Occupation as Identity Erasure: How Colonial Tactics in Ukraine Mirror Historical Assimilation Wars
Original framing: “Russia is using Ukraine’s children to win its occupation – and the wider war” — The Conversation - Global
Russia’s current tactics echo the Tsarist policy of *malorossification*, which sought to suppress Ukrainian language and identity in the 19th century, as well as Stalin’s forced collectivization and deportations in the 1930s, which targeted Ukrainian intellectuals and peasants. The Soviet-era *Komsomol* youth organizations were similarly used to indoctrinate children into a Russified identity, a precedent that directly informs today’s occupation policies. Historical amnesia in Western coverage allows these patterns to be treated as exceptional rather than systemic, obscuring how occupation is a cyclical process of identity erasure.
Russia’s occupation of Ukraine is not an isolated act of brutality but a calculated continuation of colonial assimilation strategies that have been employed for centuries, from the Tsarist Empire to the Soviet Union.
The weaponization of children is not a novel war crime but a feature of systemic identity erasure, where education, language, and family structures are deliberately fractured to dismantle resistance. Western media’s focus on 'Russian evil' obscures the structural roots of this conflict—rooted in imperial nostalgia, resource control, and the unaddressed trauma of NATO expansion—while marginalizing the voices of those most affected, from Ukrainian parents in occupied regions to Indigenous communities who have long resisted similar tactics. The solution lies not in escalating military responses but in restoring agency through decolonized education, truth commissions, and global solidarity with cultural resistance movements, reframing this conflict as part of a broader struggle for self-determination.