DANYLIW RESEARCH SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE

Making Ukrainians Russian Again:
Russia’s Paranoid Assimilation in Occupied Ukraine

Why are Ukrainians in the occupied territories pressured to adopt a Russian identity while simultaneously being denied the possibility of becoming fully Russian? Russia officially insists that Ukrainians are the same people while treating them as unreliable outsiders. The paper introduces the concept of paranoid assimilation as a system of domination in which a ruling power compels a subordinate population to adopt the identity of the dominant group while simultaneously suspecting that such assimilation is insincere, incomplete, or strategically performed.

Martin Laryš is Research Deputy Director at the Institute of International Relations Prague, Czechia.