Protests in Russia put spotlight on wartime ethnic grievances

NEW YORK - The trial of a minority rights activist in Russia this week sparked one of the biggest outbreaks of social unrest in the country since the start of the war in Ukraine, highlighting the strain the conflict has imposed on Russia’s complex ethnic relations.

Hundreds of protesters clashed with the police on Jan 17 in the provincial town of Baymak, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, after a local court sentenced an advocate for the local Bashkir ethnic minority to four years in prison.

He was convicted of inciting ethnic discord and discrediting the Russian army.

A Russian legal aid group, OVD-Info, said that at least 20 people had been detained and another 20 injured in the protest.

A video published on social media and verified by The New York Times showed protesters throwing snowballs at a wall of police officers in riot gear; other videos showed the police leading some protesters away and protesters exposed to what appeared to be tear gas.

Tensions in Baymak, in the Republic of Bashkortostan region of Russia, flared on Jan 15, after residents gathered outside the courthouse to protest over the trial of the activist, Fail Alsynov.

Alsynov had called for greater cultural and economic autonomy for the predominantly Muslim Bashkir people of Russia’s Ural Mountains.

Alsynov has also criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 mobilisation, which he said had disproportionally affected ethnic minorities like the Bashkirs.

“The smartest, strongest Bashkir men are being put under fire,” Alsynov said on social media in 2023, a post that contributed to his arrest. “This is not our war. Our land has not come under attack.”

The trial of Alsynov has shown how long-running ethnic grievances in the Russian provinces can swiftly assume anti-war undertones, in a potentially explosive mix that the government has demonstrated in Baymak that it will act decisively to prevent.

“The Kremlin is afraid of nationalism and separatism,” said Mr Abbas Gallyamov, an exiled ethnic Bashkir and former speechwriter for President Vladimir Putin of Russia, in a written response to questions.

“Putin and his circle were traumatised by the collapse of the USSR and are worried that Russia will repeat its fate.”

Videos of the protests showed hundreds of security officers in full riot gear clashing with demonstrators outside the courthouse of Baymak, a town of 15,000 people, and local media reported that mobile data access in the area had been restricted.

Several social media accounts that covered the protests have disappeared from platforms popular in Russia this week, and the Russian Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow said on Jan 17 that it had opened a criminal case over the incitement of riots.

OVD-Info, the rights group, said two students from Bashkortostan’s capital, Ufa, were detained Jan 18, seemingly in connection with Alsynov’s case.

The crackdown came despite attempts by the protesters to emphasise that their focus was on supporting Alsynov, rather than criticism of the federal government or calls for greater autonomy.

“We are the people of the Republic of Bashkortostan, a subject of the Russian Federation. We are not extremists,” one Baymak protester said, in a video addressed to President Putin on Jan 15.

The leader of Bashkortostan, Mr Radiy Khabirov, said in a social media post on Jan 18 that his office had worked to charge Alsynov with extremism and to ban his organisation, Bashkort, which had promoted Bashkir language and culture and opposed mining in the region.

“I must protect people from any attempts to weaken interethnic unity,” Mr Khabirov said, in a video posted on his Telegram channel.

In his public war speeches, President Putin has portrayed Russia as a harmonious multi-ethnic society united against what he claims are Western attempts to dismember it. He has lauded ethnic minorities for their contribution to the war and stressed the shared history of the country’s diverse ethnic groups and a common commitment to what he calls “traditional values.”

But President Putin’s use of Russian imperialist rhetoric to justify the war in Ukraine has also empowered once-ostracised far-right movements, leading to an outbreak of xenophobic rhetoric.

Alsynov, the convicted activist, made reference to the Kremlin’s conflicting messages in his social media post about the war in 2023.

President Putin, he wrote, had argued for action because “in Ukraine they are harassing Russian people, they don’t teach the Russian language,” contrasting that stance with what he characterised as mistreatment of the Bashkir language in Bashkortostan. NYTIMES