Ukrainians in Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Ukrainians in Russia have never been a marginal presence. As recently as 2015, more than 5,864,000 people identified as Ukrainian or held Ukrainian citizenship while living inside the Russian Federation, placing them among the eight largest ethnic groups in the country. That figure would swell even further after 2022, when estimates of Ukrainians who had fled into Russia ranged from 3 to 10 million. But the story of Ukrainians in Russia is not a recent one. It begins centuries before census takers ever counted them, in a migration set in motion by a single treaty signed in 1654. How did a diaspora so large take root? What communities did it build? And what happened to those communities when the political ground shifted beneath them?

• 2. Treaty, Clergy, and the 17th Century Influx

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  The Treaty of Pereiaslav of 1654 brought Ukraine into the orbit of the Tsardom of Russia as a protectorate, and a wave of Ukrainians followed almost immediately. The earliest migrants were not soldiers or laborers but scholars, priests, and artists. In 1652, twelve singers directed by Ternopolsky made the journey to Moscow, and thirteen graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium arrived to teach the Moscow gentry. Ukrainian clergy reshaped the Russian Orthodox Church from within. They established the Andreyevsky Monastery, and their influence on Patriarch Nikon contributed directly to the reform policies that produced the Old Believer Raskol, the great schism that divided Russian Christianity for generations. After 1686, when the Metropolia of Kyiv was transferred from Constantinople to Moscow, Ukrainian clerical influence reached its peak. Ukrainian Stephen Yavorsky became Metropolitan of Moscow after Peter I abolished the patriarchal chair, and was followed by Feofan Prokopovich. At one count, 70 of 127 bishops in Russia's Orthodox hierarchy were recent emigres from Kyiv. By 1750, graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium had opened over 125 schools and seminaries across Russian eparchies, and their alumni occupied key posts well into the late 18th century. Under Prokopovich, the Russian Academy of Sciences opened in 1724; it was chaired from 1746 by Ukrainian Kirill Razumovsky. Not all migration was voluntary. Ukrainian cossacks including D. Mhohohrishny, Ivan Samoylovych, and Petro Doroshenko were deported to Moscow for anti-Russian sentiment and later exiled to Siberia, Arkhangelsk, or the Solovetsky Islands. Hetman Pavlo Polubotok died in that exile.

• 3. Peasants, Settlers, and the Frontier

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  Beginning in the 19th century, a different kind of Ukrainian migration reshaped the edges of the Russian Empire. Peasants, many of whom had lived under serfdom until 1861, moved toward the promise of free fertile land on distant frontiers. The earliest wave moved into the Caucasus, settling primarily in the Stavropol and Terek areas; most came from Left-bank Ukraine and Slobozhanshchyna. They kept their traditions, their language, and their distinctive village structures, often becoming the majority in certain settlements. Where Ukrainian and Russian populations mixed, Russification frequently followed. The 1897 Russian Empire Census, the first to record language data at scale, captured the extent of this presence: 1,020,000 Ukrainian speakers in European Russia and 209,000 in Asian Russia, for a total across the empire of more than 22 million. Those census results had direct political consequences. When the borders of the Ukrainian state were drawn in the 20th century, planners consulted the 1897 figures. As a result, the ethnographic extent of 20th-century Ukraine ended up roughly twice the size of the old Cossack Hetmanate that had been absorbed into Russia in the 18th century. Certain mixed territories, including Sloboda and the Donbas, fell between the two states. In the mid-1920s, some territory initially held by the Ukrainian SSR, including the cities of Taganrog and Shakhty in the eastern Donbas, was ceded to the Russian SFSR. The Sumy Oblast was added to the Ukrainian SSR in the same period to partially offset those losses.

• 4. Ukrainian Settlements Across Russia

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  Four distinct Ukrainian settlement zones took shape across Russia, each with its own character and its own name. In the Kuban region, Black Sea Cossacks began colonizing from 1792. By the 1897 census, 47.3% of the Kuban population gave their native language as Little Russian, while 42.6% named Great Russian. Cultural life followed: plays, stories, music, and one of the first political parties in Kuban, the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party, drew on that heritage. During the Russian Civil War, the Kuban Cossack Rada declared Ukrainian the official language and allied with the Ukrainian People's Republic, though the Rada was soon dissolved by the Russian White forces under Denikin. In the 1920s, Bolshevik authorities opened 700 Ukrainian-language schools in Kuban and established a Ukrainian department at the local university. The 1926 census registered nearly a million Ukrainians in the Kuban Okrug alone, representing 62% of the total population. By the 1930s, Ukrainization was halted and reversed; the Soviet Census of 1989 showed 251,198 people in Krasnodar Kray who were born in the Ukrainian SSR. Far to the east, Green Ukraine, known in Ukrainian as Zeleny Klyn, spread across more than one million square kilometers of Far Eastern Siberia near the Amur River and the Pacific Ocean. Ukrainians made up 26% of its population in 1926, and as of the last Russian census, 94,058 people in Primorsky Krai claimed Ukrainian ethnicity, the second-largest ethnic group in that territory. Around Omsk in western Siberia lay Grey Ukraine, or Siry Klyn, where a pre-1914 observer described the bazaars as sounding Ukrainian despite the city's Russian character. A total of 1,604,873 emigrants from Ukraine settled that area before 1914. The 2010 census recorded 77,884 Ukrainians in the Omsk region, making them the third-largest ethnic group there. Yellow Ukraine, or Zholty Klyn, was founded on the middle and lower Volga soon after the Treaty of Pereyaslav of 1659, centered around Saratov, where Ukrainians settled alongside Volga Germans and Mordovians.

• 5. The Soviet Decades and Shifting Numbers

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  Census data from across the Soviet era tells a story of sharp demographic swings. In 1926, nearly 6.9 million people identified as Ukrainian inside Russia, representing 7.41% of the total population. By 1939, that figure had fallen to just over 3.3 million. The 1937 census was discarded entirely and redone as the 1939 census. Through the postwar decades the number hovered around 3.3 to 3.6 million before rising to 4.3 million in 1989 at the close of the Soviet period. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the count dropped again, reaching 2.9 million in 2002, then 1.9 million in 2010, and just 884,007 by the 2021 census, a fraction of 1% of the Russian population. The causes are multiple. Assimilation played a major role: many Ukrainians intermarried with Russians, and children of mixed families were typically recorded as Russian on subsequent censuses. The general population decline in Russia during the 1990s compounded the trend. Labor migration ran in the other direction, with Ukrainians moving to Russia for better wages; by February 2009, about 3.5 million Ukrainian citizens were estimated to be working in the Russian Federation, concentrated in Moscow and the construction industry. The question of religious identity followed a parallel track. Most Ukrainians in Russia worshipped within the Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which arrived with economic migrants from Galicia, reported having only one church building in all of Russia as of 2002.

• 6. Community, Culture, and Diaspora Organization

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  The Ukrainian cultural revival inside Russia began taking organized shape at the end of the 1980s, with the founding of the Slavutych Society in Moscow and the Ukrainian Cultural Centre named after T. Shevchenko in Leningrad. By 1991, more than 20 Ukrainian community organizations existed across the Eastern diaspora; by 1992, over 600 were registered in Russia alone. The term "Eastern Diaspora" entered use in 1992 to distinguish Ukrainians living in the former Soviet states from the older Western diaspora. That eastern community was estimated at roughly 6.8 million, versus 5 million in the west. Regional congresses followed from 1992, organized by Ukrainians from Prymoria, Tyumen Oblast, Siberia, and the Far East. The Union of Ukrainians in Russia was founded in May 1992. In Moscow, a cultural centre on Arbat Street, whose director is appointed by the Ukrainian government, publishes two Ukrainian-language newspapers and runs weekend schools. The poet Taras Shevchenko and composer Dmytro Bortniansky both spent the bulk of their lives in Saint Petersburg, where Ukrainians constitute the largest non-Russian ethnic group according to the 2001 census, at 87,119 people. In the city of Moscow, the same census recorded 253,644 Ukrainians, making them the third-largest ethnic group after Russians and Tatars, with a further 147,808 in the surrounding region. A 2011 poll found that 49% of Ukrainians in Ukraine said they had relatives living in Russia.

• 7. War, Displacement, and the Zelenskyy Decree

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  The Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014 transformed the legal and social position of Ukrainians inside Russia. Starting that year, Ukrainian activists and organisations faced prosecution on political grounds. Amnesty International described the case of filmmaker Oleg Sentsov as a "Stalinist era trial". A Ukrainian library in Moscow was closed and its staff prosecuted. The Ukrainian World Congress was banned. By November 2017, there were 427,240 registered asylum-seekers and refugees from Ukraine in Russia; over 185,000 had received temporary asylum, while fewer than 590 held full refugee status. Most refugees originated from the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and headed toward rural areas in central Russia. Destinations included Karelia, Vorkuta, Magadan Oblast, and Yakutia, with the majority avoiding large cities. The 2022 Russian invasion pushed those numbers far higher. By September 2022, an estimated 2.8 million Ukrainians had arrived in Russia. The UN Human Rights Office stated that there had been credible allegations of forced transfers of unaccompanied children to Russian-occupied territory or to Russia itself. On the 22nd of January 2024, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a presidential decree titled "On areas of the Russian Federation historically populated by Ukrainians", calling on the Ukrainian government to preserve the national identity of Ukrainians in Russia and to counter what it described as misinformation about their history. That decree signals that the question of who Ukrainians in Russia are, and what rights they hold, remains unresolved centuries after the first singers arrived in Moscow in 1652.