Russian Federation: Russian State Media Incites the Deportation of Forcibly Assimilated Ukrainians from Russian-Occupied Territories to the Russian Far East
In the occupied territories, citizens of Ukraine were forced to accept Russian citizenship under the threat of losing their property. By doing so, they were legally forced to declare themselves ethnically Russian, because the Russian Federation does not recognize ethnic Ukrainians as a separate people or legal category.
Obtaining a Russian passport was not merely a change of citizenship — it constituted a forced declaration of Russian ethnic identity. From a legal standpoint, ethnic Ukrainians cease to exist as a distinct ethnic community and are reclassified as ethnic Russians.
Under the Constitution of Ukraine (Article 13), land, subsoil, natural resources, and even atmospheric air are collectively owned by the Ukrainian people. The corresponding proprietary rights belong to the Ukrainian people, but not to the state. This makes Ukraine unique among post-Soviet and European countries, as collective ownership is legally assigned to the Ukrainian people in the collective legal sense.
But under Russian law, by contrast, such collective ownership by the people does not exist. These assets belong to the state. Consequently, once ethnic Ukrainians are legally reclassified as Russians and become subject to Russian jurisdiction, they no longer possess collective proprietary rights to the territories from which they are relocated. In legal terms, their relocation no longer constitutes the dispossession of a people from its collective property, because such collective proprietary rights do not exist under Russian law.
Given that, on 4 October 2022, the Russian Federation adopted Federal Constitutional Laws No. 5-ФКЗ, No. 6-ФКЗ, No. 7-ФКЗ, and No. 8-ФКЗ, incorporating the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions into the Russian Federation and amending Article 65 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation to include them as constituent entities.
As a consequence, Russian federal legislation became applicable to those territories under Russian law.
Additionally, Federal Law No. 459-ФЗ of 30 December 2021, amending Federal Law No. 68-ФЗ “On the Protection of the Population and Territories from Natural and Technogenic Emergencies,” introduced mandatory evacuation requirements and expanded the powers of state authorities to order evacuation measures in the event of natural or technogenic emergencies.
Accordingly, once the statutory legal grounds for evacuation are established under Russian law, compulsory evacuation measures may be implemented in those occupied territories. Therefore, once that legal reclassification has taken place, only a legal pretext would be required to justify their relocation.
Moreover, individuals residing in the occupied territories are physically unable to access territory under the control of Ukraine, as no humanitarian evacuation corridors currently exist. Furthermore, the establishment of humanitarian evacuation corridors does not, for unknown reasons, form part of the negotiating agenda of either the Russian Federation or Ukraine.
As can be seen from the video published above, a corresponding narrative is already being promoted in the public space of the Russian Federation, according to which, under the pretext that civilians can no longer continue living in the combat zone, it is proposed to organize the resettlement of 200,000–300,000 residents of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions to other regions of Russia, in particular to the Russian Far East, the Urals, and the Volga region, with their subsequent distribution across the country for permanent residence.
In Mariupol alone, approximately half a million people lived in peacetime, while Donetsk alone had a population of around one million. Even taking into account the mass evacuation, these are territories where nearly ten million people lived before the war and where millions continue to retain ownership rights to their homes, land, and other property. Against this background, an estimate of only 200,000–300,000 people creates the false impression that the true scale and consequences of such forced evacuation are limited to that number, despite the fact that the affected territories were home to millions of people.
However, this would not be legally classified as either forced assimilation or deportation, since, as explained above, even Ukraine does not recognize the existence of ethnic Ukrainians as a separate legal category, and within the jurisdiction of Ukraine, Ukrainians exist exclusively in the legal status of citizens, but not in the legal status of the Ukrainian People.
Legally, this would be regarded as the relocation of a Russian ethnic group rather than the mass deportation of ethnic Ukrainians or of the Ukrainian people in its civic sense, since even the legal provision under which the citizens of Ukraine were recognized as the Ukrainian people was eliminated by Law No. 3354 in 2023, which removed the Preamble to the Constitution of Ukraine from legal effect as a rule of law.
As explained above, by accepting citizenship of the Russian Federation under the threat of losing their property, each Ukrainian would ostensibly have “voluntarily” agreed to be recognized as Russian in the ethnic sense.
The fundamental issue is that the forced assimilation of ethnic Ukrainians into the Russian ethnic group involves both Ukraine and the Russian Federation. During the Russian invasion, Ukraine intentionally excluded ethnic Ukrainians from the composition of the Ukrainian people, subsequently refused to recognize them as a distinct legal category or grant them legal status, while the Russian Federation simultaneously asserted the legal position that they are Russians.
The European Union, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, the Republic of South Africa, and other states also participate in this by denying citizens of Ukraine refugee status under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and placing them exclusively under the Temporary Protection mechanism in order to avoid the official recording of their ethnic identity.
Because the refugee status determination procedure requires the establishment and official documentation of an applicant’s ethnic identity, whereas the Temporary Protection mechanism does not, this practice leaves the ethnic identity of ethnic Ukrainians legally undocumented.
This constitutes global aiding and abetting of the forced assimilation of ethnic Ukrainians into the Russian ethnic group, thereby creating the conditions for their future mass deportation from any part of the world to the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation without any formal violation of international law.
Thus, in addition to serving as an ideal mechanism for concealing war crimes and the testimony of millions of witnesses, Temporary Protection also functions as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and ethnic destruction, in the implementation of which all parties participate.
No people in history has ever experienced such a profound destruction of its ethnic identity as that being experienced today by ethnic Ukrainians, as a nation of forty million people is institutionally transformed from a distinct nationality possessing the right to its own land, sovereignty, state authority, and free will into a radical ideology attributed to the citizens of a neighboring state.
This is a closed cycle of absolute destruction in which the entire world is taking part.
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