Stephen Blank, CEPA / Translation by iPress
Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Stephen Blank notes that the Russian language is gradually losing its position. He emphasizes that the imposition of the Russian language has always been a tool of the Kremlin’s imperial policy: from the tsarist times and Stalin to the current attempts to Russify the occupied territories and ban the Ukrainian language. Meanwhile, Central European and Central Asian countries are increasingly confidently switching to their own languages and English, and Moscow’s attempts to defend the dominance of Russian face growing resistance. The author’s conclusion is unequivocal: despite the bravado of Russian propagandists, the imperial decline of the Russian language has become irreversible.
The Russian culture, particularly the Russian language, is retreating across the entire post-Soviet space. This retreat is a trend that has spanned generations and is linked to numerous socio-economic and political processes, and there is no doubt that it is largely due to the end of the empire, both in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the territories of the former Soviet Union.
The Russian language was losing ground even before the full-scale aggressive war against Ukraine, which began four years ago. Russia’s imperial policy only accelerated this process.
However, recently, this retreat has accelerated particularly in Ukraine, although most adult Ukrainians speak or have spoken Russian, which also belongs to the East Slavic languages. It’s not hard to find the reason for this acceleration.
Russia’s invasion and its ongoing war against Ukraine were and remain a war aimed at national annihilation – an attempt to eradicate the very idea of a separate Ukrainian people and state. Atrocities, war crimes, mass deportations of thousands of children, and the removal of cultural monuments to Russia eloquently confirm this.
Moreover, it is Russia’s official policy to Russify the Ukrainian lands occupied by it so that by 2036, 95% of the population there would have a Russian civic identity – an identity which clearly leaves room only for the Russian language.
The officially declared reason for the 2022 invasion was purportedly to “liberate Russian speakers from years of discrimination and violence based on ethnic and religious grounds by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership.”
This imperial pretext traces back to Peter I and his campaigns in the Balkans and still exists. Ultimately, Stalin used the same thesis – that Poland oppressed its Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian minorities, particularly denying them the right to their native language – as a pretext for invading Poland in 1939 and incorporating the territories of present-day Western Ukraine into the USSR. Subsequently, as under the tsarist regime, any attempts to advocate for the Ukrainian language and nationality faced systemic repression.
Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that all successor states—from Central and Eastern Europe to Central Asia—have switched to education in their native languages and begun encouraging their citizens to learn foreign languages, specifically English. In Central Europe, this process began almost immediately after the democratic revolutions: by 2024, three times as many Czechs spoke conversational English as Russian, and in Poland, the ratio reached 5:1.
It is clear that these trends are intolerable for Russian imperialists like Putin, who publicly declared that Russia was the Soviet Union, meaning that all the national minorities of the USSR were Russian, whether they liked it or not.
Just two months before the invasion of Ukraine, in December 2021, he publicly lamented that the collapse of the USSR meant the demise of historical Russia; an outright falsehood, as the Soviet borders in no way coincided with those of Tsarist Russia.
Putin is, of course, not alone—an entire cohort of sycophants continues to push this thesis. Russia expects its neighbors to limit their own sovereignty as a condition of Russian security—restrictions that obviously extend to their language policy. Similarly, the Russian government, following Stalinist and Tsarist models, banned the teaching of the Ukrainian language even in the occupied territories of Ukraine last year.
Despite this, such policy and advocacy for the primacy of the Russian language abroad, amid Moscow’s suppression of non-Russian languages among its own minorities, increasingly reveal hysteria and strain, especially when Ukraine, in response, began to strip the occupier’s language of its privileged status.
Moscow continues to invest in promoting the Russian language in Central Asia but encounters difficulties. The support of native languages, and in some cases legally enshrining their primacy, is becoming increasingly noticeable in the region. Although proficiency in Russian and its teaching remain widespread, and its significance real, its status weakens as these countries assert their freedom and deepen global ties beyond Russia.
In 2025, when Foreign Minister Lavrov noted that the inscriptions on the Uzbek memorial “Grieving Mother” were in Uzbek and English, but not Russian, it sparked a genuine storm of indignation—this demonstrated the growing commitment to the national language and, at the same time, Uzbekistan’s freedom in choosing language policy.
As Russia’s economic power and foreign influence continue to decline, it is likely that the appeal and relevance of the Russian language will also diminish. However, since Russian elites still perceive Russia as an empire dominating neighboring territories with limited sovereignty, they will not calmly accept the retreat of Russian as the primary means of interethnic and regional communication.
As the war in Ukraine tragically demonstrates, empire remains a typical choice for Russia, and with it, the undeniable primacy of the Russian language. But this war, as well as trends in Central Asia and beyond, also clearly shows that an irreversible imperial decline has already begun.
The Russian language, its proponents claim, may remain powerful, but this power is crumbling.
