the new russian nationalismIt would strongly appear that the Kremlin’s repeated emphasis
during the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict that Ukrainians and
Russians are ‘fraternal peoples’ – a favourite term used to evoke
the idea that these ethnic groups share a common state from
Kievan Rus to the Soviet Union and deserve to stay together
politically – was outweighed by months of the Kremlin’s publicly
demonising Ukraine’s protesters and government as ‘fascist’ and
more generally by the negative coverage of events in Ukraine.
Significantly fewer respondents in 2014 than in 2013 wanted
migrant Ukrainians to be ‘fraternal’ or otherwise related as
family. These findings may actually understate the real rise in
intolerance levels regarding Ukrainians: the NEORUSS survey
questions concerned only Ukrainians who were migrants and at
–10ArmeniansAzerisBelarusiansChechensGeorgiansKazakhsKyrgyzTa jiksUKRAINIANS
JewsRomaChinese0102030405060708090
2013–2014 difference 2014 2013Figure 7.4 Share of respondents who strongly opposed their family
members marrying migrants belonging to ethnic groups other than their
own
Note: ‘Don’t know’ and ‘refuse to answer’ responses have been excluded from the
denominator of the calculations here. The number of ‘don’t knows’ and refusals differed
within only a few percentage points by ethnic group in both years. The proportion of
those who said ethnicity did not matter for marriage was constant and has thus been
omitted from the denominator; respondents who chose that option were not asked their
views for each specific group. In total, these data excluded from the denominator made
up about 28 per cent of the sample in 2013 and about 20 per cent in 2014.