Within Russia, ethnic minorities are disproportionately suffering the consequences of the war in Ukraine. But Tim Marshall reports this is unlikely to weaken Putin’s grip on power
Geopolitical Hotspot
Hail Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! Once, present, and future President of the Russian Federation. That he will win the 17 March Presidential election is not in question. It is worth watching for the margin of victory, and if there are any protests, especially in the parts of eastern Russia from where he recruits his cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine. However, the victory will be overwhelming, and any protests are likely to be muted.
With most credible opponents in jail, or having fled the country, the list of presidential candidates is limited. The Kremlin always allows the Central Election Commission to register a few names other than Putin, but they are a cypher used to present the façade of democracy.
So, 71-year-old Vladimir Vladimirovich, who has run Russia since 1999, will win another six-year term with upwards of 75 per cent of the votes which are announced. Within a few years, he will be the longest-serving leader since the tsars of the 18th century. There will be media manipulation and votes not counted, but even in a fair election, he would still win. Putin remains popular despite plunging his country into a war in which well over 100,000 of its (often conscripted) troops have been killed and 200,000 wounded.
There are many reasons for this. They include control of the media and ‘rallying around the flag’, but another reason is the proportion of those dying who are from Russia’s ethnic minorities living in remote regions far from the urban centres such as Moscow, St Peterburg, and Yekaterinburg.
There are more than 160 ethnic minority groups in Russia, making up about 19 per cent of the 142 million population. About three-quarters of the total population live in the more temperate regions west of the Urals, and most are ethnic Russians. The majority of the ethnic minority groups are east of the Urals, in Siberia and the Far East. When the Kremlin’s war machine goes looking for military recruits, or on a conscription drive, it targets the ethnic minorities. This reduces possible opposition among the majority population but has a knock-on effect on who dies fighting in Ukraine.
Several reports indicate that those from groups such as the Tuvans, and Buryats, are killed in overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers relative to their population size. For example, the Buryat communities east of Lake Baikal in Siberia are around six per cent of the region’s population but have constituted 25 per cent of the dead and wounded of people from the region fighting in Ukraine.
Last year a paper from the peer reviewed Brill academic publishing house titled ‘Russia’s Ethnic Minority Casualties’ stated: ‘For such Asian ethnicities as Buryats, Tuvans, and Kazakhs, the risk of dying in this war is several times greater than for ethnic Russians.’ In a separate survey, Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service looked at the details of 31,665 named individuals who were killed between February and September 2022. They found that just over 300 were registered from Moscow, a city of 13 million, but 900 were Buryats whose population is only one million. Almost 1,000 of the dead were from the majority Muslim region of Bashkortostan which has a population of four million.
These communities may not know they are so overrepresented. Their towns and villages are poorly educated, remote places with limited access to media sources, which, in any case, are state-controlled. The Republic of Sakha for example, which borders the East Siberian Sea, is the size of India but has an ethnic Turkic population of about one million. Its capital, Yakutsk, is 8,000 kilometres from Moscow.
Even if there are any post-election protests in such regions, the rest of Russia will barely register it. Conscription has not impacted the middle classes in the big cities in the west and to many of them, the concept of ‘Mother Russia’ is stronger than if you are a Russian Kazakh, Tuvan, or Tartar.
After gaining his next term in office Putin may be emboldened to go for another round of conscription and again look east. But such is the scale of poverty and unemployment there that, despite the risks, military service can be considered an economic opportunity. Pay has been increased over the past two years and can be as high as $2.5k a month, which is a huge sum of money in those regions. An added ‘incentive’ is that failure to report for conscription results in passports and/or driving licenses being taken away. Then comes jail time.
The war will go on all year and the regions where the minorities are from will mostly do as they are told. The Kremlin’s imperial attitude towards them is like its stance on Ukraine. They are all, as is Ukraine, considered to be provinces of Russia which must bend to the will of Moscow and its Tsar.
