Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Russian attitudes towards the former Soviet republics were in flux in the 1990s. It was a decade of rampant uncertainty for all these countries, both domestically and in terms of their foreign relations. For the greenhorn Russian elite, many of whom had been in the Soviet, ‘all-union’, institutions just a few years earlier, acceptance of the other progeny of the USSR as fully sovereign countries did not come easily. For example, Vladimir Lukin, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, blithely told Talbott in 1993 that relations between Russia and Ukraine were to be ‘identical to those between New York and New Jersey’.[53] Lukin was something of a liberal on the Russian political spectrum; Russian nationalists, who were well represented in parliament, were more menacing. One lawmaker warned in October 1992 against ‘absolutising’ the new borders dividing the former republics, since they were ‘artificial’ and ‘arbitrary’.[54] Even Yeltsin, when he needed to protect his right flank, would indulge; for example, in March 1993 he called for ‘international organisations’ to grant Russia ‘special authority as guarantor of peace and stability on the territory of the former USSR’.[55] The statement was not backed up by action, but it did inflame sensibilities across the region, eliciting angry retorts from several of the neighbours.

To have its way in post-Soviet Eurasia, the Russian Federation relied on a range of tools. It meddled persistently, though without a master plan, in the internal politics of the successor states, providing moral and media support, and from time to time funding, for groups receptive to Russian policy. In Ukraine, Russia threw its weight behind Yuri Meshkov, the head of the Crimean provincial government, who was a proponent of holding a referendum on secession of the peninsula from the rest of the country. When the national parliament dismissed him in 1995, he was granted asylum in Moscow. In most of the In-Betweens, Moscow’s agencies maintained relations with representatives of diaspora Russian communities. Even moderates like Kozyrev spoke out for defence of the rights of Russians and Russian speakers in the former republics and their ‘voluntary reintegration’ with the Russian Federation.[56] A nationalist faction around Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, were for a more venturesome policy and took a special interest in Crimea.

Russia kept military forces stationed in all of the In-Betweens and, for some time, in the Central Asian republics. Some of these garrisons resulted from its role as pacifier and mediator in the range of ethnic and political conflicts that broke out as the Soviet Union splintered. In Moldova, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, the Soviet and then Russian 14th Army defended the breakaway Transnistria in its conflict with Chisinau in 1990–92. Although unrecognised by any member of the United Nations, Transnistria has had self-rule ever since, and Russian peacekeepers and remnants of the 14th Army are still in place. In Georgia, Moscow brokered an end to two ethno-national wars between the Georgians and the South Ossetians (1991–92) and Abkhaz (1992–94), groups that had eponymous semi-autonomous provinces within the Georgian republic of the USSR. In Abkhazia, Russia’s ‘policy of divide and rule included military support to both sides in the conflict, which, over the course of the conflict, increasingly favored the [Abkhaz]’, ministering to them with weapons, training and the odd airstrike on their Georgian adversaries.[57] The ceasefire agreements created Russian-dominated peacekeeping forces in both areas, along with diminutive international observer missions. Russia kept its army out of Nagorno-Karabakh, the breakaway province of Azerbaijan populated by ethnic Armenians that was the locus of a six-year-long succession of clashes, but it at one and the same time brokered a 1994 armistice in the fighting there, manned its Gyumri base in Armenia (thus warding off intervention by the Turks, ethnic cousins of the Azeris), promised to safeguard Yerevan’s security and happily peddled arms all around. Moscow also intervened to put an end to the civil war of 1992–97 in Tajikistan, which had left more than 50,000 people dead.