This text was initially presented as a part of the symposium Decolonising Russia’s War on Ukraine, co-organised by Vlad Vazheyevskyy, Sasha Shestakova, Anna Engelhardt and Michał Murawski. There is a link to the symposium recording here: https://youtu.be/q4M7SFWhQSA

On 9 December 2021—as the buildup of Russian troops for the invasion of Ukraine had been already unfolding for weeks—the filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov delivered an address to the Presidential Human Rights Council, attended virtually by Vladimir Putin. Despite the fact that this council is one of the Russian government’s puppet institutions aimed at concealing its dictatorial character, Sokurov used its platform to deliver a scathing critique of the current condition of the Russian state. Sokurov specifically focused on the federal government’s policies towards the so-called ‘national minorities’.

It is important to note that Sokurov is in no way a Russian dissident. He is a darling of Russian state institutions, and some of his film projects benefited directly from the personal support of Vladimir Putin. Given that, Sokurov’s speech looked even more striking. Speaking in front of Putin, Sokurov was very outspoken about the dismal situation of what is called in Russia ‘inter-ethnic harmony’. He warned about the looming constitutional crisis caused by the increasing hostility between ethnic Russians and the indigenous peoples inhabiting the Russian Federation. Sokurov started his speech with a reference to the plight of the Votians, a Finnic ethnic group that inhabits the Leningrad region and is now close to extinction. But then he proceeded to a more fundamental criticism of national politics in Russia.

He went as far as saying that the peoples of the Russian Federation do not want to live in one state with the Russians anymore. Sokurov even suggested that Russia ‘let the Caucasus go’—which could, to say the least, come as a surprise to Putin, who came to power by brutally subjecting the rebellious Caucasus republics with military force, and who has since then surrounded himself with yes men that only deliver the information that Putin actually wants to hear. At some point during his speech, Sokurov quoted a young man from Dagestan who allegedly told him: ‘When you, Russians, go to war with NATO, we’re not going to be joining you’.

Since then, Sokurov’s Dagestani interlocutor proved to be wrong. When the Russian army went to its imagined war with NATO on Ukraine’s territory, it also included, among many others, the 136^th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, which is permanently based in the city of Buinaksk, Dagestan. The identities of several hundred of its personnel had been exposed online, and they are now accused by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense of perpetrating war crimes against civilians in Ukraine.

This is just one account among growing evidence that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being carried out with the disproportionate involvement of non-Russian ethnic groups. And—long before the Russians decided to fight their war with NATO by sending Dagestanis to Ukraine—this rule had already enraged the minority populations of the Russian Federation up to a boiling point, as was made clear by Sokurov’s speech.

It is of course difficult to independently verify the claims about the disproportionate draft of soldiers that represent indigenous ethnic groups into the invasion of Ukraine, just as it’s difficult to verify most information pertaining to Putin’s regime. Still, some analysts say that even in case this trend is reversed, or effectively denied by Russian propaganda, the damage to the ‘inter-ethnic harmony’ is already done: this disproportionate engagement into the battlefield is already becoming one of the myths of this war among many indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation. The ‘post-truth’ media environment that the Kremlin has been unleashing all over the globe is now engulfing the Russian Federation itself.

In the midst of the fog of war that is shrouding the remnants of Russian ‘inter-ethnic harmony’, there’s one well-established fact that is confirmed and actively promoted by every side of the conflict: the involvement of the personal security unit of the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov in the invasion of Ukraine since its early days. Commonly referred to as the Kadyrovtsy, this unit was wreaking havoc on Kyiv’s satellite towns of Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel, turning these lower-middle-class suburbs of the Ukrainian capital into living hell (the Kadyrovtsy were also allegedly functioning as barrier troops preventing the Russian soldiers from fleeing the battlefield). This unit had also been involved in the blockade of Mariupol.

The very notion that the Russian Federation is using the personal army of the president of Chechnya to terrorise the population of Kyiv’s equivalents to Watford and Slough, or help destroy a city the size of Sheffield—all with the aim to ‘restore the historical unity of brotherly Slavic nations’—may look surreal. Still, I would argue that these developments are fully in line with the internal logic of Russia’s recent history, born out of a brief civil war that raged in the streets of Moscow and some of its provinces in the early 1990s. Even though the open phase of that civil war had been relatively short-lived, it had in fact only morphed into more implicit forms, marked by continuous Russian attempts to export it onto the outside of its own borders, and project it upon its neighbours.

The outbreak of the current Russian civil conflict dates back to the events of October 1993 in Moscow. As a result of a deep constitutional crisis, Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered a military assault on the Russian parliament, killing at least several hundreds of its defenders. But even before these tragic events, the Russian Federation was facing a violent war  in some of its regions, and in some cases, the lines of confrontation were identical to the conflict between President Yeltsin and the Russian parliament. For instance, the government of Chechnya was torn by a similar conflict between an authoritarian president and a corrupt parliament since as early as 1991—that is, since the moment the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian state in its current form had been established. After Yeltsin’s decision to destroy the Russian parliament, the rebel president of Chechnya, Dzhohar Dudayev, applauded him despite their own bitter conflict—precisely because Dudayev himself was also aiming for the destruction of parliamentary politics.

This open phase of violence in the streets of Moscow in 1993 remains a fundamental factor in Russian politics up to the present day. As a result of that conflict, Yeltsin had been able to force through the adoption of an authoritarian Russian constitution with an outsized presidential role—which directly gave birth to Putinism. The early years of Putin are remembered for a brutal military campaign of re-conquering the de facto independent Chechnya, which officially ended with a Russian victory. However, the price of that victory—both financially and politically—was so high that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to claim that as a result of that campaign, Chechnya had actually subjected Moscow to its outsized influence. By technically winning over the Chechen rebels such as Kadyrov, and drawing them to its own side, the Russian Federation had embraced the extreme forms of militarism, religious devotion, and obscurantism that since then became legitimate parts of its own political culture. Chechnya was once again a Russian colony, but Chechen forces had carte blanche to pursue their interests within Russia itself.

The era of Putin can be described as the process of transformation of an open civil conflict into more implicit forms of civil strife. This includes disproportional and ever-increasing police violence towards any forms of political dissent; the mockery of elections and other democratic procedures; and an ever-growing reliance on far-right movements by the Kremlin. But during all these years, there were also more violent ways to deal with the internal strife that was tearing Russian society apart. The Russian government learnt to export its own smouldering civil conflict outside of its own borders. This usually took form of armed interventions into the former Soviet republics, most significantly during the invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014.

This war that was launched in Ukraine in 2014 had many different dimensions. It was of course marked by an outright invasion by Russian secret operatives and the regular army. During its early stages, it also had a dimension of a Ukrainian civil war,  albeit one that was overblown by Russian propaganda. But this logic of civil war actually opens up another dimension in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since 2014, this has also been an open civil conflict within the Russian political nation, with ethnic Russians, Russian-speakers, and Russian citizens fighting each other on the both sides of the war in Ukraine, where they were part of the armed forces on both sides of the frontline, as well as of volunteer battalions on the both sides.

What happened in 2014 was actually a reopening of the explicit phase of the Russian civil war—only this time, it’s been fought on the territory of the neighbouring country. So we shouldn’t be very much surprised when this conflict spills back over into the territory of the Russian Federation at some point in the near future.