Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

Russia has generally not forced its citizenship on its diaspora or other nationals. Russian citizenship has had some appeal for the Russian minority and other nationalities, as seen in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, Estonia, Latvia, and Armenia. First, any citizenship may hold appeal for people without passports as in Estonia and Latvia. Second, there are also economic motives for acquiring Russian citizenship, which makes it easier and less expensive to travel to Russia as it eliminates the need for visas—an attraction, for example, in Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia. Russians may seek frequent travel to Russia to visit their relatives while all nationalities may benefit from visa-free travel if they work in Russia or reside near the border with the Russian Federation and conduct business or trade across the border. Third, Russian citizenship entitles passport holders additional benefits such as education in Russia, child support payments, free health care, support for large families, worker and military pensions, and the right to vote in Russian presidential and Duma elections.⁷⁹ Some of these benefits, though, are selectively administered and favor separatist territories. For instance, in 2008 Russian citizens residing in Moldova’s Transnistria received supplementary pension payments, while Russian citizens residing elsewhere in Moldova did not receive such payments.⁸⁰ Lastly, the appeal of Russian citizenship may reflect the success Russia has achieved in its soft power efforts to maintain the loyalty of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers abroad and attract other nationalities.

STAGE 5: INFORMATION WARFARE

The previous four stages of the neo-imperialist trajectory all pave the way for the blitz of information warfare and mark a pivot point preceding more open aggression from Moscow. Information warfare is the aggressive use of propaganda to destabilize, demoralize, or manipulate the target audience and achieve an advantage over an opponent including by seeking to deny, degrade, corrupt, or destroy the opponent’s sources of information. Some use of propaganda, loosely defined as information of a biased or misleading nature used to promote a political cause or point of view, is common among states even during times of peace and is often perceived to be part of soft power efforts. However, a turn to information warfare signals an escalation of tensions and sometimes also a turn to military engagement. In the Russian National Security Concept of 2000, the term “information warfare” was introduced to describe the threats Russia was facing, and rather ambiguously, also as the “improvement and protection of the domestic information infrastructure and integration of Russia into the world information domain.”⁸¹ Russian analysts, when referring to the internal and external information warfare threats that the country faces, argue that such warfare also “presumes ‘nontraditional occupation,’ namely the possibility of controlling territory and making use of its resources without the victor’s physical presence on the territory of the vanquished.”⁸² In my proposed seven-stage trajectory, information warfare is a crucial turning point when an “urgent” need for the “protection” of Russian compatriots and citizens is conceptualized. However, information warfare campaigns are preceded by decades of softer propaganda tactics, spread of pro-Russia historical narratives, and efforts by Russian state-run media companies to capture the audience of post-Soviet states.