Well, you move the people on the periphery into the middle of Russia where it’s harder to break away with any familiar ethnic groups, then you move people from the interior who don’t have links to people on the periphery to the periphery.

At the same time, residents of Mariupol and other occupied settlements are forcibly deported to Russia, the National Resistance Center added.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union

From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of “anti-Soviet” categories of population (often classified as “enemies of the people”), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.[9]

Sometimes the order is inverse. When a critical number of Russians live in one place (for example, Crimea), Russia has that spiritual strength to claim rights over that land and, if necessary, take it by force.