Russia is the largest country in the world and takes up a ton of the Asian continent, and people are surprised about Asian Russians?
Russia is an empire, and empires quickly move to consolidate their image externally and to a high degree internally as the image of their upper class.
That invisibility is an effective tool of suppression within the empire - representation as the sole province of the wealthy - and outside it where the marginalized populations don’t even enter the public consciousness, let alone concern.
