Russian culture and, in particular, Russian language use are in retreat across the entire former Soviet space. This retreat is a generational trend associated with many socio-economic-political trends, and there’s no doubt that it has much to do with the end of empire both in Central and Eastern Europe, and across the former Soviet Union.
More recently, however, this retreat has accelerated in Ukraine even though most Ukrainian adults speak or spoke Russian, a language very close to Ukrainian. The cause for this acceleration is not hard to find.
Russia’s invasion and ongoing war against Ukraine was and remains a war of national erasure, an attempt to uproot the very idea of a distinct Ukrainian people and state. The atrocities, war crimes, mass deportation of thousands of children, and the expropriation of cultural artifacts to Russia all testify to that fact.
Indeed, it is formal Russian policy to Russify the lands it now occupies in Ukraine so that 95% of the remaining population has a Russian civic identity by 2036, an identity that clearly has room for only the Russian language.
Ostensibly, the reason for the 2022 invasion was therefore, “liberating Russian-speakers from “years of discrimination and violence on ethnic and religious grounds from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership.”
This pretext for imperialism dates back to Peter the Great in the Balkans and has continued through the present. Indeed, Stalin employed the same idea that Poland had oppressed its Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian minorities, inter alia, denying them their language, as his pretext for invading Poland in 1939, and incorporating what is now Western Ukraine into the USSR. Subsequently, as under Tsarism, attempts to assert the Ukrainian language and nationality were subject to systematic repression.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly unexpected that all the successor states from Central and Eastern Europe to Central Asia have moved to teaching in their own languages and exposing their peoples to foreign languages like English. In Central Europe in particular, this process began almost immediately after the pro-democracy revolutions — by 2024, three times as many Czechs spoke conversational English as spoke Russian; in Poland, the ratio was 5:1.
Obviously, to Russian imperialists like Putin, who is on record as saying that Russia was the Soviet Union, i.e., all the minorities of the USSR were Russians whether they liked it or not, these trends are anathema.
Just two months before invading Ukraine, in December 2021, he publicly lamented that the demise of the USSR was the collapse of historical Russia — a barefaced lie as Soviet borders were hardly Russia’s Tsarist borders.
Putin, of course, is hardly alone as a whole crop of sycophants continues to make this argument. Russia’s neighbors are expected to diminish their sovereignty as a condition of Russian security, a diminution that clearly encompasses their linguistic policies. Likewise, the Russian government, harkening back to Stalinist and Tsarist precedents, last year decreed a ban on teaching Ukrainian even in occupied Ukraine.
Nevertheless, these policies and this advocacy for Russian language preeminence abroad, while Moscow represses non-Russian language use among its own minorities, betray a growing hysteria and shrillness, especially when Ukraine responded with its own measures de-privileging the occupier’s language.
Moscow continues to invest in the dissemination of the Russian language in Central Asia, but is encountering difficulties. Advocacy for — and in some cases legislation privileging native languages — is on the rise regionally. Even though command of and instruction in Russian are widespread and its importance is genuine, its stature is decreasing as these states assert their freedom and growing global linkages beyond Russian.
In 2025, when Foreign Minister Lavrov remarked that the Uzbek memorial “grieving mother” had inscriptions in Uzbek and English but not Russian, there was a storm of controversy, demonstrating the rising attachment to a national language along with Uzbekistan’s freedom of choice in language policy.
As Russian economic power and foreign influence continue to recede, it is likely that the attraction of and relevance of the Russian language will also recede. But since Russian elites still conceive of Russia as an empire presiding over neighboring territories of diminished sovereignty, they will be unable to accept with equanimity the retreat of Russian as the primary vehicle of inter-ethic and regional discourse.
As the war in Ukraine tragically shows, for Russia, empire remains the default option and with it the unchallenged supremacy of the Russian language. But this war, along with trends in Central Asia and elsewhere, also makes clear that an irrevocable imperial sunset has begun.
The Russian language, as its advocates claim, may remain powerful, but that power is crumbling.
Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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