Novorossiya

Also writtenNew Russia

EquivalentsRUНовороссия

Definition

Novorossiya (“New Russia”) was an administrative region of the Russian Empire covering the steppe north of the Black Sea, conquered from the Ottomans and their vassals in the 18th century. The name was revived in 2014 to frame southern and eastern Ukraine — Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odesa — as historically Russian territory that ended up inside Ukraine’s borders only by accident of Soviet administration.

As a propaganda frame, “Novorossiya” projects the Russian World civilisational claim onto a concrete map. It turns a defunct imperial label into a programme of annexation, presenting conquest as the restoration of a natural, historical order.

Origin and history

The historical Novorossiya was a real administrative term of the Russian Empire, abolished long before the modern era. Its political revival came on 17 April 2014, weeks after the annexation of Crimea, when Putin used his televised “Direct Line” to declare that Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odesa “were not part of Ukraine” in tsarist times — “Novorossiya” — and mused that “God knows” why they were transferred to Ukraine in the 1920s.¹

The term was then attached to the Russian-backed proxy project in Donbas: in 2014 the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” announced a confederation called “Novorossiya.” But the project failed to attract the southern Ukrainian cities it claimed, and was quietly shelved by 2015.² The label faded — until the 2022 invasion revived the broader territorial ambitions it expressed, with Russia attempting to seize Kherson and reach toward Odesa.³

Function in propaganda

The frame is used to:

supply a historical pretext for annexation, reframing conquest as the recovery of land that was “always” Russian;
recast military expansion as reunification rather than invasion;
project the Russian World civilisational claim onto a concrete map, giving the abstract idea of a “Russian world” defined borders;
prime audiences for territorial demands reaching well beyond the Donbas, toward the whole Black Sea coast.

The claim is historically tendentious. Borders across the region have shifted for centuries; the populations of these cities are mixed and, crucially, repeatedly demonstrated their attachment to the Ukrainian state — which is why the 2014 “Novorossiya” project collapsed for lack of local support. Imperial provenance does not confer a modern right of conquest; if it did, the map of Europe would be permanently open to revision by force.

Key examples

Putin’s 2014 “Direct Line.” The president’s personal revival of the term gave it official sanction and signalled ambitions extending across Ukraine’s south.¹

The failed 2014 confederation. The “Novorossiya” union of the Donetsk and Luhansk proxy republics was announced with fanfare but never materialised as a viable entity, and was abandoned by 2015 — evidence that the “people” it claimed to represent did not rally to it.²

2022 revival in practice. The full-scale invasion’s drive into Kherson and toward Odesa enacted the territorial logic of “Novorossiya,” even when the brand itself was not always used.³

Why it matters

“Novorossiya” matters because it converts nostalgia into a war map. By dressing territorial conquest in imperial history, it offers a respectable-sounding answer to the question “why is this land ours?” — and makes the dismemberment of a neighbour feel like the righting of a historical wrong rather than aggression.

Its 2014 failure is itself instructive: the project collapsed because the people of southern Ukraine did not see themselves as its subjects. That gap — between the imperial story and the wishes of the people who actually live there — is the propaganda’s central weakness, and the reason the claim has to be imposed by force rather than chosen.

Naming it accurately

Sources

Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, 17 April 2014, President of Russia (kremlin.ru) (2014). en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20796
O'Loughlin, John; Toal, Gerard — The Crimea conundrum, Eurasian Geography and Economics (2019)
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Institute for the Study of War (2022). www.understandingwar.org

Mentioned in

Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, 17 April 2014 (kremlin.ru) — the revival of “Novorossiya” for south-eastern Ukraine. ↩ ↩²
O’Loughlin, J.; Toal, G. (2019). “The Crimea conundrum.” Eurasian Geography and Economics — on the failure of the 2014 Novorossiya project (shelved by 2015). ↩ ↩²
Institute for the Study of War, Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment (2022). ↩ ↩²

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