The Russian government is planning to spend more than 1.7 billion rubles (almost $18 million) next year on promoting the Russian language outside the country, according to a draft federal budget released this week. The amount is nearly a fourfold increase compared to 2024.
The draft bill was approved by the cabinet on September 29 and is currently being considered by the Russian parliament.
According to an explanatory note attached to the draft budget, the outlay would nearly quadruple in 2025 compared to around 500 million rubles ($5.3 million) allocated for the purpose this year. The government is planning to further increase spending on promoting the Russian language abroad to 1.85 billion rubles ($19.4 million) and over 2 billion rubles ($21 million) in 2026 and 2027 respectively.
Most of the funds will be spent on educational, cultural, and information programs developed by the Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Foundation and RT’s Window to Russia project, according to the note.
The government is planning to finance Russian-language schools abroad, set up cultural learning centers, subsidize the teaching of Russian, and to send Russian teachers to work in supplementary education.
In his annual address to parliament in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for increased financial support of international programs promoting the Russian language and Russia’s multinational culture around the world.
According to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Russian is becoming increasingly popular in China, where on average over 80,000 students and schoolchildren study the language annually. “It is quite obvious that this trend will continue in the future,” she told Rossiyskaya Gazeta earlier this week.
Last month, the head of Russia’s federal agency for international cooperation, Evgeny Primakov, announced that the organization had sealed agreements to establish Russian Houses in six African countries – Guinea, Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, and Equatorial Guinea – increasing the number of countries hosting such venues to 16. The project is set to open up opportunities for Africans to obtain scholarships and receive an education in Russia based on the popularity of the Russian language and preparatory classes in their home countries.
The government plan to increase outlays to make the Russian language and culture more available abroad comes amid a growing number of cases in which ethnic Russians are being targeted in former Soviet republics, particularly in Ukraine and the Baltic states.
Shortly after the 2014 Western-backed coup in Ukraine, the new authorities in Kiev abolished Russian as an official regional language and adopted policies aimed at its suppression, despite the language being spoken and understood by a large proportion of Ukrainian citizens, particularly in the east of the country. The Ukrainian government has claimed that Russian constitutes a threat to national unity and security.
The authorities in Moscow have condemned the policies as extremely Russophobic.