Ukrainians in Russia

The Russian census identified that there were more than 5,864,000 Ukrainians living in Russia in 2015, representing over 4.01% of the total population of the Russian Federation and comprising the eighth-largest ethnic group. On 2022 February there were roughly 3 million Ukrainians who fled to Russia as refugees. Most of them identified as ethnic Russians. The number kept increasing throughout the war. Estimates for Ukrainians fleeing towards Russia range from 3 to 10 million.
In February 2014, there were 2.6 million Ukrainian citizens in the territory of Russia, two-thirds of the labour migrants; however, after Russia annexed Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas, the number was estimated to have risen to 4.5 million.
The Treaty of Pereiaslav of 1654 led to Ukraine becoming a protectorate of the Tsardom of Russia. This resulted in increased Ukrainian immigration to Russia, initially to Sloboda Ukraine but also to the Don lands and the area of the Volga river. There was a significant migration to Moscow, particularly by church activists, priests and monks, scholars and teachers, artists, translators, singers, and merchants. In 1652, twelve singers under the direction of Ternopolsky moved to Moscow, and thirteen graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium moved to teach the Moscow gentry. Many priests and church administrators migrated from Ukraine; in particular, Ukrainian clergy established the Andreyevsky Monastery, which influenced the Russian Orthodox Church, in particular the reform policies of Patriarch Nikon which led to the Old Believer Raskol (English: schism). The influence of Ukrainian clergy continued to grow, especially after 1686, when the Metropolia of Kyiv was transferred from the Patriarch of Constantinople to the Patriarch of Moscow.
After the abolishment of the Patriarch's chair by Peter I, Ukrainian Stephen Yavorsky became Metropolitan of Moscow, followed by Feofan Prokopovich. Five Ukrainians were metropolitans, and 70 of 127 bishops in Russia's Orthodox hierarchy were recent emigres from Kyiv. Students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium began schools and seminaries in many Russian eparchies. By 1750, over 125 such institutions were opened, and their graduates practically controlled the Russian church, obtaining key posts through to the late 18th century. Under Prokopovich, the Russian Academy of Sciences was opened in 1724, which was chaired from 1746 by Ukrainian Kirill Razumovsky.
The Moscow court had a choir established in 1713 with 21 singers from Ukraine. The conductor for a period of time was A. Vedel. In 1741, 44 men, 33 women, and 55 girls were moved to St. Petersburg from Ukraine to sing and entertain. Composer Maksym Berezovsky also worked in St. Petersburg at the time. A significant Ukrainian presence was also seen in the Academy of Arts.
The Ukrainian presence in the Russian Army also grew significantly. The greatest influx happened after the Battle of Poltava in 1709. Large numbers of Ukrainians settled around St. Petersburg and were employed in the building of the city.
A separate category of emigrants were those deported to Moscow by the Russian government for demonstrating anti-Russian sentiment. The deported were brought to Moscow initially for investigation, then exiled to Siberia, Arkhangelsk or the Solovetsky Islands. Among the deported were Ukrainian cossacks including D. Mhohohrishny, Ivan Samoylovych, and Petro Doroshenko. Others include all the family of hetman Ivan Mazepa, A. Vojnarovsky, and those in Mazepa's Cossack forces that returned to Russia. Some were imprisoned in exile for the rest of their lives, such as hetman Pavlo Polubotok, Pavlo Holovaty, P. Hloba and Petro Kalnyshevsky.
Beginning in the 19th century, there was a continuous migration from Belarus, Ukraine and Northern Russia to settle the distant areas of the Russian Empire. The promise of free fertile land was an important factor for many peasants, who until 1861 lived under serfdom. In the colonization of the new lands, a significant contribution was made by ethnic Ukrainians. Initially Ukrainians colonised border territories in the Caucasus. Most of these settlers came from Left-bank Ukraine and Slobozhanshchyna and mainly settled in the Stavropol and Terek areas. Some compact areas of the Don, Volga, and Urals were also settled.
The Ukrainians created large settlements within Russia, becoming the majority in certain centres. They continued fostering their traditions, their language, and their architecture. Their village structure and administration differed somewhat from the Russian population that surrounded them. Where populations were mixed, Russification often took place. The size and geographical area of the Ukrainian settlements were first seen in the course of the Russian Empire Census of 1897, which noted language but not ethnicity. A total of 22,380,551 Ukrainian speakers were recorded, with 1,020,000 Ukrainians in European Russia and 209,000 in Asian Russia.
The first Russian Empire Census, conducted in 1897, gave statistics regarding language use in the Russian Empire according to the administrative borders. Extensive use of Little Russian (and in some cases dominance) was noted in the nine south-western Governorates and the Kuban Oblast. When the future borders of the Ukrainian state were marked, the results of the census were taken into consideration. As a result, the ethnographic borders of Ukraine in the 20th century were twice as large as the Cossack Hetmanate that had been incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th century.
Certain regions had mixed populations made up of both Ukrainian and Russian ethnicities, and various minorities. These included the territory of Sloboda and the Donbas. These territories were between Ukraine and Russia. This left a large community of ethnic Ukrainians on the Russian side of the border. The borders of the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic were largely preserved by the Ukrainian SSR.
In the course of the mid-1920s administrative reforms, some territory initially under the Ukrainian SSR was ceded to the Russian SFSR, such as the Taganrog and Shakhty cities in the eastern Donbas. At the same time, the Ukrainian SSR gained several territories that were amalgamated into the Sumy Oblast in Sloboda region.
The Ukrainian cultural renaissance in Russia began at the end of the 1980s, with the formation of the Slavutych Society in Moscow and the Ukrainian Cultural Centre named after T. Shevchenko in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
In 1991, the Ukraina Society [uk] organized a conference in Kyiv with delegates from the various new Ukrainian community organizations of the Eastern Diaspora. By 1991, over 20 such organizations were in existence. By 1992, 600 organizations were registered in Russia alone. The congress helped to consolidate the efforts of these organizations. From 1992, regional congresses began to take place, organized by the Ukrainian organizations of Prymoria, Tyumen Oblast, Siberia and the Far East. In March 1992, the Union of Ukrainian organizations in Moscow was founded. The Union of Ukrainians in Russia was founded in May 1992.
The term "Eastern Diaspora" has been used since 1992 to describe Ukrainians living in the former USSR, as opposed to the Western Ukrainian Diaspora which was used until then to describe all Ukrainian diaspora outside the Union. The Eastern Diaspora is estimated to number approximately 6.8 million, while the Western Diaspora is estimated to number approximately 5 million.
In February 2009, about 3.5 million Ukrainian citizens were estimated to be working in the Russian Federation, particularly in Moscow and in the construction industry. According to Volodymyr Yelchenko, the Ambassador of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, there were no state schools in Russia with a program for teaching school subjects in the Ukrainian language as of August 2010; he considered "the correction of this situation" as one of his top priorities.
As of 2007, the number of Ukrainian illegal immigrants in Russia has been estimated as being between 3 and 11 million.
In a 2011 poll, 49% of Ukrainians said that they had relatives living in Russia.
During the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014, some Ukrainians living in Russia have complained of being labelled a "Banderite" (follower of Stepan Bandera), even when they are from parts of Ukraine where Stephan Bandera has no considerable support.
Starting from 2014, a number of Ukrainian activists and organisations were prosecuted in Russia based on political grounds. Some notable examples include the case of Oleg Sentsov, which was described by Amnesty International as a "Stalinist era trial", the closure of a Ukrainian library in Moscow and prosecution of the library staff, and a ban of Ukrainian organisations in Russia, such as Ukrainian World Congress.
As of September 2015, there were 2.6 million Ukrainians living in Russia, more than half of them classified as "guest workers". A million more had arrived in the previous eighteen months (although critics have accused the FMS and media of circulating exaggerated figures). About 400,000 had applied for refugee status and almost 300,000 had asked for temporary residence status, with another 600,000 considered to be in breach of migration rules. By November 2017, there were 427,240 applicant asylum-seekers and refugees from Ukraine registered in Russia, over 185,000 of them having received temporary asylum, and fewer than 590 with refugee status. The refugees were from the territories of Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republics taken over by pro-Russian separatists since the Russo-Ukrainian War. Most refugees have headed to rural areas in central Russia. Major destinations for Ukrainian migrants have included Karelia, Vorkuta, Magadan Oblast; oblasts such as Magadan and Yakutia are destinations of a government relocation program since the vast majority avoid big cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, an estimated 2.8 million Ukrainians had arrived in Russia as of September 2022; the UN Human Rights Office stated: "There have been credible allegations of forced transfers of unaccompanied children to Russian occupied territory, or to the Russian Federation itself."
On 22 January 2024 Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, has signed a presidential decree "On areas of the Russian Federation historically populated by Ukrainians", urging the Ukrainian government to take measures to "preserve the national identity of Ukrainians in Russia", "counter misinformation regarding the history and present of Ukrainians in Russia" and "develop relations between Ukrainians and other peoples enslaved by Russia".
The original Black Sea Cossacks colonised the Kuban region from 1792. Following the Caucasus War and the subsequent colonisation of the Circaucasus, the Black Sea Cossacks intermixed with other ethnic groups, including the indigenous Circassian population.
According to the 1897 census, 47.3% of the Kuban population (including extensive latter 19th-century non-Cossack migrants from both Ukraine and Russia) referred to their native language as Little Russian (the official term for the Ukrainian language), while 42.6% referred to their native language as Great Russian. Few оf the cultural production in Kuban from the 1890s until 1914, such as plays, stories and music, were written in the Ukrainian language, and one of the first political parties in Kuban was the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party. During the Russian Civil War, the Kuban Cossack Rada formed a military alliance with the Ukrainian People's Republic and declared Ukrainian to be the official language of the Kuban National Republic. This decision was not supported uniformly by the Cossacks themselves, and soon the Rada itself was dissolved by the Russian White Denikin's Volunteer Army.
In the 1920s, a policy of Decossackization was pursued. At the same time, the Bolshevik authorities supported policies that promoted the Ukrainian language and self-identity, opening 700 Ukrainian-language schools and a Ukrainian department in the local university. Russian historians claim that Cossacks were in this way forcibly Ukrainized, while Ukrainian historians claim that Ukrainization in Kuban merely paralleled Ukrainization in Ukraine itself, where people were being taught in their native language. According to the 1926 census, there were nearly a million Ukrainians registered in the Kuban Okrug alone (or 62% of the total population). During this period many Soviet repressions were tested on the Cossack lands, particularly the Black Boards that led to the Soviet famine of 1932–1934 in the Kuban. Yet by the mid-1930s there was an abrupt policy change of Soviet attitude towards Ukrainians in Russia. In the Kuban, the Ukrainization policy was halted and reversed. In 1936 the Kuban Cossack Chorus was re-formed as were individual Cossack regiments in the Red Army. By the end of the 1930s many Cossacks' descendants chose to identify themselves as Russians. From that time onwards, almost all of the self-identified Ukrainians in the Kuban were non-Cossacks; the Soviet Census of 1989 showed that a total of 251,198 people in Krasnodar Kray (including Adyghe Autonomous Oblast) were born in the Ukrainian SSR. In the 2002 census, the number of people who identified as Ukrainians in the Kuban was recorded to be 151,788. Despite the fact that most of the descendants of Kuban Cossacks identify themselves as Russian nationals. Many elements of their culture originate from Ukraine, such as the Kuban Bandurist music, and the Balachka dialect.
Moscow has had a significant Ukrainian presence since the 17th century. The original Ukrainian settlement bordered Kitai-gorod. No longer having a Ukrainian character, it is today known as Maroseyka (a corruption of Malorusseyka, or Little Russian). During Soviet times the main street, Maroseyka, was named after the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. After Moscow State University was founded in 1755, many students from Ukraine studied there. Many of these students had commenced their studies at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
In the first years after the revolution of 1905, Moscow was one of the major centres of the Ukrainian movement for self-awareness. The monthly magazine Zoria (Зоря, English: Star) was edited by A. Krymsky, and from 1912 to 1917 the Ukrainian cultural and literary magazine Ukrainskaya zhizn was also published there (edited by Symon Petliura). Books in the Ukrainian language were published in Moscow from 1912 and Ukrainian theatrical troupes of M. Kropovnytsky and M. Sadovsky were constantly performing in Moscow.
Moscow's Ukrainians played an active role in opposing the attempted coup in August 1991.
According to the 2001 census, there are 253,644 Ukrainians living in the city of Moscow, making them the third-largest ethnic group in that city after Russians and Tatars. A further 147,808 Ukrainians live in the Moscow region. The Ukrainian community in Moscow operates a cultural centre on Arbat Street, whose head is appointed by the Ukrainian government. It publishes two Ukrainian-language newspapers and has organized Ukrainian-language Saturday and Sunday schools.
When Saint Petersburg was the capital during the Russian Empire era, it attracted people from many nations including Ukraine. The Ukrainian poets Taras Shevchenko and Dmytro Bortniansky spent most of their lives in Saint Petersburg. Ivan Mazepa, carrying out the orders of Peter I, was responsible for sending many Ukrainians to help build St Petersburg.
According to the 2001 census, there are 87,119 Ukrainians living in the city of St Petersburg, where they constitute the largest non-Russian ethnic group. The former mayor, Valentina Matviyenko (née Tyutina), was born in Khmelnytskyi Oblast of western Ukraine and is of Ukrainian ethnicity.
Green Ukraine is often referred to as Zeleny Klyn. This is an area of land settled by Ukrainians which is a part of Far Eastern Siberia, located on the Amur River and the Pacific Ocean. It was named by Ukrainian settlers. The territory consists of over 1,000,000 square kilometres (390,000 sq mi) and had a population of 3.1 million in 1958. Ukrainians made up 26% of the population in 1926. In the last Russian census, 94,058 people in Primorsky Krai claimed Ukrainian ethnicity, making Ukrainians the second-largest ethnic group and largest ethnic minority.
The Ukrainian settlement of Grey Ukraine or Siry Klyn (literally the "grey wedge") developed around the city of Omsk in western Siberia. M. Bondarenko, an emigrant from Poltava province, wrote before World War I: "The city of Omsk looks like a typical Moscovite city, but the bazaar and markets speak Ukrainian". All around the city of Omsk stood Ukrainian villages. The settlement of people beyond the Ural mountains began in the 1860s. There were attempts to form an autonomous Ukrainian region in 1917–1920. Altogether, 1,604,873 emigrants from Ukraine settled the area before 1914. According to the 2010 Russian census, 77,884 people of the Omsk region identified themselves as Ukrainians, making Ukrainians the third-largest ethnic group there after Russians and Kazakhs.
The settlement of Yellow Ukraine, or Zholty Klyn (the Yellow Wedge) was founded soon after the Treaty of Pereyaslav of 1659 as the eastern border of the second Zasechnaya Cherta. Named after the yellow steppes on the middle and lower Volga, the colony co-existed with the Volga Cossacks, and colonists primarily settled around the city of Saratov. In addition to Ukrainians, Volga Germans and Mordovians migrated to Zholty Klyn in large numbers. As of 2014, most of the population is integrated throughout the region, though a few culturally Ukrainian villages remain.
Ukrainians in the Russian Federation represent the third-largest ethnic group after Russians and Tatars. In spite of their relatively high numbers, some Ukrainians in Russia reported unfair treatment and anti-Ukrainian sentiment in the Russian Federation. In November 2010, the High Court of Russia cancelled registration of one of the biggest civic communities of the Ukrainian minority, the "Federal nation-cultural autonomy of the Ukrainians in Russia" (FNCAUR).
A survey, conducted by the independent Russian research centre Levada in February 2019, found that 77% of Ukrainians and 82% of Russians think positively of each other as people.
Statistical information about Ukrainians is included in the census materials of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation which were collected in 1897, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1937, 1939, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1989, 2002 and 2010. Of these, the 1937 census was discarded and begun again as the 1939 census.
In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, attention has been focused on the Eastern Ukrainian diaspora by the Society for relations with Ukrainians outside of Ukraine. Numerous attempts have been made to unite them. The society publishes the journal Zoloti Vorota (Золоті Ворота, named for The Golden Gate of Kyiv) and the magazine Ukrainian Diaspora.
The vast majority of Ukrainians in Russia are adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian clergy had an influential role on Russian Orthodoxy in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Recently, the growing economic migrant population from Galicia have had success in establishing a few Ukrainian Catholic churches, and there are several churches belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate), where Patriarch Filaret agreed to accept breakaway groups that had been excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for breaches of canon law. In 2002, some asserted that Russian bureaucracy imposed on religion has hampered the expansion of these two groups. According to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, their denomination has only one church building in all of Russia.
During the 1990s, the Ukrainian population in Russia noticeably decreased due to a number of factors. The most important one was the general population decline in Russia. At the same time, many economic migrants from Ukraine moved to Russia for better paid jobs and careers. It is estimated that there are as many as 300,000 legally registered migrants. There is negative sentiment toward the bulk of migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia, with Ukrainians relatively trusted by the Russian population. Assimilation has also been a factor in the falling number of Ukrainians; many intermarry with Russians, due to cultural similarities, and their children are counted as Russian on the census. Otherwise, the Ukrainian population has mostly remained stable due to immigration from Ukraine.
University, and ordinary member of St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences