11 April, 07:58
While the Kremlin justifies its war with tales of NATO encirclement and “de-Nazification,” and Western observers debate whether Putin’s ambitions are imperial or paranoid, the true logic of Russia’s military campaign is much colder — and far more structural.
It is not about conquering Ukraine. It is about cleansing the empire’s internal periphery.
Russia’s demographers lament a collapsing birth rate, social scientists note record levels of outward migration, and political elites decry the dilution of “Russian identity” amid massive inflows of Central Asian and Caucasian migrants. But few acknowledge the brutal paradox: Moscow is accelerating the disappearance of its colonized peoples, not preserving them.
Thousands of conscripts from the country’s internal colonies — including Yakuts, Buryats, Tatars, Udmurts, Mari, Komi, and others — are being thrown into “meat assaults” in Ukraine. Often with no training, no gear, and no return ticket. They do not die for territory — they die to disappear.
📌 This is not a bug in the system. It’s the system itself.
By exterminating the last remaining generation of aboriginal claimants to Russia’s resource-rich hinterlands, the Kremlin is preparing the ground for a post-national empire — a Eurasian landmass populated by transient, rightless, and disconnected migrants, who will have neither bloodline nor legal basis to demand a share of the land or its wealth.
They are not settlers. They are tenants.
And tenants don’t file claims.
🧩 This is a demographic reset disguised as a patriotic war.
Notably, as protests and resistance spread across Dagestan and parts of the North Caucasus in 2023–2024, the Kremlin scaled down conscription in those regions, turning instead to even more politically voiceless republics — the Arctic North, Siberia, and the Volga basin. The more peripheral, the more expendable.
The goal is not the triumph of a nation-state. It is the quiet liquidation of its foundational peoples, to be replaced by populations that exist on temporary, revocable terms.
This is not de-Nazification.
It is de-aborigenization — of an empire that fears nothing more than those who can say, “This land is ours.”