Human-rights activist Ruslan Gabbasov in Brussels in January, 2023. He was recently targeted in an assassination plot that Lithuanian police suspect was orchestrated from Moscow.Thierry Monasse/AFP/Getty Images
In the eyes of Ruslan Gabbasov, Russia’s war against Ukraine is also a war against his own Bashkir people.
The 46-year-old human-rights activist was recently targeted in an assassination plot that Lithuanian police suspect was orchestrated from Moscow. The plot was foiled, and Mr. Gabbasov and his family are now in hiding.
He sees a clear link between the Kremlin’s alleged attempt to kill him and members of the Bashkir ethnic minority – a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who have lived for centuries under Russian rule – being sent to fight and die in Ukraine in disproportionately large numbers.
“There’s obviously a connection,” said Mr. Gabbasov, who believes he was targeted because of his calls for an independent Bashkortostan. “The Russian authorities benefit from having fewer Bashkirs. They’re already trying to assimilate and Russify us, and those who don’t succumb are sent to war so that our men will dwindle.”
A recently compiled count of Russian citizens killed in the four-year-old war revealed some staggering numbers. Most shocking is the overall death toll, which the independent Russian website MediaZona says is at least 217,800 and may be as high as 352,000. The Russian military does not disclose official figures about its battlefield losses.
The Ukrainian military also does not reveal casualty figures. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated in January that Ukraine had suffered “between 100,000 and 140,000” military fatalities between the February, 2022, start of the war and December, 2025.
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Nearly as jarring is where those dead Russian soldiers were from. According to the MediaZona count – which was compiled using publicly available information, such as the country’s probate registry – the largest single group of dead hailed from Bashkortostan, the homeland of the Bashkirs.
The lower-end estimate of Bashkirs killed fighting in Ukraine – based on a list of Russian military dead who have been named in local media or other public documents – stood at 9,234 as of the end of April.
That would represent 0.2 per cent of Bashkortostan’s total population of 4.1 million and stands in sharp contrast to the number of military dead who hail from Moscow, where MediaZona found 3,404 military deaths from a population of more than 13.3 million – or 0.02 per cent.
The second-largest number of war dead hail from another predominantly ethnic Muslim republic, Tatarstan, which borders Bashkortostan in central Russia, with 7,967 named fatalities.
There are 21 theoretically semi-autonomous republics within the Russian Federation. However, the regional governments’ powers have been sharply curbed over the course of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long rule.
Early in the invasion of Ukraine, the phenomenon of Bashkir soldiers fighting and dying was common enough that Ukraine’s then-defence minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, made a public appeal to Bashkirs to stop joining the war effort. “Why do Bashkirs die in Ukraine – far from their home?” Mr. Reznikov wrote in a 2022 article carried by Ukraine’s Interfax news service. “They will die – and will the Bashkirs have more rights in Russia? No.”
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Mr. Gabbasov said Bashkir men were being lured to join the war effort by a mixture of propaganda – the message being broadcast domestically is that the war is almost over and Russia is certain to win – and economic incentives.
In Bashkortostan, recruiters offer bonuses of one million rubles ($18,600) that are paid as soon as a new soldier signs up. That’s more than 20 times the average monthly salary in the region.
“Moscow sends recruiters down to the ethnic republics with targets for how many men it should send to the war. There are no such targets for Moscow or St. Petersburg,” Mr. Gabbasov said. “Putin benefits from having as many men as possible leave the national republics to fight, while Moscow lives a comfortable and peaceful life.”
Mr. Gabbasov was interviewed by The Globe and Mail via WhatsApp from an undisclosed location. He, his wife and their young son have been hiding ever since the assassination plot against him was discovered in early 2025.
The attempt on his life was foiled partly by his chance discovery of an Apple AirTag tracking device that had been attached to the underside of the hood of his car. He reported his finding to the police in Lithuania, where he had been living in exile, setting off a year-long investigation that culminated in April with the arrest of 10 men suspected of planning to kill both Mr. Gabbasov and Valdas Bartkevicius, a Lithuanian activist involved in pro-Ukrainian causes.
Three other suspects are being sought in connection with the plot, which Lithuanian police said involved citizens of Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Greece. After the arrests, Saulius Briginas, deputy head of Lithuania’s Criminal Police Bureau, said “the nature and objectives of these criminal acts correspond to those of the Russian Federation.”
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Mr. Gabbasov believes he was targeted because the organization he leads, the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, explicitly calls for the dissolution of the Russian Federation and independence for Bashkirs and Tatars, as well as Chechens – a group with its own long and violent independence struggle – and other ethnic minorities.
That puts Mr. Gabbasov’s group at odds with anti-Kremlin activists such as Yulia Navalnaya, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, who want to see Mr. Putin gone, and Russia put on a democratic course, but with the country’s pre-2014 borders intact.
“The liberal opposition doesn’t pose the same threat as the supporters of independence for their national republics. Because if Putin falls, and even if the Russian liberal opposition comes to power, Russia will remain as it is,” Mr. Gabbasov said. The anti-Putin democrats, he said, would need to co-operate with Russia’s feared security services if they wanted to maintain Russia’s rule over regions such as Bashkortostan, Tatarstan and Chechnya.
After centuries of repression and Russification – and now the growing death toll from the war in Ukraine – Mr. Gabbasov says it’s time for Bashkirs and other minority groups to go their own way. “Our people will die if we remain part of Russia.”