Founded 2026

The situation

How public opinion, institutions and political choices shape the conditions around the record.

This is Pomnym's editorial assessment. Sources establish the facts cited; the judgments and questions that follow are ours.

What gets attention

A public debate takes shape through selection as well as accuracy: which events lead, which comparisons are made, and which people remain outside the picture. Our concern is the ease with which criticism of Russia becomes a background assumption about Russians.

Consistent scrutiny matters. A favourable economic comparison does not vindicate every government policy; an unfavourable one does not explain a whole society. The same measure should not become uninteresting merely because it complicates a familiar account.

Russia is not the same question as Russians

The four survey series reviewed in the linked record chiefly ask about the Russian state, its president and its policies. They do not supply a continuous, comparable measure of attitudes toward Russian people. The isolated people-level questions and gaps matter as much as the state-level trend.

Distrust of a government does not tell us how its citizens are treated at work, in a bank or at a university. Nor can it prove an entire population's private motives. Those questions require their own evidence.

Institutions make choices

An account that blames only Berlin or Brussels leaves too much out. Banks, universities, competition organisers and cultural institutions also make decisions. Whether an exclusion was legally required, discretionary or later reversed must be checked case by case.

That objection applies equally to Russian state coverage when it portrays Western populations and institutions as merely following their leaders. The records identify decision-makers, not a single collective mind. Accountability belongs with the actual choice and the authority behind it.

AfD: rapprochement is not a guarantee

AfD's calls for de-escalation should not be mistaken for unconditional solidarity with Russian people. Rapprochement is nevertheless longstanding party policy: its 2016 basic platform proposed partnership with Russia and ending sanctions. Its 2025 election programme called for restored trade and repaired Nord Stream pipelines.

Emphases differ. In his December 1, 2025 answer, Rüdiger Lucassen combined diplomacy with deterrence, condemned Russia's invasion as unlawful and stressed German interests. Neither a platform nor one member's statement establishes every member's motives.

Opposition to confrontation is valuable in its own right, but it is not a guarantee against discrimination or a promise of a natural ally. Judge the party by specific policies and individual conduct. An 'enemy of my enemy' reading is an interpretation, not a measured explanation of the membership.

Sources

Economic costs deserve political weight

The loss of Russian gas imposed real costs on Germany. The Council of Economic Experts documented the 2022 energy shock's effects on household purchasing power and energy-intensive production. That connection is public, not forbidden: ZDF discussed it again in March 2026. Current weakness also has other causes; Ifo's June 2026 forecast identifies weak productivity, demographic constraints and a newer Middle East energy shock.

In July 2022, 58% of respondents to Infratest dimap supported sanctions even if Germany faced energy-supply problems and falling economic output; 33% opposed them. That is evidence of accepting specified costs, not a wish to kill Russians. In September 2026, 13% were satisfied with Merz's work and almost eight in ten judged the economy negatively. Separate answers cannot establish why an individual dislikes him.

The sharper question is whether reporting and political decisions give livelihoods and opportunities for de-escalation sufficient weight. Economic sacrifice should require a clear account of its purpose, effectiveness and alternatives. Criticising the price while exempting the choices that helped produce it from scrutiny is not enough.

Sources

Language is not allegiance

Russian is part of Ukraine's lived history, not simply a language across its border. Lex Fridman's January 2025 interview introduced Russian as Zelensky's primary language for most of his life. Zelensky also starred in the Russian-language comedy Servant of the People.

Today's picture is different from a claim of nationwide Russian dominance. KIIS's May-June 2026 survey recorded home use of mainly or always Ukrainian at 62%, Russian at 14%, and both at 23%. It interviewed 1,000 adult citizens in government-controlled territory, excluding residents of occupied territories and those abroad. These are self-reported home-use figures under wartime conditions, not a census of language ability across all of Ukraine.

Neither language nor cultural background determines political allegiance. Russian-speaking Ukrainians should remain visible as people, not be reduced to symbols claimed by opposing governments. A president's biography cannot stand in for the linguistic history of an entire country.

Sources

Origin as a disqualifier

The editor of this archive remembers a conversation, years before the invasion, with a colleague from the technology industry - green, left-leaning, genuinely curious about how Ethereum worked. The reply to the subject was that the technology was interesting, but that it had been built by a Russian, had he known that. It was not offered as an argument. It was offered as a reason not to look any further, and the looking stopped there.

Taken as a fact about Ethereum, the remark does not hold. Ethereum was conceived by Vitalik Buterin, who was born in Kolomna near Moscow in 1994 and left for Canada at the age of six. It was built by a group conventionally counted as eight co-founders, who were English, American, Canadian, Romanian, Israeli and Dutch as well as Russian-Canadian. Compressing that into one nationality is what the remark did, and the compression was the point of it.

The suspicion did not wait for the war. In mid-January 2022, six weeks before the invasion, Buterin asked his readers for the most unhinged criticisms of himself they had seen. His own father joined in to report one of them: that his son was a KGB operative working for Vladimir Putin, and that the Russian state was therefore behind Ethereum. The family treated it as a joke. It was already in circulation.

What followed shows the same man being told the opposite thing from the other direction. On 24 February 2022 Buterin condemned the invasion in Russian, calling it a crime against the Ukrainian and the Russian people. Three days later Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, wrote that Russians who were now ashamed of being Russian need not worry, because they were not Russian. Buterin answered her with an obscenity. He had been offered the exit from Russian identity by the Russian state's own broadcaster, and he refused it. Four years later, in February 2026, he was still describing himself the same way: born in Russia, but grew up in Canada.

The most consequential version of the same reflex is a job. On Monday 30 September 2024 the software company ABBYY held a meeting its staff could not speak in: invitations to a mandatory town hall had gone out the evening before, chat and microphones were disabled, and the calls ran one after another that afternoon - Limassol first, then Belgrade, then Budapest. The whole thing took about an hour and a half, and access to the corporate network was withdrawn while it was still going on. Several hundred people lost their jobs, most of them relocated out of Russia by ABBYY itself after 2022. Former employees told Mediazona, Forbes and Novaya Gazeta Europe that the invitation lists for those calls held Russian passport holders and almost nobody else. The company tells it differently: Gina Ray, its senior director of corporate marketing, said ABBYY employs people of more than thirty nationalities from thirteen countries, that it had embarked on a path of business transformation and modernisation, and that it had reorganised finance, accounting, go-to-market and research functions that were located in certain regions. It would not say how many people were affected.

What follows is the part this archive cannot leave out. The passport account comes from employees who spoke anonymously and from a post since deleted. Against it, on the record: a recruiter citing an ABBYY manager said the company had cut its development organisation rather than its Russians, and that Russian citizens in other departments stayed; a former executive told Forbes the reason was economic and not political; a Belarusian, a Latvian and staff from France were dismissed too, while some Russian passport holders kept their jobs; and Meduza pointed out that development at ABBYY had always been Russian-speaking, so cutting it would have looked like cutting Russians whatever the reason. The Bell concluded that dismissal by nationality seemed unlikely. Two months before the calls, ABBYY had announced on its own site a research centre in Bengaluru, describing it as complementing a footprint it listed as Hungary, Serbia, Cyprus and the United States. Collective complaints went to the labour ministries of Hungary, Cyprus, Serbia and Germany, and when Novaya Gazeta Europe published in October 2024 not one of them had been considered. That is where it rests, and on a narrow base: the account comes from four Russian exile outlets reporting anonymous former employees within about two days, and no journalist, regulator or union in Cyprus, Serbia or Hungary appears to have examined it since. Several hundred people were told their roles were eliminated, in a meeting where they could not ask why, and no decision on any of those complaints has been located since, so whether the passport mattered has never been established either way.

One end of this is a Western reflex that treats Russian origin as a reason to stop reading. The other is a Russian state that treats dissent as forfeiture of Russian identity. Neither asked what the person had done or thought; both read the answer off where he was born. A single remembered conversation proves nothing about how common the first reflex is, and this archive does not claim otherwise - the dated records it links do that work instead.

Sources

What a contemporary witness saw

Every country in this archive forbids discrimination and keeps a body to enforce the prohibition. The records show what those bodies did when Russians came to them. Germany's federal anti-discrimination agency reached no conclusion on the banks, because nationality is not a protected characteristic under the General Equal Treatment Act at all. The Dutch equality body examined four complaints against ING, found that the bank had made a direct distinction on grounds of nationality, and held that it was not a prohibited one. The Czech ombudsman found that universities had restricted access to education by nationality and could record fault only against a regulator, because his anti-discrimination jurisdiction does not reach the nationality of non-EU citizens. The German government counted 196 people of Russian or Belarusian origin who came for advice, and recorded the outcome of none of them. The protection exists. It was drafted so that this case falls outside it.

That is the law, and it is checkable. What follows is neither law nor finding. It is what one contemporary witness saw, set down here because this archive exists to hold the contemporaneous account and not only the paperwork that account produced.

A contemporary witness records this. The hostility did not come from where the political map says it should. It came most readily from liberals - from people whose politics is built on identity and injury, who had spent years learning to watch their language, who would not let a joke about any other nationality pass and corrected a word about any other group without being asked. With Russians none of it applied. The same person who would not generalise about anyone generalised freely. The same person who counted a slight against any other origin as harm counted contempt for Russians as a position worth holding. On that account it is the only form of racism that costs nothing to express, and the only one this witness has seen treated as a credential rather than a fault.

What the witness describes has a name, and it is the form this archive documents almost to the exclusion of everything else: socio-economic marginalisation. Not assault, but the steady, lawful, always deniable removal of people from the ordinary means of earning a living and taking part. An account capped or closed. A university place refused. A competition entry withdrawn. A residence permit not renewed. A post eliminated in a meeting where nobody could ask why. Each decision is defensible on its own, each has a form of words ready for it, and not one of them is a crime. Taken together they are the mechanism by which a person of Russian origin in the West is moved to the edge of economic and social life without anyone raising a hand or breaking a law. That is a major form of Russophobia in the West, and it is the one that leaves the most paper behind and attracts the least attention. Physical assault is a different phenomenon with a different profile, and it is counted in a Record of its own.

This archive marks what the recollection is and is not. It is one life in one country, and it establishes nothing about what liberals in general believe; no survey here measures it, because, as the record on thirty years of German polling shows, almost nobody asked. What the documented material establishes is narrower and harder to answer - that the rule against judging a person by where they are from was written, is enforced, and in this one case was found not to apply.

One such recollection is already here. The conversation recorded above under Origin as a disqualifier - a colleague, green and left-leaning, who found Ethereum interesting until he heard that a Russian had built it - is the same observation in miniature. It stays where it is because the documented material around it does the work a recollection cannot do for itself.

Sources

The uniform is not enough

All Germans are equal, but some Germans are more equal than others. The Orwell paraphrase is deliberate. The people in the Lithuania report are already serving in the Bundeswehr. According to that reporting, several soldiers with family ties to Russia or Belarus may remain in uniform in Germany, yet have been refused the Lithuania posting after security checks.

Pomnym documents the barriers a Russian connection can place across ordinary life: an account, a university place, a livelihood. Here the question reaches the state's own uniform. A restricted posting does not by itself prove Russophobia. It demands scrutiny of the point at which assessing a person's vulnerability becomes judging their belonging.

This did not begin with Lithuania. In Julia Weigelt's November 2025 JS report, Tatjana, a Bundeswehr soldier with German and Russian citizenship, described being questioned by MAD about her attitude to Russia's invasion after years of service. She rejected the prospect of becoming a second-class soldier because of her Russian roots. That is her account, not testimony from the unnamed Lithuania applicants. A MAD spokesperson confirmed in the same report that checks had tightened at the end of 2022.

There is a real security question. Foreign intelligence services can threaten relatives, and loyalty does not make a soldier immune to coercion. That requires examining actual exposure, the proposed duties and possible safeguards. It does not turn a family connection into proof of allegiance to a foreign state. Permission to serve in Germany is no automatic entitlement to every posting; neither is Russian ancestry an answer to an individual's case.

If a person's family history is used to decide what they must believe, our editorial charge is Gesinnungssäuberung - an ideological purge. That would assign political beliefs by biography. This is an editorial judgment, not a finding about the soldiers or proof that their opinions caused the reported refusals. The danger is citizenship in two grades: equal on paper, but with one group repeatedly required to establish that it belongs.

Article 3 of the Basic Law protects against disadvantage because of descent and origin. Article 33 promises Germans equal access to public office according to aptitude, qualifications and achievement. An institution invoking "our democracy" must be able to justify its treatment of the individual and submit that decision to effective review. Citizenship must not end where the family tree begins.

Sources

Look at the decision

A government's policy, an institution's decision and a person's conduct are different things. Changing a government will not necessarily change every practice. The useful question is concrete: who made the decision, whom did it affect, and what would change it?

Records / Evidence / Act