Rossiiane. It was a word that Eltsin had trouble pronouncing, particularly after indulging in inebriating festivities, yet he clung doggedly to it in public statements, to reassure the ethnic minorities they belonged in the Russian state just as much as the majority ethnic Russians (russkie) did. Putin enunciated the word clearly and smoothly after arriving in the Kremlin in late 1999. But in March 2014, the month Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Putin switched over to russkie when addressing the joint session of Russia's two houses of parliament. Crimea was now ‘a primordial russkaia land’, its key port of Sevastopol – ‘a russkii city’ and Ukraine's capital Kyiv – ‘the mother of russkie cities’ (Putin 2014a). The annexation of Crimea was accomplished, Putin asserted, to defend the 1.5 million russkie there from the pro-EU protesters who had swept away Ukraine's Moscow-leaning government in February 2014. With the guards behind him sporting an updated version of the Imperial Russia regalia, Putin signed into law Crimea's annexation, signalling his resolve to expand Russia's territory and dominance in the former Soviet space under the banner of ethnic russkii nationalism (see Aridici 2014 for a review). Commenting on Putin's vision, his spokesman Dmitrii Peskov said: ‘Russia (Rossiia) is the country on which the Russian [russkii] world is based’ and Putin ‘is probably the main guarantor of the safety of the Russian [russkii] world’ (Coalson 2014).

Although Russia's militarised intervention in Ukraine thrust it into the media limelight, the conceptual shift to russkie had been institutionalised and promoted earlier, when Putin returned to the Kremlin in early 2012. In a programmatic newspaper article on national identity, Putin claimed that Russia was a unique multi-cultural civilisation. This civilisation was based, he argued, on centuries of coexistence among ethnic groups along with the recognition of a special consolidating and leading role of ethnic Russians.