How Russia tried to erase Ukrainian identity

Imagine a world where your past is not your own – where every event, every hero, every city can be erased and replaced with someone else's script.

For Ukraine, this has not been a speculative fiction, but a political practice that it continues to resist. Centuries of Ukrainian history have been rewritten by Russia, which corrupts files, reformats archives, to fit its imperial design.

In late 2025, Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 858(opens in new tab), a technical document outlining the strategic direction of Russian national policy for the next decade. Its language is bureaucratic and simple.

Its implications are not. Under the neutral wording hides a clear objective: the consolidation of Russian identity in the temporarily occupied territories. The decree sets a target – 95% of the population of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine to identify as “Russian” by 2036, as a result of the measures set out in the document.

There is not much innovation in this approach. Imperial Russian and later Soviet policies sought to subsume Ukrainian uniqueness into a broader Russian narrative. In a series exposing Russia’s plans to erase Ukrainian identity, we begin by examining the past.

Rewriting History

Ukrainian statehood and its aspirations for freedom and independence have long been treated in Moscow not as a historical fact, but as a provocation. The Kremlin consistently uses the manipulation of facts (opens in a new tab) and distorts centuries of Ukrainian history, its political development, intellectual life and institutional formation. By portraying Ukraine as a Western “colony” and distorting the history of the Ukrainian state, Moscow tries to control the narrative. The language of “ensuring the protection of historical truth” (opens in a new tab) and “restoring unity in the historical territories of the Russian state” is used to turn aggression into reclamation and destruction into preservation.

This reformulation accelerated after 2014(opens in a new tab), with the notion of Ukraine as an “appendage”(opens in a new tab)” of Russia. Before the annexation of Crimea, the Russian leadership maintained the formula of “fraternal peoples”(opens in a new tab)”: two distinct nations linked by history and culture. After the annexation, the language changed. Gradually, the distinction itself disappeared. Ukrainians and Russians were reformulated not as related nations, but as “one people.”

Ukraine ceased to be divided and became an “integral part of historical Russia.”(opens in a new tab)It took several years for this narrative to evolve, and by 2019 the message that Ukrainians and Ukraine were a “fraternal country” was spreading.(opens in a new tab)”, however divided, the people and the state had disappeared from the Kremlin-led information networks.

According to the Kremlin narrative, any disruption to this “historical reunification” of Ukrainians and Russians is attributed to external interference. What was once described as Western influence is now defined as the intervention of a “collective hostile West,” supposedly imposing “cultural values ​​alien to Russians.”

Historical revisionism thus becomes state policy. The control of territory is accompanied by the control of memory. Archives, textbooks, and public symbols are treated as instruments of governance. The objective is not simply to occupy land, but to redefine belonging.

If history can be rewritten, identity can be recalibrated. And if identity can be recalibrated, the existence of a nation can become temporary.

The Geopost