Russia has tried to deceive the world by lying about its genocidal goals in Ukraine and so the truth
By Bohdan Nahaylo
Feb. 26, 2026
Kyiv Post
When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed to protect Russian speakers from persecution by nationalist extremists in Kyiv. It was a humanitarian mission, a “special operation,” he insisted.
But Ukraine’s Russian speakers didn’t cooperate. They fought back. In Ukraine’s Russian-speaking cities – Kharkiv, Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Lysychansk – residents built tank traps and barricades. Ukrainian soldiers, many native Russian speakers, and even ethnic Russians, gave orders in Russian as they battled the invasion.
And today, the Ukrainian military itself is filled with Russian speakers who chose to defend their country rather than submit to Moscow’s “protection.”
Russian speakers in Ukraine have turned decisively away from Russia, repelled not by “Ukrainian nationalism” but by Russia’s brutal imperialist campaign of cultural and physical genocide – a project of empire that recognizes no limit to its destructive reach. The supposed protector revealed as a destroyer.
But if we’re examining Russia’s treatment of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians, we must ask a more fundamental question – one that exposes the true nature of Russian imperialism: What has happened to the millions of Ukrainians who have lived within Russia’s borders?
The vanishing
The numbers tell a story of systematic erasure. In 1926, the Soviet census counted 7.8 million Ukrainians living in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – a substantial minority comprising roughly 7% of the RSFSR’s population.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine implemented thousands of cultural projects abroad, won its first Academy Award, started the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and so much more.
These were not recent migrants but established communities, some dating back centuries, living primarily in regions bordering Ukraine: the Kuban, the Don, the Volga region, and scattered throughout Siberia and the Far East.
By the 2021 Russian census, only 1.3 million people in the Russian Federation identified as Ukrainian – an 83% decline over 95 years. This represents one of the most dramatic demographic disappearances of the 20th century. And the explanation is not simply assimilation.
The vast majority were not killed or expelled. They were erased through systematic cultural suppression: language bans, the closure of Ukrainian schools and newspapers, the destruction of theaters and cultural institutions, the execution of intellectuals and cultural leaders, and relentless pressure to assimilate. Through coercion and the quiet calculus of survival, millions ceased to exist as Ukrainians.
Russian officials have long claimed that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”; that Ukrainian identity is artificial, a recent invention of nationalists and Western provocateurs. Putin himself has written essays arguing that Ukrainian statehood is a historical accident, that Ukrainians are really just a subset of Russians who have been misled about their true identity.
Yet for more than two centuries, Russia’s imperial machine waged cultural genocide against Ukrainians within its own borders. The language criminalized, schools closed, intellectuals murdered. Millions faced repression until they abandoned their identity entirely.
The imperial pattern is unmistakable: subjugate populations, indoctrinate them, strip away their language and distinct identity through coercion and terror, then deny they ever existed. The insistence that Ukrainians don’t really exist is not an observation – it’s the final stage of genocide – the erasure of memory to match the erasure of culture.
Imperial foundations
The erasure of Ukrainian identity in Russia has deep historical roots.
But let’s start with 1863 when Russian Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev issued a circular that declared, with the arrogance of an imperial supremacist, that “a separate Little Russian [that’s how Ukrainians were referred to by the Russian imperial authorities] language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.” This was not philology; it was imperialism. The circular criminalized most Ukrainian-language publications and dismissed the language as a mere peasant dialect unfit for civilization – a calculated insult designed to assert Russian racial and cultural superiority over Ukraine’s peoples.
Thirteen years later, Tsar Alexander II signed the Ems Ukaz, which prohibited Ukrainian-language publications, education, and performances. The language was to be confined to the private sphere, never allowed to develop into a vehicle for modern culture or national consciousness.
The empire welcomed Ukrainian labor, service, and sacrifice to help in conquering and colonizing other territories – the extraction of resources from subject peoples is the foundation of imperial power. But it viciously rejected their language, culture, and distinct identity. The imperial bargain was explicit and brutal: you may serve Russian greatness, but only by ceasing to be Ukrainian. Assimilate, disappear, or end up in prison or Siberian exile.
Soviet terror and assimilation
Although the Ukrainians lost the battle for their independence in 1918-20 to the Russian Bolsheviks, the early Soviet period briefly offered hope. In the 1920s, the policy of “korenizatsiya” (indigenization) designed to allow Soviet rule to take root allowed Ukrainian
culture to develop throughout the Soviet Union. Ukrainian schools opened, newspapers were published, theaters performed in Ukrainian.
The reversal came swiftly and mercilessly. As Iosif Stalin consolidated power, the imperial Soviet Russian state launched a genocidal assault not only on the Ukrainian peasantry but also on Ukrainian cultural institutions throughout Russia. The Great Terror of 1937-1938 included a targeted genocide against Ukrainian identity – Ukrainian intellectuals, teachers, writers, and cultural leaders were systematically murdered with deliberate ferocity.
The Holodomor – the genocidal man-made famine that exterminated millions in Ukraine from 1932-1933 – also triggered waves of repression against Ukrainian communities in Russia, particularly in the Kuban, where Ukrainians were slaughtered for suspected nationalist sympathies. Accusations of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” became a warrant for execution.
Between 1944 and 1952, the Soviet empire orchestrated one of history’s largest forced deportations – a genocidal dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians torn from their homes and scattered across Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other remote regions.
The goal was explicitly genocidal: to annihilate Ukrainian national consciousness, destroy the social infrastructure of Ukrainian identity, and scatter a people so thoroughly that organized resistance would be impossible.
It was imperialism at its most ruthless – the violent destruction of a nation through repression and forced exile.
The Post-Soviet illusion
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought brief hope for a revival of Ukrainian culture in Russia. Ukrainian cultural centers opened in Moscow and other cities. But the revival was limited and short-lived.
Under Putin, indifference turned to hostility. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Ukrainian identity once again became suspect.
In 2015, Russian authorities raided the Ukrainian Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow, arrested its director Natalya Sharina on extremism charges, and eventually closed and liquidated the institution.
After Feb. 24, 2022, Ukrainian organizations were banned. Ukrainian books removed from libraries (in the Donbas they were burned, just as the Nazis used to do). In Russia, Ukrainian identity was brutally forced underground.
Creating Ukrainians to erase them
Since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Russia has deported hundreds of thousands – perhaps more than a million – Ukrainians to its territory. This is not speculation; it is documented by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Human Rights Watch, and Ukrainian government agencies tracking missing persons.
These deportations have been systematic and deliberate. Ukrainian civilians from occupied territories have been forced through “filtration” camps where they are interrogated, their phones are searched, and their loyalty is assessed. Those deemed acceptable are given little choice about their destination. Thousands have been scattered across Russia’s vast territory, from Sakhalin in the Far East to Siberia to rural regions far from Ukraine’s borders.
Children have been torn from their families and placed in Russian foster care according to state policy and institutions as part of a deliberate policy of ethnic erasure. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin himself for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia – recognizing this as genocide under international law. Russian officials have openly and unapologetically discussed genocidal “re-education” plans: forcing Ukrainian children to forget their language, deny their identity, and accept that they are Russian, that Ukraine is not a real country, that their parents were enemies of the state. This is the language of genocide written in policy memoranda.
The deportees are Ukrainian – they speak Ukrainian, hold Ukrainian passports, identify as Ukrainian. Russia’s imperial machine is erasing them through calculated state violence.
Ukrainian children are forcibly placed with Russian families, compelled into Russian schools, indoctrinated with Russian history and ideology from Russian textbooks. Adults face genocidal coercion: accept Russian citizenship and assimilation or lose access to food, shelter, and employment.
The empire has deliberately destroyed any Ukrainian-language schools for these captive populations, closed all Ukrainian cultural centers, banned Ukrainian newspapers and television. They are being murdered in slow motion – forced to become Russian or be ground to dust by a state that denies their very existence.
In 20 or 30 years, these hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will have been consumed by the Russian state, their memories scrubbed from history, just as the 7.8 million Ukrainians documented in 1926 were erased from existence.
The 20th-century erasure is happening again – but faster
This is the continuation of the same genocidal imperial project Russia has pursued for more than a century – now intensified and operating on two fronts simultaneously with industrial efficiency.
In occupied Ukraine, Russian forces destroy Ukrainian cities with industrial precision, mass-murder Ukrainian civilians, and force the survivors into genocidal assimilation programs. Within Russia’s borders, the state obliterates the Ukrainian identity of hundreds of thousands of deported civilians through coercion, separation of families, and forced erasure – while simultaneously denying that Ukrainian identity ever existed. It is genocide doubled: kill them on one front, erase them on the other.
The imperial contradiction is stark and revealing: Russia claims to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine while waging genocide against Ukrainians within its borders.
It denies Ukrainian identity exists – a chauvinistic lie – while investing enormous resources and state violence to destroy it. It insists Ukrainians and Russians are one people – a supremacist fantasy – while ensuring Ukrainians can only survive by annihilating their own identity and becoming Russian. The contradiction exposes the imperial project’s true nature.
Yet the contradiction appears in every action. The defenders of Mariupol gave orders in Russian. The soldiers holding Kharkiv spoke Russian as they built barricades against Russian tanks. Russian speakers fought back – not because they were being “protected,” but because they were being invaded.
Ukrainian identity is real, irreducible, and threatens Russian imperialism at its core precisely because it cannot be murdered or denied out of existence. Russia’s centuries-long campaign of imperial chauvinism and genocide proves this: Ukrainians persist.
They want to be who they are – a distinct, democratic, European nation with its own language, culture, and history – which has finally won its independence and international recognition and is determined to defend them.
After years of heroic struggle, Ukrainians have shown the world who they are, in contrast to the anti-Western barbarism that Russia represents, and why today’s Russian imperialists are so obsessed with trying to annihilate this unyielding people who refuse to bow before them. A people who expose the fallacies and dangers in accepting Russia’s pretentions to greatness and right to dominate over others. A proverbial David unafraid to confront the Russian Goliath and call the monster by his real name.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
