Enemies by kinship: securitizing language and the Russian diaspora in escalated gray zone conflict

Abstract

ABSTRACT Russia’s February 2022 intervention in Ukraine transformed the socioeconomic landscape for the Russian diaspora most profoundly since the Soviet Union’s collapse. Diaspora members have been labeled as a security risk and acting as Moscow’s “agents.” Since Russia’s militarized intervention in Ukraine, Kyiv and the European Union closed their borders with Russia, limiting the movement of people. In turn, this has severed families and longstanding sociocultural and economic ties with the homeland. However, Russia’s militarized intervention should not be treated in isolation from the preceding eight years of hostility with Kyiv and NATO which occurred predominantly in the “gray zone.” This paper explores language policy conditions in Ukraine, Latvia, and Estonia that enabled Russia’s unconventional and militarized interventions. The paper argues that by rejecting ownership of the Russian language and assigning it to Moscow, Kyiv, Riga, and Tallinn weaponized language and empowered Russia’s “compatriots protection” policy. In other words, militarized deterrence against Russia has achieved limited success while the underlying factors enabling Moscow’s interventions remained outside the deterrence discussion. Thus in an era of gray zone conflict, deterrence must incorporate civilianized institution-building mechanisms. To prove this, the paper compares minority language policies and their connection to the intensity of Russia’s intervention.