Manipulation: Oppression of Russian-speaking population

Another subject exploited by the Russian propaganda is the subject of Russian minorities’ oppression. This is often the cornerstone subject of the manipulators and, depending on the level of the audience, the arguments can get more or less sophisticated.

Let’s take a look at the most crude version of the manipulation first, and then, once we’ve dealt with it, let’s work through some more “advanced” arguments. The “crude version” goes like this:

For eight years the Zelenskiy’s regime systematically oppressed Russian-speaking population in Ukraine. The neo-nazi bombed the Russian-speaking population, while denying them their basic rights like speaking their own language.

There’s a lot to cover in this story, so let’s get to it.

“8 years of Zelenskiy’s regime”? #

The “8 years” in question is the period from 2014 to 2022, when Russia “finally decided to intervene”. This lie is primarily aimed at a Western reader, who does not know any details about the faraway land of Ukraine, and will therefore buy any lie and manipulation.

Russian propaganda did not get too lucky with this argument, because a lot of political figures changed during these years, and every time a new person must have been painted evil all over again, from scratch. But thanks to the extremely short memory of a typical reader, this still worked fine.

In fact, during these 8 years, there were two, or even three presidents of Ukraine:

• For a short period of time, the acting head of the state was Oleksandr Turchynov. He was never elected as a president, and remained in power until the next officially elected president took the office.

  

• In 2014 Petro Poroshenko became the next president of Ukraine.

  

  Russian propaganda had to quickly paint the newly elected president’s power as “regime”. Here’s a representative propaganda article from that period. As stated in Wikipedia, the word “regime” is used to imply authoritarianism or dictatorship.

  Being pretty ironic, coming from a country where a whole generation of young people have never seen another president than Vladimir Putin, and some people were born, lived their whole lives, and died during Putin’s cadence, there’s another problem with the “regime” rhetoric – namely the fact that in 2019 Poroshenko lost the democratic elections to a political opponent and simply left his post.

  That’s a very bold move for a dictator. In fact, such a bold move, that I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide if Poroshenko was in fact a dictator, and whether his presidency was in fact a regime.

• In 2019 Volodymyr Zelenskiy took office.

  

  The propaganda machine had to scramble and re-paint the new president to be a “dictator” and his government to be a “regime”. If you are reading this, you know that this effort succeeded, and the incomplete three years became the “8 years of Zelenskiy’s regime”.

This is a very simplified version of the story. Focusing on more political figures and gaining better understanding the political landscape of Ukraine can shed significantly more light on the events, but the scope of the article does not allow me to go much deeper into the subject.

“Bombing Russian-speaking population”? #

The next claim of the propagandists is that the Ukrainian-speaking neo-Nazi government (one of the “regimes” above) systematically oppresses and bombs Russian-speaking population. What’s more, is that the sole reason for bombings are ethnic differences (side note: ironically, another argument of Russian propaganda states that there are no ethnic differences between Russians and Ukrainians, we’ll not go deeper into this claim now).

This time let’s take a look at the map. In Ukraine there is a very significant Russian-speaking part. And while many people have been switching to Ukrainian as a way to distantiate from the Russian aggressors (the many people is a speculation by me, substantiating this is out of scope for this article and does not add value to it in any case), by the time the war started, the map below shows a good representation of the language breakdown in Ukraine.

Let’s compare it with the map of where the so-called “ATO” (anti-terrorist operation, a military operation of Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists) took place.

Comparing these two maps you may notice a few things:

1. [factual observation] The ATO map is significantly smaller than the Russian-speaking population territory.

   You may hypothesise why the neo-nazi were so selective when bombing the Russian-speaking population.

2. [speculative observation] The affected regions of Ukraine conveniently lie on the border with Russia.

   Officially, Russia has not helped the separatist regions of Ukraine, but both affected regions are adjacent to the Russian border. You can almost say (very speculatively) that the affected regions are within artillery shot distance from the Russian border.

There are some more interesting observations that you can make using these maps. I won’t post the materials here and instead will leave a few homework assignments for a curious reader.

• Find photos of Russian-speaking cities before 2022, after 8 years of bombings. You can start with Donetsk, Mariupol, Bakhmut/Artemovsk. Compare them with the photos from 2024.
• Find a list of all villages and cities demolished by the Russian army in 2022+. Find them on the map and superimpose them on top of the language map above. Has Russian army destroyed the cities of “Ukrainian-speaking neo-nazi”? Or the Russian-speaking population they were protecting?
• Russia condemns the way Ukraine deals with separatists. Find some examples of how Russia deals with separatists.

Ban for speaking Russian #

From the logic standpoint, it’s not possible to prove a negative. On the other hand, propagandists do not present any evidence for the ban claim either.

Usually the best evidence is mentioning the law on protecting the functioning of Ukrainian language. As always, it’s best to consult the text in its entirety to make your own judgement.

The law regulates the use of the language in the official state procedures and mass media, and does not regulate the use of the language in everyday or private life. In my personal opinion, this is pretty standard stuff.

In conclusion #

We’ve started with a crude version of a propaganda myth:

For eight years the Zelenskiy’s regime systematically oppressed Russian-speaking population in Ukraine. The neo-nazi bombed the Russian-speaking population, while denying them their basic rights like speaking their own language.

As evident,

• There were no “8 years of Zelenskiy’s regime”
• The military activity map does not align with the Russian-speaking population borders
• There is no substantial evidence of denying the rights of the Russian-speaking population