Russia is waging war not only against Ukraine but also against some of its own people. At the forefront of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meat grinder—the macabre metaphor for Russia’s treatment of its own soldiers as expendable human waves—are various ethnic minorities from the poorest parts of Russia. As military recruiters sweep through Russia’s periphery, the war has hollowed out minority communities, while privileged residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg remain relatively untouched.
As Foreign Policy was among the first to report in May 2022, non-Russian regions such as Buryatia, Dagestan, and Tuva have borne the brunt of the Kremlin’s mobilization drive. Former Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj said a few months later that Russia had turned its Mongolic ethnic groups—Buryats, Tuvans, and Kalmyks—into “nothing more than cannon fodder.”
After more than three years of war, little has changed. “Russia’s recruitment of soldiers to fight in its war in Ukraine has disproportionately drawn from the country’s Indigenous peoples,” Izabella Tabarovsky, a fellow at the Wilson Center, wrote in March. Citing a Buryat advocacy group, she writes that at least 2,470 inhabitants of Buryatia, a so-called ethnic republic in Russia’s Far East, had been killed in action in Ukraine by that time. The figure, likely an undercount, includes both ethnic Buryats and Russians and equates to 27 times the death rate among Moscow residents. The Buryat minority is thus among the hardest hit by Putin’s war.
Such discrimination by ethnicity is no accident. Like many multinational states, Russia favors some ethnic groups over others. Imperial Russia favored Russian and Baltic German elites. The Soviet Union favored Russians, other Slavs, and, at least for a time, Jews. Despite paper guarantees of equality, Moscow today unabashedly favors ethnic Russians and fetishizes what it considers the Russian people’s divinely ordained civilizational mission. Among the ethnic Russian population, discriminatory and often openly racist attitudes toward Indigenous people complement state policy.
The Kremlin’s blatant mistreatment and outright exploitation of minorities is ultimately likely to backfire. Russia’s ethnic minorities have long memories of the brutal conquest of their ancestors by imperial Russia, their second-class status in the Soviet Union, and the horrific violence perpetrated against them up to and including Russia’s genocidal suppression of Chechnya’s revolt in the 1990s and early 2000s. These groups also know that the natural resources on their ancestral territories, including nearly all of Russia’s oil and gas, are funding the war that is killing their sons. Although the war economy—in particular, soldiers’ sign-up bonuses, salaries, and lavish death benefits to relatives—has led to an uptick in living standards for some of Russia’s most impoverished regions, these same inequalities threaten to reignite and possibly threaten the Russian state once the war ends.
Russia, like the Soviet Union and the czarist empire before it, is an empire—a political system with a dominant ethnic core and subordinate ethnic peripheries that were subjugated and colonized. The history of empires teaches us two things: First, all empires eventually fall, and second, modern empires are especially brittle because they need to contend with the disruptive forces of nationalism and globalization. The desire for a nation-state of one’s own is just about ubiquitous—even if it has rarely manifested itself in today’s Russia, with Chechnya the substantial exception. The democratization of warfare with cheap drones and plentiful guns makes resistance easier. Digital communications undermine centralized control. And Russia’s colonial war in Ukraine, unabashed imperial nostalgia, and use of minorities as cannon fodder have torn off the empire’s mask.
All of this makes it increasingly likely that Russia will follow the path of the Soviet Union. Surprising most Western analysts at the time, the Soviet empire fractured largely because of non-Russian mobilization against the imperial core. To be sure, Thomas Graham, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has a point when he argues that today’s Russia will not break up, even in defeat: “[N]o country as ethnically homogeneous as Russia—close to 80 per cent ethnically Russian—has disintegrated under internal or external pressure in the modern era.”
But aside from the fact that Russia’s census numbers are contested and likely underestimate minorities, Graham errs when he lumps disintegration with multiethnicity—as if countries that collapse do so only as a result of having multinational populations. Imperial Russia disintegrated because of a failed war and an internal coup; the non-Russian declarations of independence, from Ukraine to the Far East, came after. The United States broke up for a few years in the 1860s not along racial, ethnic, or even religious lines but because of the divisiveness of slavery within the dominant Anglo elite. In sum, states can disintegrate for any number of internal and external reasons. Multiethnicity facilitates state disintegration, but it is not a necessary condition and certainly not a sufficient one.
When colonized subjects mobilize against the imperial core, it is often the effect of systemic decay, not its cause. When destabilizing political and economic conditions enable national or ethnic mobilization, these groups stand a good chance of riding that instability toward independence. Anti-colonial liberation movements, for example, took off only after World War II created the conditions for independence by obliterating France and greatly weakening Britain.
Consider, again, the Soviet Union. Non-Russian popular fronts sprang up under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as an attempt to mobilize the people in support of his reform efforts. The wave of sovereignty declarations that soon followed took place not because communists had suddenly become nationalists but because the rapid diminution of central control and growing systemic chaos encouraged and compelled them to seek refuge in sovereignty. Even the hitherto least independence-minded Soviet republics, such as those of Central Asia, jumped ship to preserve themselves.
That history also shows why it’s misleading to focus on the degree to which the inhabitants of various Russian regions support autonomy or independence today. Attitudes can change quickly—and given the repressive nature of Putin’s fascist regime, silence and passivity make perfect sense for now.
Demographic and economic realities within the regions complicate the picture. A long history of colonization and forced assimilation means that ethnic Russians—and those identifying as such—form majorities in most so-called national republics today. Resource-rich Tatarstan, where the titular Tatars make up less than half the population but sit atop vast oil reserves, is an instructive example. The Tatar population declined by roughly half a million between the 2010 and 2021 censuses to 4.7 million, while native speakers of Tatar have fallen by nearly a quarter, a trend deepened by a reduction of Tatar-language instruction in schools.
But ethnic nationalism is not the only driver of a potential push for autonomy. It could also result from regional elites seeking greater control over local wealth. Given Tatarstan’s vast oil resources and substantial industrial base, local elites have a strong economic basis to challenge Moscow’s extraction of the region’s profits. Regions such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan pay far more into the federal budget than they receive in return, fueling latent resentment toward Moscow.
Food shortages, alcoholism, and crumbling infrastructure reveal the hollow core of Moscow’s claims to prosperity—including in the republics of Sakha and Chukotka, home to the Dolgans, Yukaghirs, and other Indigenous peoples. In Khatanga, one of Russia’s northernmost settlements, residents line up for food flown in by plane that is often expired. Like the Buryats, these Arctic Indigenous communities are among those with the highest casualty rates in the war against Ukraine.
Ethnic targeting of military recruitment is only one element of center-periphery tensions. According to the Moscow Times, regional budgets are collapsing under the weight of war spending and shrinking revenues. In Irkutsk, authorities are slashing education and health care budgets to stay solvent. Teachers face pay cuts, and small businesses have been hit by new taxes to cover widening deficits. The Kremlin’s war machine is draining the very regions that sustain the Russian state. Russia’s 2026 budget will cut funding for 18 of 51 state programs, while spending on police, the National Guard, and security agencies will rise by 13 percent to a record $47 billion.
Russia’s vulnerabilities are mutually reinforcing. An unwinnable war is weakening the civilian economy and overwhelmingly exploiting ethnic minorities and increasingly the ethnic Russian population as well. A weakened economy degrades living standards and reduces the chance of citizens experiencing any outcome of the war as a victory. Finally, real and perceived exploitation ultimately threatens to delegitimize the war and the government pursuing it.
Today’s Russia could easily experience the same centrifugal forces that destroyed the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation contains many so-called national republics—administrative units that, like the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, reflect old ethnic borders and serve as institutional sources of identity and potential self-administration. Many are endowed with substantial resource wealth that is almost entirely extracted by the Kremlin. When the Soviet Union collapsed, a slew of Russian subregions also declared sovereignty, with Chechnya declaring outright independence. At the time, even Graham considered the disintegration of Russia proper a distinct possibility, as he argued in a Columbia University talk attended by one of the authors.
If it comes to a process of disintegration, Chechnya will likely be at the forefront again. It is already all but formally independent, with its strongman ruler, separate army, and adherence to Islamic law. If conditions within Russia take a chaotic turn, perhaps in the aftermath of Putin’s departure, expect Chechnya to jump ship. It could be followed by Dagestan and Ingushetia, which are also predominantly Muslim and non-Russian. As the Jamestown Foundation notes, protests against Russia’s war in Ukraine have been larger in Dagestan than in any other Russian region, largely because the conscription of young men to fight in Ukraine is widely seen as a threat to national identity. In regions such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which have higher percentages of ethnic Russians, tensions are also increasing. All it takes is growing systemic disorder and one or two secessionist regions to take the initiative; others will then feel emboldened to follow suit.
To be clear: None of this suggests that Russia faces an inevitable collapse tomorrow. But the longer an unwinnable war, a weakening economy, and discontent in the periphery continue, the greater the likelihood that the center will lose control. In other words, the likelihood of a breakup will rise the longer Putin stays in power.
The drivers of potential collapse are all internal, just as they were in the late 1980s. Just like then, there is nothing that the West can do to stave it off. Indeed, propping up the repressive Putin regime in hopes of an elusive stability would only worsen Moscow’s relations with its captive regions. Only Russia itself can halt the decay—by removing Putin from power, ending the war, treating ethnic minorities as fully equal citizens, demilitarizing the economy, and redistributing resources. That’s a tall order, but it’s the only way to save Russia from itself.
