russia and in Ukraine and in the world,” she suggests. There wasn’t much of a reaction in any of these places, in part because Ukrainian organizations had ceased to trust one another given the FSB’s control of so many.

            The current situation of ethnic Ukrainians in Putin’s Russia is dire, but it isn’t necessarily irreversible. Many Ukrainians within the current borders of the Russian Federation retain a cultural identity even if they no longer speak their native language. If conditions in Russia change as a result of the war, the Ukrainian community in Russia almost certainly