The Russian tsar is sending Turks to their deaths in Ukraine

The Russia-Ukraine war has become more than a confrontation between two Slavic nations or an example of Moscow’s imperialist expansion. It has turned into what the Kremlin is allegedly using as a demographic purge targeting non-Russian peoples within the country, particularly Turkic and Muslim communities. The grim figures for October alone are presented as evidence of this reality: the Russian army suffered more than 50,000 casualties in a single month, with over 12,000 of those losses reportedly involving young men mobilised from Bashkortostan.

The loss of 12,000 people from a single republic in one month cannot be explained by military necessity or coincidence. It is a deliberate state policy pursued by the Kremlin. While the Putin regime shields young people from Moscow and St Petersburg’s elite circles from the horrors of war, it sends the sons of Turkic and Muslim communities from Russia’s outlying regions – Idel-Ural, the North Caucasus and Siberia – into Ukraine’s meat grinder.

The Russian authorities’ objective is clear: to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, they seek to hold the front line in Ukraine with human shields; on the other, to weaken Turkic and Muslim populations that preserve their national identities, are growing rapidly in demographic terms and could demand federalism within Russia in the future. Villages in Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Chechnya and Dagestan are being deprived of their men. Mothers are losing their sons, and children are growing up without fathers.

History is repeating itself. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Lezgins, Avars, Kumyks, Circassians and other peoples of the Caucasus, who were once drawn into foreign wars under Tsarist Russia and the Bolsheviks, are once again becoming victims of the chauvinistic ambitions of a new “Russian tsar”. This war waged by Moscow is neither the Bashkirs’ war, nor the Tatars’ or the peoples of the Caucasus’ war. No Turkic or Muslim young person is obliged to die on foreign soil for the sake of Russian chauvinism and imperial fantasies.

All Turkic and Muslim peoples living within the Russian Federation must now recognise this bloody game and seriously consider their future. Peoples who have been deprived of rights in their ancestral homelands, whose national languages have been pushed out of schools and whose resources are plundered by Moscow must understand that only one person’s throne is being protected at the cost of their blood. Raising their voices in protest against this slaughter, evading mobilisation and protecting their existence have become matters of life and death – and of national survival – for these peoples.

Ismayil Shahli