Since February 2022, Russia has waged a full-scale war against Ukraine that combines conquest, mass atrocities, terrorism, and settler colonialism. It follows more than a decade of Russian military aggression against Ukraine, which began with the seizure of Crimea and the intervention in Ukraine’s eastern regions. The war has been enabled by the “discourses of Russian supremacy and Ukrainian ‘inferiority’”, yet the colonial character of Russia’s war often remains obscured. The invasion of Ukraine is, of course, not the first war of aggression waged by contemporary Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Empire. What is unusual about it is that it takes place in an era when blatant land grabs are universally condemned: Russia has attacked an independent, universally recognised country. Yet Russian atrocities against nations and peoples that lacked statehood were no less tragic, such as the massacres of Turkmens by the Russian Empire, Qazaqs during the Soviet era, and Chechens in the post-Cold War era – under both Yeltsin and Putin. The list of examples is much longer.
Still, Russia continues to claim “imperial innocence”. Prime Minister Lavrov has maintained that Russia “has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism”. However, the reluctance to recognise Russian colonialism runs deeper than susceptibility to Russian propaganda. This essay examines Russia’s imperial past and present, explores how it has been obscured, and suggests implications for the international studies discipline.
Colonialism is typically associated with European powers, but Russia – partly in Europe geographically and a key diplomatic player on the continent – is often left out from those discussions. However, both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were no less brutal than other empires, committing mass atrocities that are recognised as genocide by one or several states, including the massacres of Muslim Circassians and Holodomor in Ukraine. Furthermore, the Russian Empire had significant aspirations but limited capacity to pursue colonisation of Africa. Thwarted in its ambition, it treated the territories it had acquired through overland expansion as colonies by drawing on European orientalist discourses.
While the notion and practice of colonialism has many manifestations, its distinguishing features include the coloniser’s self-perceived superiority, the “civilising mission”, and dehumanisation. Superiority is the belief that some peoples are more “advanced” or “deserving” than others. Contemporary Russian colonialism is rooted in the same premise: the idea that Russia is the natural “leader” of all Slavic nations – or possibly all nations once under the Russian or Soviet rule – and that Russian culture is superior to the culture of its neighbours.
The notion of “advancement” has been traditionally associated with modernity, rationality, and Christianity. Russia has similarly relied on the discourse of modernisation to justify its claim to “great power” status, and some Russians have denigrated Ukraine for allegedly being poor and low-skilled. Russia has stressed the “rationality” of its rulers and people while portraying Ukrainians as sentimental and unsophisticated – a “singing and dancing tribe” as opposed to martial Russians. Christianity has also become increasingly central to Russia’s colonial project, with the Russian Orthodox Church supporting Russia’s war.
Colonialism rests on colonisers’ self-perception of being not only more “advanced” but also more “deserving”. When discussing buying up cheap property in destroyed and occupied Mariupol – where up to 25,000 civilians died during the Russian onslaught – Russian settlers admit that they are drawn to Mariupol for its favourable location and climate. Others admit that they move to the occupied lands to realise their aim of having their “own house of no less than 180 sqm”. The sense of entitlement to more space and better climate mirrors the colonisers’ motivations throughout history.
The second element of colonialism is the “civilising mission”, or the belief in the benevolence of the metropole that seeks to “better” colonised lands or people. Russia argued that it invaded Ukraine to “fix” it: to “save” it from imaginary “Nazis”, politicians deemed “corrupt” or “inept”, or simply the risk of forgetting “Russian roots”. (Russians have a term, vyrus’, for those who have allegedly “lost their Russian identity”, such as Ukrainians who have switched to speaking Ukrainian after the full-scale invasion.) The project to attract Russian settlers to the newly occupied areas in southern Ukraine is called the “virgin lands” programme, echoing similar the Soviet-era in Qazaqstan. “Virgin lands” is a classic colonial trope: “[c]laiming land to be uncultivated and indigenous people idle” has been used by settlers to justify land expropriation.
Metropoles persuade subjugated people that they can get “civilised” by forsaking their language and culture and adopting those of the coloniser. Before the discussions on decolosination gained pace across the region, in Qazaqstan some looked down on fellow citizens who spoke Russian with an accent. Similar attitudes were internalised by some Ukrainians (although they started to disappear after the full-scale invasion) as the society reflected on the meaning of decolonisation in the Ukrainian context.
The third element of colonialism is dehumanisation. In the Soviet Union, the request to speak Russian was framed as a demand to “speak human”, implying that the languages of other peoples within the empire were somehow less-than-human. In Ukraine in 2022, the massacres such as Bucha were clear manifestations of dehumanisation, with the Russian forces leaving the graffiti in occupied houses reading “It is not considered a war crime if you had fun”, privileging colonisers’ “fun” over Ukrainians lives. Instead of condemning the war crimes, some Russian social media users celebrated and further encouraged them – a persistent and possibly accelerating trend.
Russian discourse towards Ukrainians is in part assimilationist and in part eliminationist. During the occupation, Ukrainians willing to abandon their identity (linguistic and cultural, but also political) could survive through russification. The unwilling ones, as a Russian collaborator in Ukraine’s east bluntly stated, were to be eliminated: he said that “if you don’t want to be convinced, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: one million, five million, or exterminate all of you”. This is typical of colonialism that sought to either “convert”, “uplift”, or “enlighten” – or exterminate. Russian discourse has also likened the Ukrainian identity to a “virus”, reminiscent of colonial authorities’ trying to “medicate” subjudated populations out of their perceived “illnesses”. A headline of a Russian newspaper declared that “Ukrainiannes cannot be civilised”.
Beyond Ukraine, Russian private military companies – an arm of the Russia state – have committed murders, rapes, and displacement in Mali and the Central African Republic. However, even this is rarely recognised as (neo)colonialism. With so
