"About three million people, mostly young women and children, were deported from the territories occupied by Russia," Snyder writes.

- How at least 200,000, and possibly up to 700,000 children were forcibly taken to Russia.

(For comparison: Nazi Germany during the Second World War deported about 200,000 Polish children for assimilation)".

We bring to your attention the thoughts of an American historian.

"When Vladimir Putin says that Russians and Ukrainians are one nation, he means that Ukrainians will agree to the use of force.

Russian war planning was based on the assumption that Ukrainian identity is something shallow and brought in from outside, and that it can be eradicated with a quick military strike, physically destroying the elites who allegedly rely on foreign countries.

This form of genocide turned out to be impossible, because it was based on erroneous calculations.

Ukrainian self-identification is widespread and deep throughout the population of Ukraine, and people themselves are taking the initiative to help the country win the war.

In this sense, the Ukrainian identity during the war is easier to observe than the Russian one.

Indeed, this war raises the question: what is Russia?

Putin could not answer this question in any positive sense.

If he proposed something, it was to tie the Russian identity to the Ukrainian one, although he did not want that.

Judging by the Russian mass media, Russians now understand themselves mainly as "anti-Ukraine".

As the Nazi legal theorist

Karl Schmidt

and the Russian fascist

Ivan Ilyin

recommended , Russian politics begins with the definition of the enemy.

Here it must be said that such a definition cannot be exact.

In the official Russian rhetoric, Ukraine as an enemy is a repository for everything that scares the propagandists: Nazis, gays, Jews, Nazi gay Jews, etc. Now the most popular idea is that Ukraine is the birthplace of Satanism.

This fits well with Ilyin's teaching.

There is no clear image of Russia among Russian elites.

However, there is a hidden racial idea that can be seen in politics.

Putin shares with his far-right supporters the concern about the demographic situation: they say that soon there won't be enough of us, and there will be too many of them.

Although Russia has not been able to achieve the military goals set by its leaders in Ukraine, it is pursuing an ambitious policy of racial transformation.

And here I do not mean the policy of genocide against Ukraine (although we will see that these two things intersect), but intra-Russian eugenics - an attempt to form a "healthier" Russian people through struggle.

With the beginning of the war and the announcement of mobilization, a significant part of the Russian intelligentsia and the middle class went abroad.

From Putin's point of view, it was a necessary "self-cleansing" during which Russia "spit out" the traitors (his words) like a slur.

During the initial stage of the invasion, and later, among the mobilized, the proportion of ethnic minorities was higher than in the general population.

It also changes the ethnic composition of Russia's population, making it more "Russian".

Third, Russia is now liberating its prisons and sending these people to fight and die in Ukraine.

It is also openly presented as a cleansing of the Russian population.

All these actions reduce the population of the Russian Federation.

But the fourth racial action more than compensates for these losses.

We are talking about the systematic seizure of Ukrainian women and children and their deportation to the territory of Russia.

About three million people, mostly young women and children, were deported from the territories occupied by Russia.

At least 200,000, and possibly up to 700,000 children were forcibly taken to Russia.

(For comparison: Nazi Germany during the Second World War deported about 200,000 Polish children for assimilation).

The logic is that these women will have to marry Russian men, and the children will grow up to be Russian.

The deportation strategy follows the same logic that justified Russia's invasion of Ukraine: that Ukrainians are just white proto-Russians who are unaware of their true identity and can be remade by force.

Deported women and children pass through "filtering camps" where men who are considered hopeless Ukrainians are simply killed.

From the point of view of Ukrainians, this is genocide and the reason why we need to win the war.

From a legal point of view, they are right: although Russian officials continue to brag about how many children Russia has abducted, this practice is clearly defined as genocide by the 1948 convention.

There is a debate about whether Russia is a fascist state.

The eugenic nature of the current war is relevant to this discussion.

For a decade now, Putin has been talking about a world without rules, a world of constant struggle for resources, which will determine (to quote his speech from 2012) who will be the leader and who will become an "outsider" and "inevitably lose their independence."

When Putin announced the annexation of new Ukrainian territories in September 2022, he said that the rules do not apply to Russia, as it is a special civilization.

In this case, he quoted, as he often does, the Russian fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin.

Thus, the definition of Russia remains "empty": it is simply a race that defeats other nations in the struggle for resources, and the struggle begins with racial cleansing.

This seems to be a fascist view of the state of affairs.

In this light, Russia becomes "anti-Ukraine" in another sense as well.

Ukrainian political presentation in the war has nothing to do with race, but is based on civilian self-defense.

While Russian wartime eugenics is based on fear of the future, Ukrainians insist that their highest goal is freedom, in the sense of an open future full of possibilities.