Ukraine’s parliament declares ‘Rashism’ national ideology of Russia

Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) has adopted a statement that declares “Rashism” a national ideology of Russia, says Ruslan Stefanchuk, the parliament’s speaker.

The Verkhovna Rada addressed the UN, the European Parliament, PACE, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, NATO, as well as governments and parliaments of other countries, calling on to “support the condemnation of the ideology, the policy, and the practice of ‘Rashism”.

The Ukrainian parliament also called on the international community to condemn the “Rashist” regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin “as criminal” and to take “real measures that will make it possible to hold the military and political leadership of Russia accountable” for the war in Ukraine.

According to the adopted statement, the signs of “rashism” are: "militarism, cult of the leader’s personality and sacralisation of state institutions, self-glorification of the Russian Federation through violent oppression and / or denial of the existence of other ethnicities, the imposition of the Russian language and culture on other peoples, 

sovereign rights of other countries, their territorial integrity, and internationally recognised borders”.

The statement was published on the parliament’s website. It was compiled by committees on humanitarian and information policy, foreign policy and inter-parliamentary cooperation, on the integration of Ukraine into the European Union, and others.

In March, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky considered an e-petition to rename Russia into ‘Muscovy’ in the Ukrainian language and instructed the country’s prime minister Denys Shmyhal to “explore this possibility”.

The petition in question was posted on 23 November 2022 and was signed by 25,000 individuals, enough to be considered by the president. It also suggests that the word “Russian” be replaced with “Muscovian”, and the “Russian Federation” to be referred to as “the Moscow Federation”.