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The Kremlin's Occupation Playbook: Coerced Russification and Ethnic Cleansing in Occupied Ukraine
ISW ^ | February 9, 2024 | By Karolina Hird

Posted on 02/11/2024 10:26:12 AM PST by Chad C. Mulligan

The war in Ukraine is primarily a war for control of people, not land. Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine twice not mainly because he desires Ukraine’s land, but rather because he seeks to control its people. Putin’s project, explicitly articulated in the 2021 article he published justifying the 2022 full-scale invasion, is the destruction of Ukraine’s distinctive political, social, linguistic, and religious identity.[1] Putin seeks to make real his false ideological conviction that Ukrainians are simply confused Russians with an invented identity, language, and history that a small, Western-backed minority is seeking to impose on the majority of inhabitants. He sees language as one of the primary determinants of ethnicity—Russian speakers, he claims, must be Russians regardless of the state they live in.[2] The Russian Federation has claimed special rights to protect Russians in the former Soviet states since the 1990s, although the Kremlin did not act on those claims until Putin became president.[3] Putin’s aim to destroy Ukrainian identity, language, and culture is thus one of the primary objectives of his entire enterprise.

The stakes of this war thus transcend hectares of land. They include the lives, freedom, and identities of nearly five million Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation, the nearly five million more whom the Kremlin has illegally deported to Russia and the additional millions who have fled their homeland to other parts of Ukraine or abroad.[4] Dry, abstract, “realist” discussions about pressuring Ukraine to make “concessions”—to “trade land for peace”—ignore the reality of the war. This war is about people as well as land, and Western leaders cannot dismiss the consequences of the policies they pursue and demand.

Russia first experimented with its occupation playbook in 2008 when it invaded Georgia and occupied the Georgian territories of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia “republics.”[5] Russia further developed means and methods of occupation in Ukraine after it invaded and seized Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014. The international community denounced the 2014 invasion, refused to recognize Russia’s claims to these areas, and heavily sanctioned involved Russian actors.[6] The international response, however, failed to discourage Russia from continuing its occupation of Ukraine and setting conditions for the 2022 full-scale invasion. Russia succeeded in forcing the international community to accept and internalize the 2014 occupation enough that many even in the West now view the 2014 territories as different from the rest of Ukraine.

Russia is now applying these means and methods of occupation on an expanded scale in the Ukrainian territories it occupied since the full-scale invasion that began on February 24, 2022. The Kremlin’s occupation design aims to eliminate Ukrainian identity by forcibly integrating occupied Ukraine into Russia socially, culturally, linguistically, politically, economically, religiously, and bureaucratically. Moscow ultimately seeks to persuade Kyiv and its supporters that the forced integration of Ukraine into Russia, and the resulting elimination of Ukrainian identity, are permanent and irreversible so that the Kremlin can fully subjugate these territories and people for its own gain.

Putin also seeks to use Ukraine as a source of mobilizable manpower in part to address Russia's demographic issues. Russia has been struggling since the beginning of the 1990s with a demographic crisis, caused by declining birthrates, an aging population, low life expectancy (particularly amongst males of working age), and high levels of emigration.[7] The war has somewhat exacerbated Russia’s demographic challenges because 800,000- 900,000 Russians fled the country after the start of the war, including up to 700,000 who ran after Putin ordered partial mobilization in September 2022.[8] Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) data shows that Russia’s labor shortage amounted to 4.8 million people in 2023, a problem that has reduced Russia’s economic output.[9] Rosstat also estimated in 2023 that Russia’s population will decline naturally at a rate of more than 600,000 people per year until 2032.[10]

Rosstat reported that the Russian population was 146 million as of January 1, 2023.[11] Five million Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied areas, plus the 4.8 million Ukrainians whom Russia has deported into the Russian Federation, thus comprise about 7 percent of the current Russian population. Russian efforts to control Ukrainian land and seize its people are therefore in part intended to offset Russia’s population decline and workforce shortages.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Ukraine
KEYWORDS: ethniccleansing; general200; genocide; instituteforwargrift; isw; kagan; karolinahird; kotlovoygeneral; moscow; nuland; syrskythebutcher; thekotlovoygeneral; ukraine; zeeperpr0n; zeepers; zeepersjustwannazeep; zeeperslovevindman
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To: Chad C. Mulligan
The battle going on is over Ethnic Russian territory. Ukraine is guilty of the Ethnic cleansing and has been since 2014.
41 posted on 02/11/2024 12:22:14 PM PST by McGruff (Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f*** things up - Barack Obama)
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To: rxh4n1

Foreign weirdos

More like the nwo

Brave new world diversity

Gay fascist - nazi - 666 everything

Russia dropped this marxism

Libs want it back

Gog dnc commie usa

Magog dnc commie nato

Rev 13


42 posted on 02/11/2024 12:29:42 PM PST by Firehath (Quackery - An irrelevant simplification / undetected Complex problem - attacking symptoms)
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To: McGruff
The battle going on is over Ethnic Russian territory. Ukraine is guilty of the Ethnic cleansing and has been since 2014.

Posting that fib over and over doesn't/can't make it true. Although as Goebbels said it can make people believe it, which I suppose is your intent.

READ THE REPORT. The evidence is there, copiously footnoted with contemporary news accounts of what went on even before 2014.

43 posted on 02/11/2024 12:30:20 PM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
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To: Chad C. Mulligan
Russification and ethnic cleansing

Translation: denazification

IMG-3489
images of up

44 posted on 02/11/2024 1:06:54 PM PST by CapandBall
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To: Chad C. Mulligan; McGruff
READ THE REPORT.

A report from the Institute For Grifting On War? Puhhh-leeese!

45 posted on 02/11/2024 1:40:31 PM PST by kiryandil (Free Zaluzhny!)
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To: Chad C. Mulligan
Posting that fib over and over doesn't/can't make it true. Although as Goebbels said it can make people believe it, which I suppose is your intent.

Queen Vicky and her crew of Kagan relatives at ISW are stone-cold liars.

46 posted on 02/11/2024 1:43:32 PM PST by kiryandil (Free Zaluzhny!)
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To: rxh4n1

“That’s not good enough for the pro-Ukraine crowd, if you aren’t in favor of all-out war and destruction of Russia, they slander you as an appeaser or a Putinista. They’re mostly weirdo foreigners with no real skin in the game.”

Skin in the game? I’ll give you skin in the game.
-How ‘bout 7 years US Army and 4 years in Iraq where I witnessed KGB-trained and Syria and Iran-equipped terrorists blow up US personnel -some of whom I knew?
-Or the 3-man KGB(bum) team I encountered in BIAP on a flight down to MND-CS 3 weeks before the EFP IEDs started being used there?
-Or the Chinese mortar team that attacked Camp Alpha and was later caught in Baghdad?

Putin, Assad, Ahmadinejad, Rouhani are horrible PsOS! They care NOTHING of people. NOTHING. They are low-life tyrants.

Anyone who pretzel-logics them into being anything but horrible, disgusting tyrants is a tool. A GD FOOL!


47 posted on 02/11/2024 2:09:24 PM PST by Justa
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To: Justa
Anyone who pretzel-logics them into being anything but horrible, disgusting tyrants is a tool. A GD FOOL!

Like this guy?


48 posted on 02/11/2024 2:17:49 PM PST by McGruff (Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f*** things up - Barack Obama)
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To: Justa

“Anyone who pretzel-logics them into being anything but horrible, disgusting tyrants is a tool. A GD FOOL!”

There you go with the slander. Who said they weren’t tyrants etc.? I didn’t. I don’t really believe your stories; you sound like another keyboard tough guy.


49 posted on 02/11/2024 2:25:36 PM PST by rxh4n1
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To: Chad C. Mulligan

I’m sure Russia doesn’t mind all the abundance of resources too.


50 posted on 02/11/2024 3:00:42 PM PST by BushCountry (A properly cast vote (1 day voting) can save you $2.00 a gallon.)
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To: ronnie raygun
Stalin starved the Ukrainians what Some historians conclude is that the famine

Make sure and give Ukrainian Socialists some credit for the Holodomir
51 posted on 02/11/2024 3:13:42 PM PST by Jan_Sobieski (Sanctification)
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To: kiryandil
Queen Vicky and her crew of Kagan relatives at ISW are stone-cold liars.

THEIR presentation is backed up by copious footnotes; facts found contemporaneously by dozens of separate and independent news reports. Moscow makes up its' own "facts", uncorroborated by anybody at all. And useful idiots repeat them thoughtlessly.

52 posted on 02/11/2024 3:30:41 PM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
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To: Chad C. Mulligan
A bag full of cowplop is still cowplop, even if it isn't "free range" once you put it in the bag.

If the ISW told me the sky was blue or water was wet, I 'd check for myself.

Useful idiots trust Nuland and Kagan and their crew of neocon propagandists.

53 posted on 02/11/2024 4:32:25 PM PST by kiryandil (Free Zaluzhny!)
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To: kiryandil

The lowest form of ignorance is rejecting something you know nothing about.


54 posted on 02/11/2024 4:39:37 PM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
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To: Chad C. Mulligan
The lowest form of ignorance is rejecting something you know nothing about.

I agree.

Why do you and your band of useful Ukraine idiots do that, exactly?

Is it intellectual laziness, or something genetic?

55 posted on 02/11/2024 4:43:47 PM PST by kiryandil (Free Zaluzhny!)
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To: Chad C. Mulligan

About what the Allies did to defeated Nazi Germany after WWII.


56 posted on 02/11/2024 4:59:06 PM PST by Lion Den Dan ( )
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To: kiryandil
I agree.

Oh. so you'll read the ISW report then? Let us know when you finish, then we can talk.

57 posted on 02/11/2024 8:39:25 PM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
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To: Chad C. Mulligan
Let us know when you finish, then we can talk.

I find that talking to useful idiots like yourself is a waste of time.  

58 posted on 02/11/2024 8:43:01 PM PST by kiryandil (Free Zaluzhny!)
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