Prison of nations: Who lives well in Russia?

While the active phase of hostilities in Ukraine continues, and the Ukrainian military defends the Ukrainian people's right to exist at the cost of incredible efforts and their own lives, many capitals are increasingly calling not only "not to humiliate Russia," but also to restore access to global markets.

Yevgeniya Gaber,

The desire to protect the countries of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, whose populations are least protected from the threat of famine, the food crisis, and its socio-political consequences, is often the reason for such liberalism toward the aggressor country.

Typically, in the information space, these arguments are accompanied by criticism of the cynical "imperialist West" and accusations against "great powers" that act solely in their interests, 

Simultaneously, Russia is portrayed as a romanticised "defender of the masses," a regional leader fighting against the sole dominance of the United States and the G7 countries.

The most interesting part of this detached from reality discussion of Russia as the saviour of all the "unjustly offended" in the struggle against Western capitalism is that Moscow is defended by countries that should be the first to condemn its crimes against its own "popular masses."

Deportations, genocides, and oppression of Muslim, Turkic, and numerous ethnic and religious minorities living on its territory, in particular. Despite their significant representation not only in the population but also in the country's resource potential and economic development, these groups' involvement in 

political decision-making and the distribution of state budget revenues in Russia remains minimal. 

Thus, in "socially oriented" Russia, basic survival becomes a problem, while national and cultural identity preservation is regarded as a direct threat to the regime.

According to conservative estimates, Russia's Muslim population now exceeds 14.5 million people (10 percent of the total). In many regions of the Russian Federation, Muslim communities represent the vast majority of the population, ranging from Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan (94-98 percent), to Kabardino-Balkaria (70 percent), Karachay-Cherkessia, Bashkortostan, and Tatarstan (52-55 percent ). Russia's nine republics, as well as several other autonomous regions and districts, have a predominantly non-Russian population of a different ethnicity (from Chuvashia and Kalmykia to Thebes and Mari El).

This, however, is not reflected in the expansion of local powers or the formulation of local budgets. Quite the opposite. According to the logic of Russian "federalization," the level of freedom in local decision-making is inversely proportional to the percentage of the population that does not belong to the "title" Russian nation.

Since 2004, direct elections for heads of all federation subjects and heads of executive power at the local level have been cancelled in the Russian Federation. Without getting into the legal weeds, de facto governors are appointed and controlled by the Kremlin.

In addition to permanent additional restrictions on the formation of local authorities, the judiciary, law enforcement agencies, education, and cultural policy remain completely subordinate to the centre. The Russian leadership's 

calls to Ukraine to "protect" the Russian-speaking population and introduce Russian as a second state language is of particular interest in this context.

In multinational Russia, which is home to a large number of non-Russian peoples and ethnic groups, there are not only attempts to legislate multilingualism in the federal Constitution, but any discussions on the right to establish regional languages at the regional level with predominantly non-Russian populations are severely limited.

It is useful to remind the leaders of some countries, who for a long time gladly repeated Russian narratives in an attempt to impose "federalization" on Ukraine as the quickest path to peace, that today the "republics" of the Russian Federation have far less power to form authorities and distribute finances, filling the budget, administrative, personnel, and even humanitarian policy, than most regions in unitary European states. 

Including Ukraine, which, although not without problems, is steadily implementing decentralisation reform.

Instead, Russia's federal "subjects" retain their subjectivity solely on paper and in the right to report on the execution of numerous orders from Moscow, even though they lack sufficient resources or allocations from the centre. 

Furthermore, by law, Russia's subsoil, which generates more than half of the federal budget's revenue, belongs to the federation, not the entities on whose territory it is located. As a result, federally managed mining companies fully manage local resources while paying only a small portion of taxes (up to 10%) to local budgets.

So it is not surprising that representatives from the Russian Federation's most resource-rich remote regions, whom the Russian leadership mobilised for the war in Ukraine in the first place, without any training or equipment, are taken 

aback by asphalt roads or lighting in Ukrainian cities and villages. Aside from Moscow and St. Petersburg, such a luxury cannot be expected in Russia.

Unfortunately, the residents of all Russian-occupied and illegally annexed territories face the same fate. The examples of Moscow's war-torn, isolated imperial policies and the bloodless corruption of Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the so-called "People's Republics of the DPR / LPR," and occupied Crimea are the best proof of this.

While Russian troops bring Soviet passports into sovereign Ukraine for distribution to residents of occupied territories, threatening "liberation" from liberties to the entire Russian-speaking population of Eastern and Central Europe, Russia's multilingual regions - like most non-European countries around the world - remain deafeningly silent, each in its language.