russia has announced the launch of a large-scale “Siberia Development Program”, which was launched by Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu. Behind the official facade of “700 billion investments” and promises to create “industrial clusters”, experts see signs not of economic development, but of demographic reshaping and preparation for the mass eviction of residents of the occupied Ukrainian territories, sprotyv.org.ua reported.
The kremlin considers the main driving force for the development of the devastated regions of Siberia and the Far East not to be its own citizens, who are massively leaving the country, but to be the population of the newly occupied Ukrainian regions: Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Luhansk regions.CNR analysts note that Siberia is devastated, young people are fleeing, and mobilization has killed hundreds of thousands of men. Since russians do not want to go “to the taiga for 20 years,” the kremlin has decided to build a new “industrial empire” with the hands of Ukrainians. Currently, the first stage of this hidden mechanism has already been launched in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
According to the CNR sources, local “administrations,” as well as schools, hospitals, and municipal enterprises, are receiving official letters marked “urgent.” The essence of the directives is to “identify employees for possible long-term business trips to the Far East and the Angara-Yenisei macroregion.” Managers are forced to submit lists of “employees not burdened by family circumstances” – a wording that, in essence, identifies the most vulnerable and those who can be most easily deported without significant public resonance. This vague wording is the first step towards “resettlement under state programs,” disguised as a voluntary initiative.
This mechanism almost completely recreates the Soviet practices of “organized recruitment”, through which Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians from Western Ukraine, Chechens and other peoples were forcibly deported in the 1940s and 1950s. The rhetoric has changed: Shoigu speaks of “the development of Siberia”, ideologists romanticize “the transfer of the center of development to the East”.However, the essence of imperial policy remains unchanged: first – passportization, then – “business trips”, then – “state resettlement programs”, and finally – a complete change in the demographic composition of the occupied regions. The “Sibirization” program is not an investment project, but an instrument of soft assimilation and an attempt to tear Ukrainians away from their homes in order to dissolve them in the vastness of the imperial experiment.
