Policy Commentary
May 10, 2026
Policy Commentary
Circassian Genocide Recognition
Russia and Empire
On 21 May, Circassians mark the destruction of their homeland. The Circassian Day of Mourning commemorates those killed, expelled, and displaced during the nineteenth-century Russian invasion and destruction of Circassia. For Circassians, this is the memory of a homeland shattered, a people dispersed, and a genocide that remains insufficiently known, insufficiently discussed, and still unrecognised by many states.
Any serious discussion has to begin with knowledge. Many people in Europe, including in policy circles, still have only limited knowledge of what happened to the Circassians. Awareness is essential before recognition. Before the Circassian genocide can become a matter of public discussion, it has to enter the political and historical vocabulary through which Poland and European policy institutions understand Russia.
Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has made the imperial logic of Russian power impossible to ignore any longer. It has made visible again practices long hidden behind the language of “union” and “federation”: invasion, war crimes, crimes against humanity, deportation, forced assimilation, denial, and the erasure of political communities from maps and memory. The Circassian case belongs in this discussion because it shows how Russian imperial power was built not only through military victory, but through ethnic cleansing, depopulation, exile, settlement, denial, and the engineering of collective memory.
For Poland, this is not a distant Caucasian question; it is not a blurred image of imperialism. It belongs to the same political vocabulary through which Poland has long understood Russian power since engaging Russia centuries ago: imperial wars, partitions, deportations, occupation, erasure, resistance, and the refusal to accept imperial legitimacy. Poland does not need to borrow or invent a new conception in order to understand Circassia. Much of that vocabulary already exists in Polish historical memory and manifests in Poland’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire waged a decades-long war against Circassia, destroyed Circassian sovereignty, and ethnically cleansed large parts of the north-eastern Black Sea coast, forcing the majority of Circassians out of their homeland. The result was a transformation of space: Circassian homeland was absorbed into an imperial order; the people of the land were made homeless; memory became politically dangerous for those who remained and painful for those forced into exile. The historical case for describing this destruction as genocide has been developed by scholars of the Caucasus and has informed recognition efforts in Georgia and Ukraine.
Becoming aware of this history, and recognising the genocide that followed, does not change the past. However, in the present, it changes the intellectual conception and therefore the analytical map. It forces policymakers to see Russian power not as a neutral territorial fact, but as the accumulated result of repeated invasion, destruction, deportation, settlement, renaming, and denial. It is precisely here that recognition of the Circassian genocide matters for Europe’s Russia policy: it challenges the habit of reading Russia’s borders, those beyond immediate European Union bordering countries, as natural and its imperial inheritance as normal.
The war has also made parts of the historical Circassian homeland newly visible. The point is not to turn wartime targeting into historical argument. The point is that war has made visible a geography whose prior history is usually absent from strategic discussion. Russian energy and port infrastructure in Krasnodar Krai, which overlaps with parts of the historical homeland of several Circassian groups, has entered the wartime conversation because of Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s oil export and refining system. Tuapse, whose name is derived from the Circassian toponym T’uapsə, is one such place. These developments should not be romanticised. Their significance is analytical: the north-eastern Black Sea coast is a logistical zone in Russia’s war economy as well as it is also historical Circassian homeland geography, marked by invasion, expulsion, resettlement, and erasure.
Ukraine’s strikes on Russian energy assets expose how imperial geography continues to function. Space absorbed by empire becomes infrastructure; infrastructure becomes war capacity; war capacity is then discussed as if the space had no prior history. If Tuapse, Sochi, associated with the Circassian toponym Shache, Krasnodar Krai, and the Black Sea coast are discussed only as Russian strategic depth, export capacity, or coastline, then the imperial map is reproduced without scrutiny. Contemporary borders exist, but they should not be treated as historically innocent. In places such as the north-eastern Black Sea coast, they also mark the memory of imperial violence.
Since 2022, discussions of Russian decolonisation, territorial fracture, and the political agency of non-Russian peoples have moved from the margins into policy and analytical circles. These debates can easily become speculative. Wishful thinking on Russia’s collapse is not policy. In this case, the immediate question is whether European policy circles can imagine a post-war Russia policy that no longer treats imperial centralisation as stability, or Russian rule as preferable to the imagined instability of self-determination by imperially subjugated nations. This is the moment to stop treating Russian imperial centralisation as the only acceptable form of order.
We are still in the historical episode of unfinished question of Russian empire. Russia once invaded Circassia, Chechnya, and other lands of the North Caucasus; but the deeper problem is that the political order created by that violence was normalised and later treated as ordinary statehood. The empire did not disappear simply because time passed or the century changed. Russia’s imperially designed borders, institutions, military infrastructure, security thinking, and historical denials continued to shape the region.
Ivan U.K. Klyszcz’s recent International Centre for Defence and Security report, Agents of Decolonisation? The Chechen and Circassian Diasporas in Europe since 2022, is useful because it places Chechen and Circassian diaspora politics inside the post-2022 debate on Russia’s future. It treats these diasporas as policy actors: divided, vulnerable, politically active, and exposed to Russian pressure. It notes that Circassian activism has resurfaced after a relative lull, that Ukrainian outreach has given North Caucasus diaspora organisations greater legitimacy and a wider platform, and that European failure to engage these communities leaves space for Russian influence, disinformation, surveillance, and transnational repression.
This warning is critically important. Circassian and Chechen diasporas in Europe are not merely communities of memory. They are also targets of Russian pressure and potential partners in building a more accurate understanding of Russia. Absence of engagement is also a policy choice and benefits Moscow when North Caucasus communities are seen only through the lenses of security risk, folklore, or fragmentation.
Circassians are not asking Europe merely to recognise the genocide they suffered. They want European policy institutions to stop reading Russian territory only through Russian imperial categories that deny the historical sovereignty of invaded peoples subjected to genocide, such as Circassians. That demand might sound uncomfortable because it disturbs the apparent stability of political maps. Yet this discomfort is precisely why recognition matters. The Circassian genocide is one of the events through which Russia’s imperial space was produced. Recognition of this genocide is not hostility toward Russians as a people. It is a refusal to let imperial violence remain hidden inside the language of state continuity, it is a way to break the Russian engineering of collective memory and identity.
Poland is particularly well placed to understand this. Polish political memory is shaped by empire, partition, deportation, occupation, resistance, and the struggle to preserve national identity under foreign domination. Poland also occupies a central position in Europe’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. If any European political community should understand that imperial violence does not disappear when it is renamed as order, stability, or security, it is Poland.
This does not mean that Poland should rush into maximalist declarations. The first task is to build a serious knowledge base and a responsible policy language. Georgia and Ukraine have already recognised the Circassian genocide, following historical and political deliberation, and a December 2025 conference in the Lithuanian parliament on recognition of the Circassian genocide showed that the issue can and should enter European parliamentary debate. Poland, too, should examine these precedents carefully as it begins its own public and parliamentary assessment. Critically, recognition of genocide should not be reduced to a symbolic gesture against Moscow. It should be framed as part of Europe’s broader reckoning with Russian imperial violence.
Poland and Europe should take three practical steps. First, they should include the North Caucasus in serious Russia-policy analysis, not only in discussions of terrorism, instability, or security risk. Second, European governments and policy institutions should engage Circassian and other North Caucasus diaspora organisations systematically, carefully, and pluralistically, while protecting them from Russian transnational repression. Third, Poland should begin an expert process leading to a parliamentary briefing on recognition of the Circassian genocide. A parliamentary pathway can follow, but it should rest on serious preparation rather than sudden political symbolism.
Recognition of the Circassian genocide will not by itself transform Russia. But it would change the terms of discussion. It would make clear that Europe’s debate about Russian imperialism does not begin in 2014 or 2022. It reaches back to the invasion and destruction of peoples whose histories were pushed to the margins because empire succeeded in making them appear marginal.
Circassia is not a footnote to Russia’s centuries-long history of imperial war-making. It is one of the places where the history of Russian empire can be read most clearly. To remember Circassians and the genocide they suffered in May is therefore not only to mourn the dead. It is to recover a political geography that Russia has spent more than a century trying to naturalise, obscure, and silence.
Poland does not need a new language for this. Its own history has taught it that empire survives not only through armies, but through maps, archives, schoolbooks, silence, and the normalisation of conquest. Recognising the Circassian genocide will not solve the Russian problem by itself. But it would mark one necessary step in naming it correctly.