Ukraine’s reconstruction must also combat ‘Russification’

As Russian forces withdraw from Ukrainian lands they once occupied, we are seeing grisly new evidence of the depravity at the heart of Kremlin-directed war tactics.  

But the mass graves burying the executed, rubble where schools, clinics and apartment buildings once stood, twisted remnants of civilian energy infrastructure — not to mention gut-wrenching firsthand accounts of torture and abuse — tell us that something even darker and more dangerous has occurred than physical destruction. They suggest that President Vladimir Putin’s real mission has not been the mere seizure of Ukrainian territory, but instead the complete “Russification” of Ukraine and its neighborhoods. 

When analysts and policymakers contemplate what the reconstruction of Ukraine might look like, undoing the effects of Russification and defeating Russian influence in Ukraine will be as essential as rebuilding its physical infrastructure.

Over the centuries, Russification has been deployed by various Russian rulers to force the cultural and linguistic assimilation of the country’s non-Russian population. That general definition, however, does not capture the brutal violence, chauvinism and cruelty that has historically accompanied this policy. Russification goes beyond merely asserting the superiority of Russian culture: It is the weaponization of such sentiments to systematically marginalize and even extinguish other nationalities and cultural identities.

Several nationalities have withstood the worst of Moscow’s Russification policies, including Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Finns. Imperial leaders often imposed strict Russian language mandates, formal recognition of Russian traditions and cultural norms above all others and the insertion of Russian and pro-Russian leaders into influential offices and posts. 

For centuries, Moscow has used the intersection of law and religion as a tool for absorbing far-flung populations across the Russian empire. At first, local religious traditions would be tolerated and even encouraged so long as religious leaders demonstrated loyalty to the state. Then, as the capital tightened control, it would use the law and prospects withdrawing state support to control local clerics and supplant local traditions in favor of dictates from the center.

Those who resisted or opposed Russification policies were often attacked, persecuted, imprisoned or even killed. 

But Russification is not a relic of 18th and 19th-century imperialism. In 1944, Joseph Stalin sought to “cleanse” Crimea by ordering the deportation of its entire Tatar community — approximately 200,000 in number — to Central Asia. Nearly half of those taken away by freight cars died along the way or shortly after reaching their mandated destinations. Stalin destroyed Tatar mosques and erased Tatar names from all public records. 

Putin has often expressed his longing for the “glory days” of the Russian empire. Over the past few years, Putin has been transforming his toxic nostalgia into formal strategy and action. The result is an expansionist foreign policy that actively supports the use of pro-Russian disinformation in neighboring lands, the occupation of strategic territory outside Russia’s legal borders and the persecution of those who resist. The impact of Putin’s approach can be seen in the experience of indigenous communities in places like Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where ethnic divisions have been used to create “frozen conflicts” and undermine the unity and territorial integrity of several post-Soviet states. 

Nowhere has the impact of Russification been clearer than in modern Crimea, where Putin has acted in ways reminiscent of Stalin. In 2014, Kremlin operatives moved quickly to shut down the Crimean Tatar representative body and a Tatar television station, replacing them with pro-Russian voices. Experiencing little blowback from Washington and Europe, Putin’s representatives in Crimea imposed Russian language and symbolism onto public and private life and manufactured a phony veneer of local support for its illegal annexation. Throughout the process, according to the State Department, there were numerous reports of atrocities and human rights violations. 

In the Ukrainian communities Putin’s forces have held in today’s conflict, Russification efforts abound. There are reports of Ukrainian teachers who were tortured for refusing to teach in Russian, and of Ukrainian parents threatened with losing their children if they refused their offspring’s participation in such classes. The Russians have even introduced a new term into the Russification vocabulary: “Filtration” is used to describe the forced evacuation of Ukrainian children and families to the Russian Federation, giving the brutal practice a clinical feel. Then, there’s Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko, murdered in his home last month by Russian soldiers for refusing to take part in a concert staged by authorities meant to represent the restoration of peaceful life under Russian rule. 

Rebuilding from this period of savagery will mean helping Ukrainians build new institutions that are citizen-centered, that give a voice to all of the cultures and traditions that make up modern Ukraine and that prepare the country and its people for full membership in European institutions.  

In other words, in order to support Ukraine’s economic and democratic future, it will not be enough to merely see Putin withdraw from Ukrainian territory seized after Feb. 24. It will not be enough to rebuild the schools, homes and physical infrastructure that Russian forces brutally destroyed. It will not be enough to help Ukraine and its neighbors wean themselves from Russian energy and natural resources. 

Putin must be defeated and, even more importantly, his Russification ideology must be openly repudiated. For Ukraine’s sake and the world’s.

Ambassador Mark Green, president and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served as USAID administrator from 2017-2020 and U.S. ambassador to Tanzania from mid-2007 to early 2009. Before that, he served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Wisconsin’s 8th District.