Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

Some may argue that Moscow’s policies in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and beyond have been haphazard rather than planned, and that there is no consistent discernable trajectory in Russian government policies. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, the evolution of Moscow’s policies toward compatriots has taken time to develop and demonstrated inconsistencies and even initial incoherency. However, the some twenty different Russian policies and laws related to compatriots enacted from 1994 to 2015 and outlined in the next chapter clearly demonstrate that the Kremlin has awarded increasing attention to its diaspora as a tool of foreign policy. It is also reasonable to conclude that Putin’s actions and particularly their timing have been driven by opportunism. Certainly, the 2014 Ukraine’s Maidan movement, which sought to bring the country closer to the West and resulted in bloody clashes between pro-Russia and pro-West groups in Kiev, and in the deposition of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, created instability in Ukraine and in turn a ripe moment for Moscow to take back Crimea and stoke conflict in the eastern part of the country.³ Likewise, the Georgian military operation to retake its breakaway territory of South Ossetia in 2008, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed, was another opportune moment for Russia to officially move its troops into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On a much smaller scale, the Estonian government’s 2007 decision to relocate Tallinn’s Soviet-era war memorial also proved opportune for Moscow to stoke riots by Estonia’s Russian minority. Nonetheless, opportunism can go hand in hand with careful planning. “Fortune favors the bold” says a Latin proverb, but Louis Pasteur said that “fortune favors the prepared.” The reimperialization trajectory fits well with both maxims.

In the following sections, I will detail the seven phases of the reimperialization trajectory as a road map of Russian foreign policy toward post-Soviet states with large ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking minorities, providing the framework for the later country case study chapters that will locate states like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and others on the trajectory. It will be in the case study chapters rather than here that extensive examples of reimperialization policies will be provided. Those chapters will also demonstrate an element of common timing when the reimperialization trajectory turns from softer to more aggressive policies. This has generally been when countries like Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia turned Westward and sought closer relations with NATO or the EU. The states in question then generally experienced a rapid progression from Russia’s soft power policies to intensified information warfare, arming and training of separatist groups, and passportization.

STAGE 1: SOFT POWER

According to American political scientist and leading scholar of soft power, Joseph Nye, that form of power is a state’s ability to wield influence based on its culture, political values, and foreign policies, which must be perceived as legitimate and having moral authority. Soft power facilitates a state’s public diplomacy by building long-term relationships that influence the context for government policymaking.⁴ Over the past decades there has been debate over whether Russia even has any soft power and, if so, what sets Russia’s soft power apart from that of other states. Russia scholar James Sherr has demonstrated that Russia’s influence is based on “hard diplomacy” and “soft coercion.” The latter is an “influence that is indirectly coercive, resting on covert methods (penetration, bribery, blackmail).”⁵ He also argues that Russia uses co-optation of various business, political, and private groups through the establishment of networks bonded by mutual interest to promote its objectives.⁶

Russia’s objectives and the means used to achieve them raise concerns for the target states. Russia’s discourse and policies demonstrate its resolve to maintain a “zone of privileged interest” in the post-Soviet states and postcommunist Europe often irrespective of the wishes of these countries. To achieve these objectives Moscow uses a combination of hard and soft power. Disentangling Russia’s soft power from hard power is difficult because it often takes forms that are covert, implicitly coercive, or of dubious legality.⁷ For this reason, and because Moscow often interlinks different issue areas, in this book softer methods like cultural, religious, and linguistic appeals will be discussed together with harder methods that usually fall outside the scope of soft power like economic coercion and sanctions. Furthermore, as the country case studies demonstrate, Moscow uses soft power not to avoid hard power methods, but in order to pave the way for subsequent use of hard power.⁸