Does Putin really want to revive the USSR? In reality, he wants to restore control over the sphere of influence of the former USSR, but not the USSR itself. Putin’s new imperial project is based on a false historical construct in which Russia appropriates the legacy of Kyivan Rus. He seeks to create a Moscow-centric “Greater Russia” in which there is no place for Ukrainian national consciousness.
An Estonian publicist Andrey Kuzichkin from Postimees.ee, shows that the assimilation of Ukrainians and the erasure of Ukrainian heritage is the policy Putin pursues both inside Russia and in the occupied territories in order to implement his imperial project.
The liquidation of Ukrainian cultural centers in Russia
In my hometown of Tomsk, the Ukrainian cultural center Dzherelo (Spring), created by Ukrainian activists in 1990, was liquidated on August 21, 2025. This is just one example of the complete destruction of Ukraine’s rich heritage in Putin’s Russia.
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, emphasized the paramount importance of national policy, since cultural ties in the post-Soviet space made it possible to preserve the illusion of unity of the former republics of the USSR. Thus, in 1998, an agreement was signed between Russia and Ukraine on the mutual creation of cultural centers.
In the same year, the Ukrainian National Cultural Center was opened on Old Arbat in the center of Moscow, which became an umbrella organization for many Ukrainian diaspora centers in Russian regions. However, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the start of hostilities in Donbas in 2014, this very center became the target of constant provocations by Russian ultras: they burned Ukrainian flags in front of the center building, smeared paint on the walls, and disrupted cultural events.
After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian National Cultural Center in Moscow was closed. The agreement on cultural centers with Ukraine was canceled by Vladimir Putin in 2024. The fact that the leader sitting in the Kremlin has a pathological hatred towards Ukraine and Ukrainians is a medical fact. But why did Ukraine become the object of Putin’s manic pursuit? To understand this, let’s look at the pages of history.
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Ukrainian colonization of lands outside Ukraine
In the 19th-20th centuries, after the abolition of serfdom in Russia and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, a mass resettlement of Ukrainians began in several regions of Russia. In a good climate and on free fertile lands, people from Ukraine very quickly established prosperous settlements, applying their national talents as farmers and herders.
Thus, in the southern part of Russia, Malinovyi Klyn (transl. Raspberry Klyn) was established in Kuban, Zholtyi Klyn (Yellow Klyn) in the forest-steppes of the Lower Volga region, Seryi Klyn (Gray Klyn) in Southern Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan, and Zeleny Klyn or Zelenaya Ukraina (Green Klyn or Green Ukraine) in the southern part of the Far East. Klyn it is what Ukrainians called a plot of land. Later, it became a general name for all areas where Ukrainians lived outside of Ukraine.
In the aforementioned areas, the share of Ukrainians in the local population was up to 70 percent. Many travelers noted at the beginning of the 20th century that in the villages of the Far East “you cannot hear Russian speech at all, only the “malorussian” dialect (the dialect of Little Rus), and the fairs there are held exactly like somewhere in Myrhorod near Poltava.”
In 1917, after the abdication of Nicholas II and the formation of the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg, the national self-awareness of Ukrainians in Russia began to grow rapidly. A session of the Rada, an advisory body convened by local Ukrainians and Cossacks, was held in Kuban. The Rada proclaimed the creation of the Kuban Republic.
The First All-Ukrainian Far Eastern Congress was held in the Far East, the delegates of which demanded that the Provisional Government grant Ukraine and Green Ukraine national autonomy within Russia. To combat the consequences of forced Russification, Ukrainian schools were opened in Green Ukraine, Ukrainian-language newspapers were published, state authorities were formed, and national armed forces were created.
The civil war that broke out in Russia and the offensive of the Red Army put an end to all these plans: the Ukrainian self-government in Kuban and the Far East was destroyed in 1920-1922, and those who participated in it were shot.
Putin’s New Imperial Project: Greater Russia without Ukrainians
It is not surprising that the attempts of the peoples of the former empire to achieve independence became a trauma for all subsequent rulers of the USSR, and this was also inherited by Putin. Already in 2016, Vladimir Putin reproached Lenin in his public speeches, who, in his opinion, unnecessarily and in defiance of Stalin, defended the right of peoples to self-determination up to the point of secession.
Stalin supported the autonomy of the republics and was against the national independence of peoples. But Lenin’s model won. In Putin’s opinion, this laid a “historical mine” under the USSR, which destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991. However, this is, in Putin’s opinion, “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century,” because “historical Russia, which was created over a thousand years, collapsed.”
By equating the USSR and historical Russia, Putin actually announced his plans to restore the lost heritage. Many experts believe that this is about Putin’s attempts to restore the Russian Empire in a new form. However, I think that Putin does not want to step on the historical rake a second time: he does not need a multinational federation, where the right of peoples to self-determination will be preserved only formally, but still. Putin needs a united and indivisible Greater Russia. where the Russian ethnos will undoubtedly become dominant. In accordance with the concept of the “Russian world”, in which Russia appropriates the legacy of Kievan Rus, the Russian ethnic group will undoubtedly be dominant in it.
For two decades, Putin’s regime has followed this path, curtailing the rights of national republics, liquidating national schools, restricting the teaching of national languages, rendering once economically independent regions subsidized and completely dependent on Moscow. However, Ukrainians, as the most numerous diaspora with their own state outside of Russia, became for Putin not just a challenge, but a looming threat that disrupted plans to revive Greater Russia that included Moscow Russia, White Russia (Belarus) and Periphery Russia (Ukraine). There was a danger that Ukrainians in Russia could have become carriers of European political ideas and thus a new mine.
Anti-Russia in Putin’s mind and reality
Vladimir Putin’s article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” was published on the Kremlin website in July 2021. In essence, it was a manifesto that envisaged the forcible integration of Ukraine into the Russian national space by military means.
At the end of the article, Vladimir Putin mentioned the “anti-Russia” project eight times. The Kremlin leader claimed that Western countries were actively turning Ukraine against Russia, setting the fraternal peoples at odds with each other. Numerous European experts rushed to jointly refute Putin’s claim.
But I think Putin was right that by 2021, Ukraine had indeed become anti-Russia. If you don’t count the Baltics, of all the post-Soviet countries, Ukraine developed the furthest on the path to democracy in the 30 years since the collapse of the USSR. The short period of democratization in Russia ended with the revenge of the Chekists and oligarchs when Putin was elected president. Ukraine, however, having experienced two Maidans, firmly set out on the path of European integration.
Political competition, the dependence of power on the people and an independent judiciary, civil society control over the power structures and the army, the absence of censorship, freedom of speech and creativity, respect for human rights and the primacy of the individual over the state – all of these ceased to be just slogans and became a strategy for the Ukrainian state, which in the name of the people declared its intention to become part of Europe.
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Ukraine is a dangerous example for the Putin regime for Russians
However, for Putin’s Russia, which moved from a moderate autocracy to a military dictatorship, all these plans of Ukraine became a challenge, a threat and a slap in the face. For Putin, the danger also lay in the fact that Ukraine became a modern state and the center of Russia’s creative and political elite shifted from Moscow to Kyiv.
The Russian entertainment industry and entrepreneurs in general opened nightclubs and restaurants in Kyiv and Lviv, built ski resorts in the Carpathians, and invested in Ukrainian startups. Until the annexation of Crimea in 2014, over 70 percent of Russian TV series were filmed in Ukraine in collaboration with Ukrainian directors and actors. Among other things, six seasons of the extremely popular TV series “Svaty” (“The In-Laws”), the executive producer of which was Volodymyr Zelenskyy, were filmed there from 2008 to 2012.
Ukraine became a country that others, not just liberal and creative Russia, followed suit. Even Russian officials, seeing that no presidential candidate in Ukraine won the first round of the elections or received 90 percent, asked each other in astonishment: “Oh? Is this allowed?!” This is exactly what Putin could not forgive Ukraine for.
The failure of the plan for the political subordination of Ukraine
Putin wanted Ukraine to become another “Belarus” – a puppet state with a crazy dictator whom the Kremlin itself would put on the throne. When Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian leader of the Donetsk mafia, became president of Ukraine after the fifth attempt in 2010, the Kremlin decided that the game had been won, everything was going according to plan, and Ukraine’s fate as part of Greater Russia had been decided.
But in 2014, Yanukovych fled from the rebellious people, and an angry Putin declared war on Ukraine, annexing Crimea and using separatists in eastern Ukraine as his proxy forces. But gradually, the sharp confrontation in Donbas from 2014 to 2018 instead turned into a simmering conflict.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy essentially fulfilled his election promise by 2020 and stopped the war in the east of the country (according to the UN, 26 civilians died in Donbas in 2020 and 25 in 2021 as a result of military activity). Realizing that the Greater Russia plan was in danger, Putin decided to finally resolve the “Ukrainian question” by launching a large-scale aggression against Ukraine. Russia’s anti-Ukrainian policy reached a new level.
Cancellation of the Ukrainian heritage
Russia has a long history of dispersing Ukrainian ethnic identity. Already in Tsarist Russia, the political conjuncture forced Ukrainians who wanted to pursue a career in the civil service to declare themselves ethnically Russian.
Nothing has changed in Putin’s Russia. Federation Council chairwoman Valentina Matviyenko, whose mother bore the surname Bublei, prefers not to recall that she was born and spent her childhood in Ukraine. First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation Sergey Kiriyenko bears his mother’s Ukrainian surname, his mother studied in Odesa. Gennady Timchenko, a pro-Putin oligarch with a Ukrainian surname, spent his childhood in Ukraine and graduated from school in the Odesa region.
However, they all consider themselves Russian, hiding their Ukrainian roots. And here are the astonishing figures: from 1989 to 2021, the number of Ukrainians in the Russian Federation decreased by 5.5 times – from 4.4 million to 0.8 million. It is quite obvious that there was no devastating plague among Ukrainians – Russians simply massively abandoned Ukrainian nationality, which had become politically unstable, and embraced Russian nationality.
The creeping elimination of Ukrainian culture in Russia has been going on for quite some time, but it is especially associated with Putin’s reign. As early as 2010, a court closed the only state library of Ukrainian literature in Moscow, and in 2018 it was finally liquidated on charges of distributing extremist books.
Over the past 20 years, nearly twenty Ukrainian national-cultural associations have been closed in southern Russia and the North Caucasus (the former Malinovyi Klyn). Until recently, five Ukrainian national centers operated in Krasnodar Krai. Their liquidation began in 2008.
The last of them, Sodruzhestvo Kuban-Ukraina, was closed in 2023. In 2021, a court liquidated the Prosvetitelstvo Center for Ukrainian Spiritual Culture and Education in the Far East in Primorsky Krai (the former Zeleny Klyn). In 2020, the Ukrainian cultural center Syry Klyn was liquidated in Omsk.
Ukrainian national-cultural associations in Astrakhan (the former Zholtyi Klyn), Rostov-on-Don, and Taganrog were closed. Some centers are being closed even despite their active support for the war in Ukraine. For example, the Ukrainian People’s Union of Kalmykia was closed in 2021, even though its leader, Vladimir Omelchak, approved of the annexation of Crimea.
There are exceptions. For example, in 2022, a new Ukrainian center, Slavutych, was established in North Ossetia. The organization’s chairman, Viktor Hamaza, often talks on social media about how Caucasian Ukrainians are sending humanitarian aid to Russian servicemen participating in the invasion of Ukraine.
The fight against the Ukrainian language
From September 1, 2025, the Ukrainian language has been removed from the school curriculum in Russia. This means the abolition of compulsory teaching of this language in primary, basic and secondary schools in the occupied territories of Ukraine, which Putin already considers Russia.
Already in 2017-2019, the use of Ukrainian as a state language was banned in the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. The constitution of annexed Crimea still maintains the status of Ukrainian as the state language.
However, this year, all Ukrainian schools in Crimea and the Russian-controlled territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions will be closed. Under the conditions of Russian occupation, Ukrainian is taught secretly, in secret apartments.
Putin’s obsession is the destruction of Ukraine and its cultural and historical heritage. This is the personal mania of the leader sitting in the Kremlin, which has become Russian national policy. And only the collapse of the Putin regime can stop this madness.
