China likes and is investing in Ukraine. It is a problem for Russia. The invasion launched in February 2022 was aimed at assimilating people who were allegedly Russian but had been brought up with Ukrainian culture. Such an attitude was first expressed by Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of the Russian Empire from 1906 to 1911, when he was assassinated. He issued circular number 2 in 1910 declaring non-Russian speakers as aliens. This included speakers of Ukrainian who therefore had to be ‘corrected’ and ‘assimilated’.
Ukrainians were apparently unaware of being part of the same nation (‘narod’) as Russians. This explains the Russian eagerness to declare the occupied areas of Ukraine as ‘New Russia’ or ‘Novorossia’ (Новороссия). This is paradoxical since the term Rus’ originally designated the area around Kyiv. There is nothing new about it.
If we follow such logic, it implies that eastern Slavs such as Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians allegedly form a single narod or nation. This fits with the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) the man who coined the term ‘lebensraum’ (‘living space’) employed by Nazi Germany to justify invading neighboring countries. In 1895, he also claimed that “Der Grenzraum ist das Wirkliche, die Grenzlinie ist das Abstraktion davon” (“The borderlands are the reality, the boundary line is an abstraction thereof”). Putin has claimed in 2006 that the ‘borders of Russia have no end’ (‘границы России нигде не заканчиваются’). He is paraphrasing Ratzel’s notion of natural living space and adapting it to the Russian nation.
This is when the paradox kicks in. The Russian diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboyedov had claimed that China was to be admired because of its distance and isolation.
We should take something from the Chinese
Their contempt for what is unknown among strangers.
Хоть у китайцев бы нам несколько занять
Премудрого у них незнанья иноземцев;
(Griboyedov, Woe from Wit, Act 3 Scene 22)
Russia today is promoting the notion of a nation which would logically exclude all populations within the Russian Federation for whom Russian is just a useful but second language. That is almost all of the areas east of the Ural Mountains and many to the Southwest of Russia (towards the Caucasus). Indeed, the invasion has removed many Ukrainian speakers from the areas of occupied eastern Ukraine.
They have been replaced by Chinese workers. An emblematic case are the Karan Quarries (Каранский карьер) just north of Mariupol. They have been closed since 2008. They were reopened and exploited by two Chinese companies (Amma Construction Machinery and Zhongxin Heavy Industry Machinery). The taxes from the Karan Quarries are the most important income of the occupied territory of Donetsk. Yevgeny Solntsev, the head of the Donetsk region occupied by Russia, attended the Russian-Chinese Construction Forum in Harbin in April 2024. It appears that Putin sought ‘ethnic purity’ but instead achieved Chinese investment.
China has already obtained large areas of Russian farmland in the Far East. It has special economic zones in Belarus where Chinese workers may reside extraterritorially. Chinese officers police the streets of Hungary. China has an important role in the Balkans and especially in Serbia. Putin declared Russia a vassal state of China during his homage to Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2023. (see F. Lauritzen, Rhyme and Reason, Venice, 2024). Russia has removed Ukrainians and replaced them with Chinese workers who are above the law.
The notion of 'narod' or 'nation' is collapsing before the might of the Chinese economic annexation of Russia.
The paradox is that both sides of an eventual frozen conflict line in Ukraine will simply be populated by Chinese workers and sustained by Chinese investment.