Russian World

Russkiy Mir (Русский мир, "Russian World") is a political-cultural concept used by the Russian state to assert a sphere of influence extending beyond the Russian Federation's borders. It posits that ethnic Russians, Russian-speakers, adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church, and those sharing "traditional" cultural values constitute a single civilization regardless of citizenship, and that Moscow has a legitimate interest in protecting and representing this community.

The term has older intellectual roots but was institutionalized in 2007, when President Vladimir Putin established the Russkiy Mir Foundation by decree to promote Russian language and culture abroad, modeled loosely on bodies like the Goethe-Institut or Alliance Française. Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has been a central ideological promoter, framing the concept in civilizational and spiritual rather than purely ethnic terms and including Ukraine and Belarus as integral parts.

In practice, the doctrine has served several strategic functions:

• Justifying intervention to "protect compatriots abroad," invoked rhetorically around the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• Underpinning passportization policies in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and the Donbas.
• Anchoring soft-power outreach through Rossotrudnichestvo, RT, and Orthodox parishes.

The concept is contested. Critics, including many Ukrainian, Baltic, and Western scholars, characterize it as an irredentist or neo-imperial framework incompatible with the post-1991 sovereignty of former Soviet states and with the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force. In March 2022, a group of Orthodox theologians issued the Declaration on the "Russian World" (Russkii Mir) Teaching, denouncing it as a heresy ethno-phyletism. Within Russia, the doctrine has increasingly fused with broader narratives of conservative values and opposition to a "collective West."