ST. PETERSBURG — The Russian language, Alexander Pankin told a forum session in this city on Wednesday, is not dying. The Western effort to kill it, he argued, has not worked.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister delivered that assessment at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in a session formally titled “The Russian Language as a Treasure and Strategic Asset: From National Policy to Global Influence.” The staging was deliberate. SPIEF runs through June 6 — the same day the United Nations marks Russian Language Day each year, coinciding with the birthday of Alexander Pushkin, who is considered the father of modern Russian literary form. The proximity was not lost on the audience.
“This is a very big task, one that has a foreign policy dimension, especially in the context of geopolitical rifts, in a context where they are trying to erase us — the Russian language, the Russian culture and Russian sports,” Pankin said, according to RIA Novosti. “They are reducing various exchanges to practically nothing. They are creating obstacles.”
What follows that acknowledgment is the argument Moscow wants heard: that the obstacles have not worked as intended. Pankin said the promotion of Russian abroad is demand-driven, not supply-pushed, and that the appetite exists across countries regardless of their relationship with the Kremlin. The Russian language, he insisted, functions as an instrument of connection rather than coercion — a distinction the Russian Foreign Ministry has leaned on heavily since 2022, as Western governments severed or suspended cultural and educational exchanges with Russia at a pace without post-Cold War precedent.
The specific losses are not difficult to enumerate. The British Council closed its Moscow offices. The Goethe-Institut and Alliance Française suspended programming in Russia. US government-funded exchange programs — among them Fulbright, FLEX, and Global UGRAD — were placed on hold or terminated. Russia reciprocated in part by designating American cultural organizations, including the American Councils for International Education, as “undesirable” under domestic legislation, banning Russian students from participating in programs they administered. Pankin himself, speaking earlier the same day at SPIEF, had warned that Washington intended to increase economic and extraterritorial pressure on Moscow and its partners.
And yet enrolment data from Russian language schools in markets outside Europe tells a different story than the one Western cancellations imply. Liden & Denz, the largest Russian-language school in Russia with campuses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, has reported growing student numbers from Turkey, South Korea, and Latin America in recent years — markets where the geopolitical rupture between Russia and the West has no direct institutional weight. Russian speakers globally number over 250 million, and the language retains significant commercial weight in energy, defence, and cybersecurity — sectors in which demand for Russian-language specialists has, if anything, increased as new supply chains formed around the sanctions architecture.
Pankin’s framing — language as encouragement rather than coercion — is a deliberate rebuttal of the argument, common in Ukrainian and Baltic political discourse, that the Russian language abroad has functioned as a vehicle for political influence and demographic leverage. Ukraine’s post-2022 legislation restricting Russian-language broadcasting, publishing, and education is the most extensive example of the countervailing policy. Moscow has characterised those laws as ethnic discrimination; Kyiv and its Western partners describe them as national security measures.
That dispute is unresolved, and Pankin’s forum remarks did not engage with it directly. What he offered instead was a forward posture: the space of the “Russian world” — a phrase carrying its own contested political history — would not contract, despite what he called intensifying difficulties. “In other words, the Russian language is not a tool for coercion, but for encouragement, for stimulating the development of the entire set of connections that, we hope, the world still views with interest,” he said.
The question of whether that is true is genuinely open. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a similar argument in February 2025, telling assembled ambassadors in Moscow that Russia’s course of international isolation had “completely failed” — pointing to cultural events, scientific exchanges, and language programmes as evidence. The Kremlin has made parallel arguments about Russian energy, insisting global demand for Russian hydrocarbons has remained robust regardless of Western sanctions. Both claims contain elements that are verifiable and elements that are not.
What the language case turns on is geography. In Western Europe and North America, Russian-language enrolment fell sharply after February 2022 and has not recovered. University Russian departments across the United States saw a wave of cancellations or consolidations. The same dynamic played out in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia. In the Global South — across India, the Gulf, Central Asia, parts of Africa and Latin America — the picture is different, and that is the geography Pankin was describing on Wednesday.
Whether demand in those markets is durable or transactional is the thing Moscow does not yet know. Geopolitical alignment with Russia tends to be interest-driven in the Global South rather than ideological. If the commercial and diplomatic conditions that make Russian language study valuable in those markets change, the enrolment numbers will change with them. Pankin’s claim that the Russian world will not shrink rests on an assumption — that current alignments hold — that his own ministry has no guarantee of.
SPIEF runs through June 6. Putin is scheduled to deliver the forum’s plenary address on Friday. Russia this week also sealed a joint declaration with China on Northeast Asian stability, underscoring the geographic pivot that now underlies Moscow’s soft-power calculus as much as its economic one.
—Inputs from RIA Novosti, Sputnik.
