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Russia’s war in Ukraine has displaced a huge number of Ukrainian refugees. Millions of people fled Ukraine, heading to other European countries, although many chose to relocate to some of the country’s safer areas. Russia has been trying to turn this crisis to its advantage. In EU countries, it has been promoting false narratives designed to generate public hostility towards Ukrainian refugees. In the case of Ukrainians relocated at national level, Russian propaganda sought to focus on fueling public unrest and internal tensions.
Ukrainians fleeing the war
Displaced Ukrainians did not become a nationwide phenomenon with the invasion of February 24, 2022, but much earlier. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the onset of the military campaign in Donbas, many Ukrainians chose to flee the war or simply didn’t want to put up with the occupation of Moscow-backed separatist leaders.
In 2021, some 1.5 million people were dislocated across the country. Many Ukrainians moved out of Donbas to the Kyiv oblast. Other popular destinations were Bucha, Irpin, Borodianka and other cities in the Kyiv region, which the Russian army invaded in 2022. Additionally, a lot of people moved to the center of Donbas, from Russian-held separatist areas to territories controlled by the Ukrainian government, particularly in Mariupol.
With the launch of the large-scale invasion in 2022, part of the internally displaced people were forced to find a new home again, ending up either in different parts of Ukraine or abroad, including in Romania.
According to official data, the number of internally displaced people rose from 1.5 to 4.6 million people. In September alone, over 100,000 Ukrainian citizens moved out of military hot zones. The authorities haven’t ruled out the possibility their numbers might actually be much higher. In 2023, the Ukrainian Government provided financial support worth 60 billion UAH (tantamount to 13 billion EUR) to these people.
“Kyiv’s Russophobia”, the narrative fostered by Russians in occupied provinces
Russia has been trying to burn all bridges between the local population and Ukraine. To that end, it has been promoting the false idea that the Ukrainian authorities are Russophobic, an attitude fueled by the West which is reportedly also transparent in the way the state treats Russian-speaking Ukrainians. In recent years, pro-Kremlin media has disseminated several disinformation themes and fake news with a view to showing the public back in Russia and particularly Russian speakers in occupied territories of Ukraine that Kyiv authorities are persecuting the Russian-speaking population. At the same time, Russia has been trying to hamper every effort of the Ukrainian government to retrieve and reintegrate these territories, thus blocking social dialogue channels.
Last summer, for instance, Kremlin-affiliated media wrote that students from Crimea and Donbas will be persecuted in Ukraine, just as internally displaced people, a false narrative debunked by Veridica.
More false narratives soon followed, according to which the Ukrainian army might rid Donbas and Crimea of Russian speakers. The Russian state media wrote about banning the Russian language in Ukraine, about Russian speakers fearing the authorities as well as the delicate situation of Ukrainians still living in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Step by step, the topic of internally displaced people was replaced with more radical narratives about the genocide of Russian speakers in Donbas, a campaign launched by Kyiv and encouraged by the West, while Russia posed as savior, a country liberating Donbas and “breaking the chains” of Russian speakers all across Ukraine.
2022: Moscow tries to turn Ukrainians against each other
After the start of the full-blown war in Ukraine, pro-Kremlin media rekindled false narratives about internally displaced people, which it let simmer towards the end of October 2021, thus trying to encourage residents of war-ravaged territories to relocate not to Ukraine, but rather to Russia.
Publications in Russian-held territories write that internally displaced men are persecuted, sent to the frontline, leaving their women without any form of protection. Moreover, these people are purportedly treated with hostility the moment they reach other areas and are even fined for alleged offenses fabricated by the authorities.
Ukraina.ru, a news portal financed by the Russian government, wrote in an article published in June that internally displaced people are abused in Western Ukraine, whereas humanitarian aid provided by the West and the UN never reaches people who are of Russian origin or speak Russian. The publication claims the dead bodies of many Ukrainians killed in the east as part of the “special military operation” are brought home, and people fail to understand these young men are sent to the frontline to kill Russian speakers. “Each coffin carrying the dead body of a Ukrainian from the west increases the hostility of locals towards other men who have relocated to this part of the country”, the Russian publication writes.
The pro-Kremlin media further writes that internally displaced people want to move to Russia and obtain the Russian citizenship, but they fear talking about it, lest they should be persecuted or massacred in broad daylight by “Ukrainian Nazis”.
The article makes no mention about the Russian speakers who evacuated to Russia, moving from one “filtration center” to another, only to later on seek refuge in Baltic States in EU territory. Many Russian-speakers chose to evacuate to Russia simply because there was no other alternative, otherwise risking being killed by Russian servicemen or the battalions of Chechen leader Kadyrov.
Russia also wants to make Ukrainian readers believe that every Ukrainian citizen relocating from different parts of the country is a separatist. Propaganda themes surrounding this topic reach readers in Ukraine via Telegram channels or Facebook pages. On the other hand, in the case of internally displaced people, messages speak of how hated they are in Western Ukraine, of the West’s support for Nazism, etc.
The grain of truth: Kyiv’s linguistic and media policies
Russia’s narratives focusing on internally displaced people seek to exploit an existing rift at national level ever since Ukraine proclaimed its independence: the clash between the Russian-speaking east and the Ukrainian-speaking west. It’s not just a linguistic fracture: for years, these discrepancies became transparent also in election cycles, the votes of the two regions of Ukraine also reflecting their pro-Western or pro-Russian orientation. Moscow took full advantage of this situation and used its powerful media empire to create/develop a common linguistic/cultural/media space that should keep Ukraine anchored in the so-called Russian World, also in political terms.
Things started to change after 2014, with the invasion of Crimea and the war in Donbas. No one could still pretend Russia was anything but an aggressor and an enemy of Ukraine. In this context, representatives of nationalist movements in Ukraine have repeatedly called on the authorities to toughen language-related legislation, which is exactly what happened starting 2016-2017, when the use of the Russian language got increasingly restricted in education, media, the public sphere or the administration. These measures were implemented to protect Ukraine from Moscow’s cultural and information acts of aggression.
The derussification policy took off after February 24, 2022. Ukrainian-language teaching units addressing Russian speakers were set up in most regional centers in Western Ukraine, a practice that spread to the south as well. Shocked by the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine and destroy cities inhabited by Russian speakers, a lot of internally displaced people stopped speaking Russian and switched to Ukrainian. Not anyone can do that easily, and not everyone is willing to, arguing that being a Russian speaker doesn’t make you a pro-Russian: you can be Ukrainian, you can love your country and fight for it even if you speak Russian. At the opposite end, Ukrainian-speaking nationalists are disgruntled with the fact that the linguistic transition towards Ukrainian is not happening quickly enough, or are simply angry there are people who still haven’t learned the official language of this country, 30 years after the proclamation of independence. Language, therefore, remains a highly sensitive matter.
Fighting an aggressor that challenges its national identity, Ukraine has been trying to reinforce it by means of standardizing policies in the linguistic and cultural fields. Pro-Kremlin media describes Kyiv’s steps as a genuine terror campaign targeting Russian speakers, which justified the invasion. It is a clear attempt from Russia to manipulate public opinion by omitting the main reason behind these policies (Russia’s aggression in 2014, the invasion of 2022). The measures taken by Ukraine to defend against Russia are presented not as a response to, but the cause of “the special military operation”.
At the same time, a great deal of Ukrainian policies seem legitimate in times of war, but are controversial in times of peace, all the more so as Ukraine wants to join the European Union, a community built on multiculturalism and the observance of rights (linguistic rights included) of minority groups.
