Far East Indigenous Peoples in Russia Face Heavy Losses in Ukraine War

This story written by Vladimir Sevrinovsky and translated by Anastasia Pestova originally appeared on Global Voices on November 22, 2025.

Russia’s Indigenous peoples have the legal right to alternative civilian service and to deferment from mobilization. Yet, proportionally, more men from these small ethnic communities — including the Evenks, the Nanais, and the Nivkhshave, three Indigenous groups of the Far East — have gone to fight in Ukraine than from the Russian population at large.

The Russian Far East is vast, sparsely populated, and significantly distant from Moscow. Singapore, Jakarta, and even the Australian city of Darwin are closer to Vladivostok than the capital of its own country. There are so few people here that the government offers special incentives to attract newcomers. Yet, the region faced some of the most aggressive recruitment campaigns for the war in Ukraine.

According to the independent outlet Mediazona, the Far Eastern Federal District ranks first in Russia in terms of confirmed soldiers killed in combat per capita. A significant portion of these deaths comes from small Indigenous nations that were already at risk of disappearing. As sociologist Guzel Yusupova notes, it is mostly rural residents from vulnerable social groups who are drafted — people who often have little awareness of their legal rights.

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The Evenks

Igor Ivanov, who came from a long line of reindeer herders, trained as a veterinarian and joined a herding brigade. The woman he would eventually marry also lived a nomadic life with the herders. Though women usually do not herd reindeer, they do have a role as chumrabotnitsa or keeper of the chum, a traditional tent. They also tend the fire, make food and comfort the herders.

During World War II, only six people from this district went to the front. According to Natalia Benchik, who heads the district association of Indigenous peoples, Evenk herders were not conscripted then; yet, more than 30 men from the same district have gone to fight in Ukraine. Locals say that about ten of them were mobilized, while the rest signed contracts voluntarily.

The district has tried to support its soldiers. Despite its heavily subsidized budget, residents regularly send reindeer hides to the front, with officials claiming they provided “not only protection from cold and damp in the trenches, but also reliable camouflage against enemy thermal imagers.”

In early 2024, after several previous rejections, Ivanov — “sickly and small,” as his wife Nina described him — was suddenly drafted. Like most men from the area, he was a skilled marksman, but he soon realized that such skills were of little use at the modern front. Nina later recalled him saying, “They fight with drones now. So many are dying; it’s terrible.” Ivanov never came home.

At least eight men from the district who went to war have already been killed, locals say, while six are still missing and one deserted. Villagers who collect aid for those at the front also look after the deserter, as they believe that whether people fight or flee, they are all their own, caught in the midst of hardship and deserving of compassion.

The Nanais

Andrey Beldy, the former head of the Nanai Cultural Center, who resides in the Nanai District of Khabarovsk Krai, speaks bitterly of the officials who, in his words, have brought his people to the brink of “assimilation and complete extinction.”

Today, only about 300 people are fluent in the Nanai language. The cultural initiatives Beldy organizes to preserve national traditions are, at best, ignored by local authorities and at worst, actively obstructed. He runs traditional Nanai games at his own expense. Although he once spoke his native language, he lost it after years spent in a boarding school and only began relearning it in adulthood.

The Autumn 2022 mobilization in Khabarovsk Krai was massive, even by Far Eastern standards. According to human rights defender Pavel Sulyandziga, forty men were drafted from the Nanai village of Dada, which has a total population of around 400.

The Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North in Khabarovsk Krai appealed to the Russian president and other officials to halt mobilization in Indigenous settlements: “When you draft peoples listed in the Red Book, it can be fatal — because you’re calling up the last Oroch, Udege, and Nanai men, who are unlikely to return.”

A few months after speaking with journalists, Beldy buried his son, who was killed in the war.

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The Nivkhs

In the early 2000s, the celebrated novelist and poet Vladimir Sangi, creator of the Nivkh written alphabet, drafted a plan to save his people. He proposed relocating the Nivkhs to small, self-contained settlements — “reservations” modeled after those in the United States — where elders, then numbering only about twenty, could pass on the dying language and traditions to younger generations. There, far from cities and the trap of alcohol, the community might live as their ancestors once did.

The Nivkhs are a Paleo-Asiatic people, native to the Amur River basin and Sakhalin Island. Their population of roughly 4,000 has remained nearly unchanged for the past century. Linguists have even found traces of proto-Nivkh in Korean, suggesting that their ancestral range once stretched much farther south.

Their folklore is both striking and surreal: far from warriors being drawn to adventure, Nivkh legends tell of things like a needle, urine and excrement, a dog’s skull, and even a whetstone setting out on heroic quests.

When the Soviet Union introduced mandatory schooling, it tore families apart. Tiny Nivkh settlements had no schools, so children were sent to boarding institutions where speaking their native tongue was forbidden. Many recall the trauma of being stripped of their names, as children were addressed only by numbers.

At the turn of the millennium, various associations that Sangi founded successfully lobbied for legislation protecting Indigenous minorities. Oil and gas companies courted Sakhalin’s Indigenous groups with grants and agreements to develop ancestral lands. Cultural identity became a kind of commodity: funded by corporate money, traditional crafts, festivals, and books flourished in exchange for picturesque images that soothed investors’ consciences.

By the 2020s, the Nivkh language began to reemerge — taught in a few primary schools, offered in optional courses, and even featured in a mobile app with a phrasebook. Yet, only a handful still speak it in daily life.

In 2024, Russia’s Ministry of Justice added 55 organizations founded abroad by representatives of Russia’s Indigenous peoples to its list of extremist groups, labeling them as branches of a fictitious “Anti-Russian Separatist Movement.”

The Autumn 2022 mobilization also reached the Nivkhs. The few remaining civic activists were fragmented, and no one imagined protests like those eventually seen in Dagestan. “The Dagestanis still have spirit,” said one middle-aged Nivkh. “Ours was beaten out of us long ago.”

They say that when people disappear, an entire world disappears with them. If these communities continue to be driven into silence and war, it won’t be only the people who vanish — it will be the smoke in their tents, the names of their rivers, their languages, and their songs.

[VP]

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