First published April 7, 2022.
On 3 April 2022, five weeks into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti ran an opinion piece titled "What Russia should do with Ukraine". Its author, the political consultant Timofey Sergeytsev, argued that Ukraine should stop existing as an independent state, that its national identity should be erased under the banner of "denazification", and that much of its population should be punished. Ukrainian leaders, Western officials and historians condemned it as an open call for the destruction of a nation, and it has since been cited in genocide complaints and investigations.
Below is what the text actually said, who wrote it, why critics compared it to Nazi language, and where its central claims fall apart when checked against the facts.
What the RIA Novosti article proposed
The piece is long, but its programme can be summarised in a few points. Sergeytsev wrote that Ukraine's leadership, which he labelled the "Banderite elite", had to be eliminated because it could not be re-educated. He then went further than the government. In his telling, a large part of ordinary Ukrainians were "passive Nazis" who had tolerated or supported the authorities in Kyiv. They could not all be prosecuted as war criminals, he admitted, yet he still described them as guilty.
For that population, the essay set out a path of hardship and "atonement". It spoke of a sweeping purge of public life, the banning of organisations it accused of Nazism, and forced labour to rebuild destroyed infrastructure for those not facing prison or the death penalty. It also called for harsh censorship of Ukrainian culture and education, a process the author described as de-Ukrainisation, and suggested the country be broken into several entities under direct Russian control. Even the name "Ukraine", in his view, should not be allowed to survive.
Put plainly, the article described the end of Ukraine as a nation and the forced reshaping of its people into something else. That is why so many readers did not see it as ordinary wartime propaganda.
Who Timofey Sergeytsev is and what RIA Novosti is
Sergeytsev, born in 1963, is a political technologist rather than a government official. He worked as a campaign consultant in Ukraine, including for Leonid Kuchma in 1999 and Viktor Yanukovych in 2004, and co-produced the 2012 film Match, which Ukraine later banned. Some analysts have pointed out that his essay closely follows the ideas of a 2016 text by the nationalist writer Alexander Zhuchkovsky.
RIA Novosti is often described in English as "Russian state TV", but it is a news agency, not a television channel. It belongs to Rossiya Segodnya, a federal state enterprise. That distinction matters: the article was not a speech by a minister, and Russia never adopted it as formal policy. It was, however, published by a government-owned outlet in wartime, when Russian media operated under strict censorship laws, which is why critics treated it as more than one man's opinion.
Not everyone agreed on how much weight to give it. The Carnegie analyst Andrei Kolesnikov argued that consultants like Sergeytsev have little real influence on decisions. Others, such as the analyst Samuel Ramani, saw it as a reflection of mainstream thinking around the Kremlin. Within days, former president Dmitry Medvedev, then deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, repeated several of its themes in his own statements.
Why critics called it a "final solution" text
The timing sharpened the reaction. The essay appeared on the same day the world saw images of civilians killed in Bucha after Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv region. Read alongside those pictures, a plan to punish "passive" civilians looked less like rhetoric and more like a justification.
British newspapers, including the Mirror, described it as a "final solution" manifesto. The phrase is deliberate and heavy: the "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the Nazi regime's euphemism for the Holocaust, the systematic murder of around six million European Jews. Using it signals that commentators saw an intent to destroy a people as a group, not just to defeat an army.
The historian Timothy Snyder, who studies the Holocaust and Eastern Europe, wrote that the text advocates eliminating Ukrainians as such and reveals genocidal intent. Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it could serve as evidence before a future tribunal. Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak called it an official call for mass murder, and Latvia's foreign minister Edgars Rinkēvičs described it as "ordinary fascism".
The legal language here is specific. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide means acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Incitement to genocide is a crime in its own right. That is why the article attracted lawyers' attention as well as columnists'.
Fact check: the "Nazi Ukraine" claim
The essay rests on the idea that Ukraine is a Nazi state. The facts point the other way.
- The president is Jewish. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, elected in 2019 with about 73% in the run-off, is of Jewish heritage, and members of his family died in the Holocaust.
- Far-right parties are electorally weak. In the 2019 parliamentary election, the nationalist Svoboda party won about 2.2% of the party-list vote, far below the 5% threshold, and took only a single constituency seat.
- The author concedes the point himself. In a revealing passage, Sergeytsev admits Ukraine has no main Nazi party, no Führer and no full racial laws, then claims its "Nazism" is more dangerous anyway. An argument that redefines Nazism so that no evidence is needed cannot really be tested.
None of this means Ukraine has no far-right groups. Like many European countries, it does, and some volunteer units formed in 2014 drew from them. But a fringe that cannot pass an election threshold is not the same thing as a state ideology, and it offers no justification for punishing a whole population.
Who was Stepan Bandera?
The word "Banderite" appears throughout the essay. Stepan Bandera (1909–1959) led the radical OUN-B wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In June 1941, as German forces moved east, his faction proclaimed a Ukrainian state that pledged cooperation with Nazi Germany, and the proclamation was followed by pogroms. Germany rejected the declaration, and the Gestapo arrested Bandera; he spent much of the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. OUN forces were involved in the massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943. Bandera was killed in Munich in 1959 by a KGB agent.
His record is genuinely contested and painful, especially in Poland. But in Soviet and later Russian usage, "Banderite" became a blanket insult for almost any Ukrainian who wanted independence from Moscow, regardless of what they thought about Bandera himself. That is how the essay uses it.
What happened after publication
The article did not fade away. In April 2022, the German Bundestag member Thomas Heilmann filed a complaint with Berlin prosecutors, arguing that it may breach the Genocide Convention. In May 2022, Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office opened a pre-trial investigation. Researchers tracking Russian war rhetoric continue to cite it alongside other statements by officials and state media figures.
Its ideas also echoed in official speech. Medvedev's later essays repeated the claim that Ukrainian identity is artificial, and security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev spoke of Ukraine's breakup as an outcome being pursued by others. Whether any single text shapes policy is hard to prove, but courts and genocide researchers treat public calls like this as relevant evidence of intent.
How to read wartime propaganda carefully
Texts like this are worth understanding, not just condemning. A few habits help:
- Separate the author from the state. Note who wrote it and where it ran. A state agency publishing a piece gives it weight, but it is still not a law or decree.
- Look for redefinitions. When words like "Nazi" are stretched to cover anyone who disagrees, the label stops describing reality and starts justifying violence.
- Check the numbers. Election results, court records and casualty figures are public, and they tend to cut through slogans quickly.
- Read reactions from people who know the field. Historians of genocide and of the region can place a text in context better than a viral headline can.
The RIA Novosti essay remains one of the clearest examples of how dehumanising language can move into mainstream state media during a war. Knowing what it said, and why it was wrong, is part of remembering what Ukrainians have faced since 2022.
Sources: Wikipedia: What Russia Should Do with Ukraine; Wikipedia: RIA Novosti; Wikipedia: Stepan Bandera; Wikipedia: 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election; original coverage by the Mirror.
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