The fight for Ukraine’s survival is happening in more ways than just on the front. The rich heritage of the country’s language and culture is now under attack from a genocidal Kremlin administration determined to consign it to history. Moscow’s war goal of “denazification” is none other than Russification.

Russia’s invasion of its neighbour has focused the world’s attention on the struggles of Ukraine and its people. Despite this, a similarly brutal conflict in the Ethiopian region of Tigray has failed to attract almost any attention at all.

The Kremlin has stated time and time again that its war in Ukraine will ensure the safety of the country’s Russian speakers. Far from achieving this goal, Moscow’s military threats will only diminish Russian’s status as a global language.

Russia’s political system, officially known as “sovereign democracy” (suverennaia demokratiia), is nothing but a dictatorship along the lines of Lenin and Stalin’s democratic centralism. After all, the main goal is to re-establish a new Russian empire with Putin on the throne. Imperialism is this “new-old” ideology’s proper name.

During the past decade, the term “fascism” has become ubiquitous in Russia’s public discourse. The more that freedom of expression and freedom of the press have been curbed, the more the word “Nazism” has appeared in the country. The preferred form of both terms is that of a slur, namely “fascists” (fashisty) and “Nazis” (natsisty). In the West, this phenomenon has been largely disregarded as a peculiarity of the political language in present-day Russia. Arguably, it appeared to be nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. On February 24th, however, in a totally unprovoked move, the Russian president ordered his armies to invade peaceful Ukraine officially to “denazify” the country. A day later, he gave a bizarre speech in which he denigrated the Ukrainian government as a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis”.

The democratic and free world cannot stand idly by when one of their own is facing a war of destruction waged by a neo-imperialist authoritarian force under false pretences.

Russia’s resurgence on the global stage has been motivated by desires to influence all the post-Soviet space. This is clear with regards to various political and military moves, such as those concerning Ukraine. Yet, actions of this type have not been replicated along any part of Russia’s Asian border.

Today, it may seem like the idea of a communist state is nothing but a relic of the 20th century. Despite this, many countries are still officially communist, mixing rhetoric with market economics in a way that often proves attractive to other states.

In 2008 the Belarusian ministry of information launched a list of extremist materials that are officially banned in the country. Symbolically, the item which opens this list is a CD-ROM disc ostensibly with the recording of a lesson of the Belarusian language. No more details are provided, though some say this entry refers to the 2006 documentary film on the rigged 2006 presidential election. One way or another, what irks the Belarusian government most is the Belarusian language.

The modern Israeli state is deeply rooted in both Central Europe and Ottoman Palestine. It is a place where Central Europe’s dominant ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism meets the post-Ottoman ideology of ethno-confessional nationalism.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the regime in Belarus has progressively made Belarusian into a monoscriptal language, with Cyrillic as its single official script. This Russification and the Union State with Russia appears to be Aljaksandar Łukašenka’s only constant programme for Belarus and its citizenry.

Former Russian Deputy Prime Minister and opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, did not hold Belarusian dictator Aljaksandar Łukašenka in high esteem (in this text we allow the author to use the national Latin script for Belarusian as explained later on in this essay – editor’s note). Nemtsov deemed him to be “a Slavic Qaddafi. He is an outrageous murderer and dictator, a completely insane person. He has nowhere to retreat. It is not worth waiting for a velvet revolution to happen.” No one cared to listen.

The Tigray War is being fought between the proponents of the ethnic federation of Ethiopia (similar to Yugoslavia) and those of the ethnolinguistic nation-state of Tigray (similar to Slovenia or Croatia).

Jurij Koch's Sorbian language novel - The Jewess Hana, has finally been published in German.