Valeriy Morkva on Russification, Genocide, and Russia’s Imperial War on Ukraine

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/04

Valeriy Morkva is a Ukrainian historian and international relations scholar based in Turkey whose work examines Russian imperial practices toward Ukraine and other neighbouring peoples. Drawing on archival research and his own experience growing up as a Ukrainian in a Russian-speaking region of southern Ukraine, he studies Russification, assimilation, and demographic engineering from the early modern Muscovite expansion to Putin’s contemporary war. His research explores episodes such as the Holodomor, the suppression of Ukrainian language and culture, and the forced transfer of children from occupied territories, situating today’s invasion within centuries of colonial violence and contested historical memory.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Morkva about the long arc of Russian imperial domination over Ukraine, from Muscovy’s conquests and the 1654 Pereiaslav agreement to Soviet policies and Putin’s full-scale invasion. Morkva describes Russification as a centuries-long project of linguistic, cultural, and demographic control, including the Holodomor, structural pressure to abandon Ukrainian, and today’s abduction and re-education of children from occupied territories. He argues these practices meet the legal definition of genocide and form a “strategic imperial demographic policy,” while showing how Russian aggression has united Ukrainians worldwide across political, cultural, and psychological life in Ukraine.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: My first central question is how long this project of Russification—attempts to erase Ukrainian identity or to distort Ukrainian history—has been underway. It goes under different names, but the aim seems to be to present Russian or Soviet history as the only legitimate narrative. How far back does that history go, and what was happening well before the current full-scale war?

Valeriy Morkva: We can start from the mid-17th century, with the first major political integration between parts of Ukraine and Muscovy, usually associated with the Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654. We can then look at 18th-century practices, such as the destruction of Baturyn in 1708, the capital of the Cossack Hetmanate, which was allied with Ivan Mazepa.

In Baturyn, the population was annihilated mainly—men, women, and children—and similar patterns continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. In almost any period of history, we can find examples of pressure, repression, or violence against Ukrainians. How can we explain this? These are expressions of Russian imperial practices and patterns of domination vis-à-vis neighbouring peoples and countries. We cannot speak only about Ukraine; this has been a broader practice applied to various subjects of the Russian Empire.

If we go further back, from the time when Muscovy began expanding and conquering other territories in the mid-16th century—often dated from the capture of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556—we see the first significant conquests in the Volga region.

Ukraine later became an object of Russian imperial expansion, primarily in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the progressive loss of autonomy of the Cossack Hetmanate and the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which brought more Ukrainian lands under Russian rule. What we are dealing with today continues that long trajectory. I work in Turkey, and for many Turks and others abroad who do know where Ukraine is and who Ukrainians are, the situation is often explained in terms of realist international-relations theory: Russia feeling threatened, NATO enlargement, and so on.

Last year, while discussing this, I went to Ankara for a conference on the Holodomor. There I was thinking about this NATO argument. NATO was founded in 1949. But the Russification practices and this demographic war by various means long predate NATO. When we talk about the Holodomor, we are talking about 1932–1933, when millions of Ukrainians died in a famine widely recognized by Ukraine and many scholars as an artificial, politically driven catastrophe. There was no NATO at that time.

We can go back further to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the end of the First World War, and the collapse of the Russian Empire. At that time, Ukraine tried to establish its own state—the Ukrainian People’s Republic and related formations — between 1917 and 1921, but neither the White (anti-Bolshevik) nor the Red (Bolshevik) Russian forces accepted lasting Ukrainian independence. We see several episodes of the Russian-Ukrainian wars in that period.

Throughout history—in the 19th century, in earlier periods, and later in the 20th century—there is a consistent pattern of Russian imperial and then Soviet policies aimed at controlling, assimilating, or suppressing Ukraine and other nations under their rule, including restrictions on the Ukrainian language and culture, deportations, and political terror.

So for Ukrainians, the current full-scale invasion launched in February 2022 was both a shock and, at a deeper historical level, not entirely surprising. No one expected Russia to start such a massive conventional war in the middle of Europe in the 21st century, and every Ukrainian remembers the day it began. I remember that day; it was a profound shock for everyone.

People in Europe may compare the emotional impact to the beginning of the Second World War, which also had consequences for all European countries. Yet from the perspective of Ukrainian history, it is not entirely unexpected. We can find many earlier examples—even in the 20th century—of Russian imperial and Soviet policies directed against Ukrainian statehood, culture, and population.

Jacobsen: What would you consider the starting point?

Morkva: The very early point is the Pereiaslav Rada of 1654. From that moment, all of the subsequent Russian expansion and Russian–Ukrainian interactions began.

This is a vast topic, and I can speak in more detail from my own experience. I grew up in the late Soviet Union, in the 1980s, as a non-Russian living in a Russian-speaking area of southern Ukraine. I think many non-Russians share similar experiences from Soviet times, when you essentially lived in two worlds: the world of your family and the world outside—social spaces, school, and the street.

By the late 1980s, almost all major Ukrainian cities had been successfully Russified, and the Russian language had displaced Ukrainian from nearly all spheres of public life. At best, ethnic Ukrainians developed a kind of bilingualism, in which Ukrainian was used at home (often only when speaking with the older generation), while in the streets, shops, public transportation, workplaces, and in kindergartens/schools/universities, Ukrainians switched to Russian even when speaking among themselves. It created two different worlds, two different realities. That was considered normal at the time. As a child, you saw both worlds, but you felt that Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language were treated as secondary. In contrast, the official language—the language of culture, education, and prestige—was Russian.

My parents, especially my father, were part of the first generation from a Ukrainian village to receive a university education. He already used Russian in official spaces, though he had a Ukrainian accent. His goal was for his child— me to speak Russian without an accent. He chose a Russian-language school for me, and there was no problem with that. I completed most of my school years and later university, speaking Russian fluently without an accent.

At the same time, Ukrainian remained for me the language of my family and my father’s village.

There was a real possibility that I would be Russified as the next generation in our family.

Jacobsen: What about Imperial Russia versus the Soviet Union? How did the character, style, and content of Russification differ? And how did people writing in those times describe the feeling of being Russified?

Morkva: In the 1980s, I was still a child. When the Soviet Union dissolved, I was fourteen. You did not feel “Russified” in the way people did during Stalin’s terror. It was not an overt, violent Russification. It was more a set of practices that had become routine—using Russian in education, administration, and public life.

Later, when I began researching these topics, I learned that in the late 1950s, the Central Committee of the Communist Party adopted a decision concerning the language of education in Ukraine and other Soviet republics. That policy accelerated the shift toward Russian-language schooling and contributed to the long-term structural Russification of the population.

This decision was about giving parents the right to choose the language of education, Ukrainian or Russian, and parents were choosing Russian. It was presented as a democratic choice, as if parents were willing to send their children to Russian-language schools. But why was it so? Because Russian, Ukrainian, and other republican languages— Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh—did not have equal status. Parents like mine, like my father, wanted their children to have better careers and better education. When entering university, you had to use Russian, and you had a better chance of admission and a better job. So it was not an equal choice; it was a choice shaped by linguistic inequality.

It did not feel like harsh oppression, but on the street, on television, the more interesting children’s programs were usually in Russian. Children’s books—there were more interesting options available in Russian. So it gradually shifted from one generation to the next that Russian would dominate, and it was dominating in the 1980s. Even later, in independent Ukraine in the 1990s, the Russification process continued to reproduce itself.

I can share an example. For me, it was interesting, comic, and revealing. At a train station, one person was trying to buy tickets, while another was selling them. Both were obviously Ukrainians. The woman selling tickets had a Ukrainian name on her badge and a Ukrainian accent. They were both speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent. I was standing in line. It was the mid-1990s. I was already a university student in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas region. 

In Donbas, bilingualism continued through the 1990s and 2000s. Now, in the Russian-occupied territories of Donbas, using Ukrainian is dangerous. I would not risk speaking Ukrainian there now. But at that time, it was simply not prestigious. Everyone spoke Russian. When someone spoke Ukrainian, it sounded strange, even if you were Ukrainian and the people around you were Ukrainian.

My university classmates came from villages where they used Ukrainian with their parents. They moved to the city and switched to Russian. This was modern, independent Ukraine in Donbas, eastern Ukraine—my mother is from that part of Ukraine.

So, summarizing what I was saying about Russification: it was steady, not forced. You did not feel direct enforcement—no one said you must or you should. But it was everywhere, and you could not avoid it.

If you tried to avoid using your family’s language, you would look strange in Russian-speaking areas. I cannot speak in detail about western Ukraine, although my father is from there. When I visited our village in western Ukraine, I used Ukrainian with my relatives. My grandfather did not know any Russian.

About the Russian perspective, I always use this example, because it reflects the official Russian position: Ukrainians supposedly do not exist. Ukrainian national identity supposedly does not exist.

When I was already in Turkey, in Ankara, during my master’s studies, we had a Russian professor from St. Petersburg. In front of the class—most of whom were Turkish students and other foreigners—he said, “Valeriy is Russian, but he does not know that he is Russian.” This was a professor who had studied at Cambridge University. It was not an ordinary man from the street, but an educated academic, saying this seriously. That is the starting point of the Russian perspective: we do not exist.

At that moment, I thought about my grandfather, who did not know or speak Russian. By that logic, he was supposedly Russian anyway.

The roots of this war are not about Russia being threatened by NATO or some Western threat. This is a long story rooted in the past, in Russian imperial practices. In the belief that Ukraine should not exist because Ukrainians supposedly do not exist, Ukrainian statehood supposedly does not exist. All Ukrainian territories supposedly belong to Russia. After 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, Russia received new borders that it considers artificial and unjust.

Unfortunately, abroad— and also in Turkey—people know almost nothing about Ukraine. They usually speak only about the conflict between big powers and the balance of power. The United States is portrayed as the primary source of problems, and Russia is often justified, as if it had valid reasons to start its aggression. I have seen this in Turkey, and many people around the world may share that view.

The problem is that Ukraine was silent. During Soviet times, there was almost no opportunity to express the Ukrainian position or the Ukrainian version of history. Sometimes we can even call this war a war about history, about historical narratives that are not just different—they are diametrically opposite. What Russia claims and what Ukrainians would say about that history are entirely different.

Jacobsen: What about the forced transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories? Abduction, attempted re-education. How do you frame this in that more extended history?

Morkva: Abducting children is a dramatic example. This is a new episode of a demographic war against Ukraine. Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territories are transferred to Russia and adopted by Russian families. Under Russian law, their names can be changed, their birthplaces can be rewritten, and their identities can be erased. New Russian identities are created.

What about the parents of those children? Russia claims it is “saving” children from war. Who brought that war? Where are the parents? Russia kills the parents, forcibly separates families, takes children from orphanages, and transfers them to Russian families.

At the beginning of this month, I was in Istanbul for a conference on current global problems. The First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine spoke there and compared these practices with Nazi Germany’s policies during the Second World War, the Lebensborn program. Children in Eastern Europe who were considered “racially fit” were taken to Germany, adopted by German parents, and given German identities.

This policy has two consequences. First, the number of Ukrainians decreases. Second, the number of “new Russians” increases. Russia is using the human demographic potential of Ukraine, as it has for centuries.

Even now, many people of ethnic Ukrainian origin live in Russia. Their names are clearly Ukrainian. You can see these names even inside the Russian government. Yet the official Russian census—taken in 2020—reports Ukrainians as less than one percent of the population, about 0.6 percent.

I can explain how this happens from my own family. My mother is from eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region. There were five children in the family. Most of them married Russians and moved to Russia—often to Siberia—because in Soviet times that meant stable work and better earnings. Their children, my cousins, grew up in those regions. They have a Ukrainian father and a Ukrainian surname, but they grew up entirely in Siberia, in Russia. When I met my cousin again in the 2000s, I saw this transformation clearly.

Before the war, my cousin told me, “I love Russia, I am Russian myself.” His father is Ukrainian. His father’s surname and his own surname are Ukrainian. Under different historical conditions, he would also identify as Ukrainian. But only the Ukrainian surname remained; in every other respect—his mindset, his ideas—he became entirely Russian. When the war started, all my cousins from my mother’s side were living either in the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic,” created by Russia in occupied Ukrainian territory, or inside Russia itself.

This is an example of how assimilation worked in Soviet times, and how it still works. People move with their families to the Far East or the Far North. Their children grow up without any connection to Ukraine or to other ethnic republics. It does not matter whether the families were originally Estonian, Georgian, Kazakh, or any other group. Living in Russia, they become Russified, and their ethnic origin survives only in the surname.

In this way, Russia used the demographic potential of many nations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. People abroad often associate Soviet achievements—such as space exploration and scientific breakthroughs—with Russia alone. But how many Ukrainians worked on those projects? The Soviet Union was treated as equivalent to Russia. When the USSR sent “Russian specialists” to Africa or Asia, many of those engineers were not ethnically Russian at all. They were from every Soviet republic. That demographic potential was used then, and it is still used now. In today’s Russian government, many officials are of Ukrainian origin and were born in Ukraine.

Jacobsen: But they are doubly Russian—very proud nationalists, yes? I spoke with another interviewee who had a hypothesis: anyone perceived by the culture as an outsider, if they want acceptance. They join a nationalist political sphere—especially a public-facing one—that becomes doubly whatever the group demands. They embody the identity even more intensely than people born into it. So a Ukrainian entering Russian nationalist politics becomes “more Russian than the Russians,” partly because their original identity is being wiped from the map. There is something psychologically strange in that desire for acceptance and the need to overperform the adopted identity.

Morkva: That is especially true for Ukrainians, who are Orthodox Christians and linguistically close to Russians. It becomes a matter of choice—choosing to be Russian—and for many people, that option was available.

In the Russian worldview, you always have the option to become Russian. You can join and be part of the larger imperial project. But if you choose to remain Ukrainian, then you are automatically labelled—as Russia uses these terms—as a “fascist.” In Russian newspeak, being Ukrainian and being a fascist are treated as identical. The so-called “denazification,” declared as one of the primary purposes of this war, in fact means de-Ukrainianization and the return of these territories to Russia. That “return” means the destruction of Ukrainian identity, even death. Yes, this is different from a classical genocide focused only on physical extermination.

Jacobsen: With the centuries-long picture you gave—from Imperial Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union to contemporary Russia under Putin—how would you characterize the forced transfer of Ukrainian children, the abductions, and the re-education of those abducted children? Genocide? Ethnocide? Or simply the continuation of a strategic imperial demographic policy? Perhaps all three.

Morkva: All three can apply. In our article and in the work of many scholars studying this issue, we rely on the definition of genocide that includes the transfer of children from one ethnic group to another, followed by re-education and the imposition of a new identity. This is genocide. Genocide does not necessarily mean only physical killing or destruction. An ethnic group can be destroyed in many different ways.

The example of adopted Ukrainian children shows that the Ukrainian nation—the Ukrainian ethnic group—loses its future. This can be even more effective than killing people. It uses the human potential of one group for another by creating “new Russians.” This is why the policy can be accurately described as strategic demographic engineering. It is not one case, not a handful of cases, but a systematic policy.

Russia is improving its demographic situation by increasing the number of people it categorizes as ethnic Russians—especially Slavic-appearing children. It can be compared to Nazi Germany’s search for “Aryan” children with the “necessary features” deemed fit to become Germans. In the Russian view, Ukrainian children are fit to become new Russians.

This deprives the Ukrainian nation of its future and transfers that potential into the Russian nation. All the relevant terms apply here. It is genocide, according to the definition adopted in the late 1940s, which explicitly includes the transfer of children from one group to another. Researchers consistently cite this article. In my view, what makes this especially clear is the policy’s systematic character.

This is not about a couple of people. It is about thousands of children kept there. Even the children who remain with their families are subject to indoctrination through the school system in those occupied territories. A new generation has already grown up in the Russian-occupied regions—Ukrainians, but indoctrinated in schools to hate Ukraine and all Ukrainians, and ready to join the Russian army.

In Russian schools, military training is included. I remember Soviet times. It was also an obligatory subject. They brought you a Kalashnikov rifle, and you needed to know its parts and how to handle it at the age of fourteen or fifteen. It was like that in the Soviet period, and it remains so now.

History classes in the occupied territories are designed to advance the Russian vision of history. I already mentioned that the Russian vision is the refusal to accept the existence of the Ukrainian nation.

I recall a quotation I used in my work here in Turkey, in a recent book about Ukraine. The quotation comes from the Russian General Anton Denikin, a White Army commander, writing in the 1930s. During the Russian Civil War, he fought the Bolsheviks. However, when it came to Ukraine, there was no difference between White Russians and Red Russians—they were still Russians.

Denikin said, more or less, that whatever Russia might be—authoritarian or democratic, whatever its government—Russia would never accept the existence of an independent Ukraine. He wrote this in his memoirs in the 1930s, which I checked. He was living somewhere in Western Europe at the time.

This is not about new circumstances or Russia being “forced” to attack Ukraine in 2022. Look at these quotations and at historical events: the Holodomor, earlier Russian-Ukrainian wars, Denikin’s writings. This is history and a consistent policy already visible a hundred years ago during the First World War—continued in Soviet times, and continuing today.

These genocidal practices—using Ukrainian demographic potential through the Russification of children and forcing Ukrainians in occupied territories to become Russian citizens—are systematic. Suppose you stay in Russian-occupied territory, whether Crimea or eastern Ukraine, you have no option but to become a Russian citizen. Without citizenship, you cannot live there, access social guarantees, or receive any payments. This reminds me of the 1930s in Nazi Germany, when the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. Of course, these are different countries and circumstances, but the principle is the same: without citizenship, you have no rights.

People in Donbas have been forced to take Russian passports. My wife’s family is still there under Russian occupation; my mother-in-law is now a Russian citizen. My classmates and friends living there have also been forced to take Russian passports. My classmates have different views; some support Russia because they are ethnic Russians. Ethnic Russians often justify this aggression and use the standard line pushed by Russian propaganda.

A very old friend of mine from Luhansk wrote to me recently, saying that no one needs the wars that governments are fighting. Ordinary people do not need it—that this is a war of governments, not of people. That is a typical Russian justification, framing Ukraine and Russia as equal parties in this war. But I wrote to him that there is a clear aggressor and an apparent victim, and you cannot place them on equal terms. He did not reply.

Jacobsen: The critical point is that political statements—like the “red line” once invoked by a Western leader about NATO not expanding eastward—do not determine the legal threshold for aggression. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, beginning with Crimea in 2014 and growing in 2022, clearly met the legal definition of the crime of aggression under international law. This was affirmed by United Nations resolutions demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops, the return of occupied territories, and recognition that the invasion violated the UN Charter. Even if one wants to discuss so-called provocations, which is a political argument, it does not alter the legal reality or the moral asymmetry.

In terms of meeting the legal standard for the crime of aggression, that responsibility rests entirely with Russia. Provocative statements from some political leaders in the West certainly exist, and I do not deny that. Western commentary is not monolithic either. However, regarding the legal threshold for aggression, it is clearly on the side of the Russian Federation under the Kremlin and Putin. Of course, you won’t get a response. What else should I ask about? I have been interviewing artists, including at least one fashion designer, both in the diaspora and in Ukraine. Do they also perform an essential role in maintaining Ukrainian historical memory, specifically culture and identity? I mean both the diaspora abroad and those living locally in Ukraine. Artists, fashion designers, cultural activists—do they play a core role in preserving and expressing Ukrainian identity?

Morkva: It is essential. The Ukrainian diaspora represented Ukrainian culture during the Soviet period, mainly when the expression of Ukrainian national culture was heavily restricted. The diaspora played a significant role at the beginning of the 1990s. From my memories, when Ukraine became independent, Ukrainian history was a new subject. It was not taught in Soviet times. We never studied Ukrainian history from a Ukrainian national perspective.

The diaspora contributed greatly to literature. I studied in Luhansk—the same Luhansk that is now the center of Russian occupation—and my university years were spent there at the history faculty. At that time, a Ukrainian-Canadian Center opened in Luhansk. During my five years at university, I could use the library. It helped enormously. I could find books on Ukrainian history there that were unavailable anywhere else in Luhansk. These books were printed abroad, usually in Canada or the United States.

This was also important for my classmates. Regarding the role of Ukrainians abroad today, [Actually, I am abroad also, just thought that the question is specifically about Canadian/North American Ukrainian diaspora, so I said I am not living there (in Canada/US) to see their activities]Ukrainians now live in many countries because of the war, especially across Europe. They make Ukraine more visible and help preserve Ukrainian culture and history. Making Ukraine visible is essential.

Morkva: Staying in Turkey is also part of my life. I never thought I would live in Turkey or work at a Turkish university, but now I do. A couple of years ago, we prepared a book about Ukraine in Turkish, and this is important. It is my contribution, because I myself can be considered part of the Ukrainian diaspora in Turkey. I have met others, and everyone is doing something in their own places. This is positive, but is it enough?

Is it enough or not enough? We still have massive Russian propaganda, strong and very influential, around the world. You can take schoolbooks in Europe—perhaps also in Canada or the United States; I can only guess what children there are taught about Ukraine or Russia. There are examples of schoolbooks that still present the Russian vision, and it remains influential everywhere—in German, in English. Having Ukrainian diaspora communities in these countries is undoubtedly a positive factor for Ukraine. Still, I am not sure whether it is enough.

This is a matter of time. It is a matter of generations. The Russification process and Russian influence are so strong because they are deeply rooted historically in traditions. Even changing the names of Ukrainian cities from Russian spellings to Ukrainian spellings was not completed quickly. “Kiev” is one example.

Jacobsen: Yes, Kyiv. Kharkiv, not Kharkov. I have been doing English subtitling and English dubbing for a Canadian Ukrainian television news station. They cover topics like FPV drones used in modern Ukrainian warfare. One of my Ukrainian friends in Canada often says, “It is not Kiev, it is Kyiv.” I also realized Ukrainians speak from the center of the mouth, while Russians speak more from the top and front. Every language has its own specific pronunciation. I found that fascinating. Kyiv. He gave me much grief over that. All right, I will pronounce it correctly.

So, what else should we cover here? Here is a good one. And ignore “rotten tomatoes”—that is just for me to know what words to remove from the transcript. Where was it? Yes. Some— not all, not most, but some—argue that the Russian Federation should de-imperialize itself for a lasting peace. A Romanian colleague told me the Russian state invaded Romania thirteen times in the last three to four hundred years. Clearly, there has been a long pattern. Based on your expertise in the history of Russification of Ukrainian citizenry—despite Ukrainians fighting in the Soviet armies and in the Imperial Russian armies—there has been service followed by attempts to absorb them culturally. In a religious analogy, it resembles a forced conversion, a conversion at sword or gunpoint. It does not repay loyalty as one might expect.

Given contemporary history and the absence of peace, does the Russian Federation need de-imperialization for lasting peace in Ukraine, Romania, and other neighbouring nations? Is that a straightforward question?

Morkva: Yes. De-imperialization is the keyword here.

The question is whether Russia can truly stop being an empire. At the core of Russian identity and Russian history, we see an empire. Russia was formed as an empire, and it still exists as a de facto empire. It seems impossible to separate Russia from this imperial foundation. For all types of Russian nationalists—imperialists, leftists, rightists, supporters of Stalin, communists, monarchists—Russia is imagined as an empire. Whether Stalinist Russia or monarchical Russia, the imperial idea remains.

Even those who talk about a democratic Russia and view Russia as a nation-state are unable to achieve this transformation. How can Russia become a nation-state? This idea is interesting because if the goal is to make Russia democratic and de-imperialize it, then how could this be done? One approach would be to allow all people to express their national identities fully—similar to how Canadians identify as Canadians while still recognizing distinct nations within the state. Another approach proposed by some Russians who imagine Russia as a democratic nation-state is to erase all internal differences, even on paper: to abolish autonomous republics such as the Caucasian republics, Volga region republics, Yakutia, Tatarstan, and Dagestan. Erase all of these and create a unified nation-state where everyone is simply a Russian citizen, equal in name.

But what would that mean? It would mean the aims of Russian imperialists—assimilation and Russification of ethnic territories—would be realized under democratic rhetoric. Russia was formed as an empire, it exists as an empire, and de-imperialization appears to be wishful thinking. It seems an impossible project.

De-imperializing Russia would require allowing all peoples to determine their own futures, as Chechnya attempted in the 1990s when it declared an independent republic.

Jacobsen: I was going to bring up that example. Chechnya is a good case. When Putin came to power, my understanding—please correct me if I am wrong—is that two significant things happened. First, he moved against the wealthiest men in the country. Second, he invaded Chechnya as a demonstration of power.

Jacobsen: And that, to me, is an imperial attitude. Imperial power is about power in the broadest sense. The very wealthy—the billionaire class—hold financial power, so if someone is asserting imperial-style dominance, they may go after or intimidate people who have any form of power, including financial influence. The second dimension of imperial power is territorial: military imposition onto another territory, as in Chechnya. Those two moves, from the perspective of someone who is not a professional historian, appear to be imperial practices. Is that a fair assessment?

Morkva: Yes, of course.

Jacobsen: In Putin’s Russia, what would you put at the top of the list as the most Tsarist? And what would you put at the top of the list as the most Soviet in his “new Russia”?

Morkva: Contemporary Russia now? Once more, let me make sure I understand. You mean: Imperial Tsarist Russia had defining characteristics, the Soviet Union had defining characteristics, and the contemporary Russian Federation has defining characteristics. What is similar between the current Russian Federation and Tsarist Russia, and what is identical between the current Russian Federation and the Soviet Union?

Jacobsen: Yes, exactly—continuities across the eras.

Morkva: I didn’t initially understand the word “Tsarist” and was thinking about my English. But yes—Imperial Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, and Putin’s Russia. Similarities and comparisons.

One system comes from another. In ideological terms, the Soviet and Tsarist periods were different. The Bolsheviks brought their own ideology, and the Communist Party ruled the country. But all these states—Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and now Putin’s Russia—are expressions of the same fundamental structure: Russia centred on Moscow, functioning as an empire.

Across all periods, we can trace an ideology of Russian imperialism: the idea of the “Third Rome,” the belief in a unique Russian civilizational mission. Russia is imagined as a state that is not ordinary, always having—and should have—a special mission: saving or guiding others. From Ukrainians to Crimean Tatars to Buryats, Russian imperial narratives claim these peoples “joined Russia of their own free will,” not through conquest. This was the narrative in the Russian Empire, in Soviet historiography, and now in Putin’s Russia.

How did Russia become so large, so vast? Official narratives say it was not through conquest, but through voluntary accession—whether in the Caucasus, Ukraine, or Siberia. This is, of course, historically inaccurate, but it remains central to Russian imperial mythology.

Another core feature that continues across Tsarist, Soviet, and Putin-era Russia is anti-Western ideology. In all three periods, the West—Europe, North America, Western political culture—is framed as dangerous to Russia’s existence. Values like democracy, the rule of law, and transparent political relations are portrayed as threats. That continuity runs through Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and today’s Russian Federation.

The relationship between the individual and the state, as it developed in the Western political tradition, is seen as dangerous for Russia. Anti-Western sentiment is a defining characteristic across Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary Russian systems.

In the Western view, people possess human rights and natural rights simply because they are human. Individuals have dignity and inherent freedoms. People create governments and states, not the other way around. The state is accountable to its citizens.

In the Russian case—Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, and Putin’s Russia—the individual is treated as a means for state policy. The person is a part of a larger whole, and the whole is always considered more important than the individual. Human life has never been valued highly in these totalitarian or authoritarian systems. The state absorbs the individual rather than serving them.

If I continue this line of thought, one point stands out: Russia has no democratic tradition in its governance. This is widely recognized by those who study Russian political history. The first Russian ruler elected by the people in a genuinely competitive, democratic election was Boris Yeltsin in 1991. Taking Russian history as a whole, that was the first such moment.

Later elections became increasingly predictable. By the early 2000s—Putin’s second election in 2004, for example—they could no longer be considered democratic. This applies even more strongly to the Medvedev period and all later elections under Putin.

When I was in Moscow during one of the elections—I believe it was 2008, either parliamentary or presidential—I travelled there from Ankara, where my Turkish friend and I were studying. He joked that people in Moscow were “guessing” who would win the election, as if the outcome were already known. That captured the atmosphere perfectly.

Yeltsin’s first election was democratic, but even his second election in 1996 is widely questioned, especially given the Chechen War and his dramatic loss of popularity. He had almost no genuine public support by that point.

So the absence of democratic traditions, the persistent anti-Western stance, and the state’s power over the individual remain defining features for ordinary Russians.

Ordinary Russians take pride in the state itself rather than in their living conditions or ways to improve their lives. They feel proud of a strong, expansive state while being deprived of fundamental rights. If we look at Tsarist Russia, people were serfs until 1861, bought and sold like property. In Soviet times, citizens were also used as instruments of state goals. It did not matter whether it was Stalin’s era or later. In Putin’s Russia, all those being sent to Ukraine are once again tools of the state. This continuity is one of the defining characteristics.

The differences across the eras are mostly in titles. Under the Tsars, the monarch ruled. Under the Soviets, it was the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Elections, in any meaningful sense, were absent. In today’s Russia, Putin holds the title of president, but if he were called “Tsar,” nothing would change. Russia is a “federation” on paper only; in practice, power is centralized entirely in Moscow. These are the common elements across all versions of the Russian state—different forms of the same imperial structure.

Jacobsen: How has the full-scale invasion particularly changed Ukrainian perspectives on the Russian language and culture?

Morkva: This shift began even before the full-scale invasion, after the occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. The war had already started, and people began using Ukrainian more frequently. It may have been a gradual process, but Ukrainians increasingly saw their country as independent from Russia.

When my family and I visited Kyiv around 2016 or 2017, I saw a noticeable change—more people speaking Ukrainian and more Ukrainian flags everywhere. This was before the full-scale invasion. After February 2022, we have not visited Ukraine, but my wife’s sister brought her child to Turkey. He was eight years old when the invasion began and stayed with us for three months. That experience—caring for a child traumatized by war—is our family’s direct encounter with the consequences. As for broader observations inside Ukraine, I can only reflect on what I witnessed during earlier visits.

Morkva: I can observe the changes through conversations with friends who stayed in Ukraine. One of my friends from Luhansk—also from our history faculty—had to move to Kyiv after the Russian aggression began in 2014. Then, when the full-scale invasion started, he said, “Russia is coming for me again.” This feeling is familiar.

That aggression, that constant threat, united people. Especially in the first days, weeks, and months of the full-scale invasion, unity was powerful. I felt it directly when we began the book project about Ukraine here in Turkey. I wrote to Ukrainian scholars, and many people helped us with that book. That aggression united Ukrainians inside and outside Ukraine. They were contributing from their own places: as historians, as police officers, in whatever roles they held.

To put it simply, aggression united Ukrainians. Without it, political debates would have continued—about corruption, about which party was right or wrong. Those debates still exist, but the invasion overshadowed them.

My friend from the Luhansk region—the same one I mentioned earlier—once said that Ukrainians should put a monument to Putin because he united them. He personally supports neither Ukraine nor Russia. He idealizes the Soviet period and says, “I am for the Soviet strong state.” In his view, both sides are wrong. But even he admitted that Putin unintentionally united Ukrainians.

Morkva: As the war continues, people are not as united as in the first days. The beginning was a shock for everyone. It is still shocking to think about how it happened. On that day, I was returning home from the university. My wife called me while I was on a bus here in Turkey and said, “Russia attacked. Russian rockets are striking cities across Ukraine. Russian tanks have entered,” and she named the cities. It felt unbelievable, like a computer game or a film, not something real.

For the first  days and weeks, we were constantly checking the news 24/7, reading everything in every language to understand what was happening. In those days, everyone tried to contribute in some way. My wife immediately said, “Let’s donate to the Ukrainian army. Whatever we can. How else can we help?” Later came the book project about Ukraine in Turkish. The book, titled Ukraine, presents a Ukrainian perspective in Turkish. That was my contribution—what I could do from where I am living now.

Yes, Putin united Ukrainians.

Jacobsen: Any final Ukrainian quotes? A Taras Shevchenko line or something from another historical figure—like an aphorism or phrase of wisdom that captures your view on this war or on Russian imperial history?

Morkva:. In Hrushevsky’s writings, I came across a comparison he made regarding the so-called “brotherly nations,” a claim repeated by Russians both in the past and even today. Talking about the Russian aggression against Ukraine during 1917-1921, Hrushevsky quoted Bible: “And the Lord asked: Cain, where is your brother Abel?”

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time today, Valeriy. I appreciate it.

Morkva: Thank you again. Thank you for inviting me. It was a surprise, of course—Canada is here, Turkey is there—but it happens. [Actually, I do know one Canadian, by the way, from Vancouver. We studied together some twenty years ago in Ankara. Named Mark, very good person. We haven’t talked in a long time, mostly my fault. Work, life… But it would be unethical toward him (sounds as if I do not know any Canadians at all), whether he would ever see it or not.]

Jacobsen: I am a stray Canadian, like a stray cat.

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