Geopolitical Priorities in Russia's Regional Policies

State regional policies are generally based either on the goal of stimulating the development of specific regions or of equalizing the level of development among the regions. The first path is generally pursued by developing states while rich states favor the second path. Russia has in the past experimented with both vectors of regional policy. Since the annexation of Crimea, a third factor has come to dominate: geopolitics. The main goal of Russia's regional policy is securing control of geopolitically significant territories. The high expense of such a policy makes it unsustainable during a period of economic retrenchment.     

After the Ukrainian crisis: Is there a place for Russia?

Revolutionary protests in Ukraine in winter 2014 resulted in the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and an anti-terrorist operation launched by Kiev in eastern Ukraine. What was a totally internal manifestation of displeasure with governmental policy transformed into an international security crisis. While Kiev considers it a Russian–Ukrainian conflict, Moscow perceives it as a Russian–West confrontation, claiming that the crisis was provoked by NATO’s desire to enlarge into the region where Russia’s vital interests lie. The article analyses the sources of the current Ukrainian–Russian conflict and looks into Russia’s place in post-crisis Ukraine. As history has shown, even those states which used to fight each other for centuries managed not only to find peace but to establish constructive relationships. Still, with the shift from material to ideological confrontation, there are fewer and fewer options for compromise.     

Crimea and the quest for energy and military hegemony in the Black Sea region: governance gap in a contested geostrategic zone

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its destabilization of Eastern Ukraine have radically altered the European security order, with the Black Sea region becoming an acutely contested geostrategic zone. Russia’s strategic interests in the Black Sea region, especially in terms of energy and military presence, collide with those of Ukraine, Turkey, the European Union and the United States, among others, and expose the governance gap left by the existing conventions and institutions in dealing with the region. It is argued that Russia’s move to annex Crimea was a strategic decision made irrespective of the destructive effect on the post-Cold War order. Furthermore, until a new normal has been accepted by the main players, there is no hope of revising the existing conventions and institutions pertaining to the basin.     

Official Russian identity discourse in light of the annexation of Crimea: national or imperial?

Close examination and analysis of the Kremlin’s framing of Russia’s annexation of Crimea reveals that domestically it was presented in unprecedented national irredentist terminology, aiming at reunifying the Russian nation in one state. The Russian nation was largely described in ethno-lingual or ethno-cultural terms, while the Russian state was all but explicitly declared as a nation–state of ethnic Russians. The official identity discourse was marked by the recasting and unprecedentedly strong reassertion of boundaries between the Russian and Ukrainian nations, legitimizing Russian claims to Crimea. However, the changing references to the crisis in Eastern Ukraine illustrate how the Kremlin’s identity rhetoric is still mainly guided by considerations of political necessity, rather than dictated by some national or ideological vision. Significantly, the focus of the Russian official identity discourse shifted from the state to the nation. This marks a decisive departure from Putin’s earlier largely statist rhetoric in the 2000s, and a new stage of maturation and official acclamation of national ethnicization trends launched during his third presidential term. After years of sitting on the fence, the Kremlin reinvented itself as an active and initiating player in the nationalism field.     

Reviving the Russian empire: the Crimean intervention through a neoclassical realist lens

Although many policy-makers and scholars maintain that international norms have altered the motivations underlying state behaviour, this article argues that states continue to pursue national self-interest, but in ways that remain understudied. While traditional realist assumptions explain a great deal of state behaviour, they have not been widely used to account for important alternative tools of state intervention, such as economic and normative strategies. Focusing on the case of Russia's 2014 intervention in Ukraine, this article offers insights into how, and under what circumstances, these tools are used to accomplish traditional state objectives. Guided by the tenets of neoclassical realism, the article argues that in the case of Russia, military force is no longer the sole, or even the primary, means used to accomplish traditional security goals. Such dynamics have significant theoretical and policy implications for contemporary international relations.     

The Four Pillars of Russia’s Power Narrative

The Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and the annexation of Crimea were two major international events in which Russia engaged in early 2014. In spite of all the divergence in the logic underpinning each of them, four concepts strongly resonate in both cases. First, in hosting the Olympics and in appropriating Crimea, Russia was motivated by solidifying its sovereignty as the key concept in its foreign and domestic policies. Second, the scenarios for both Sochi and Crimea were grounded in the idea of strengthening Russia as a political community through mechanisms of domestic consolidation (Sochi) and opposition to unfriendly external forces (the crisis in Ukraine). Third, Sochi and Crimea unveiled two different facets of the logic of normalisation aimed at proving – albeit by different means – Russia’s great power status. Fourth, one of the major drivers of Russian policy in both cases were security concerns in Russia’s southern flanks, though domestic security was also an important part of the agenda.     

Continuity and change in instrumentalizing ‘The Precedent’. How Russia uses Kosovo to legitimize the annexation of Crimea

The article contributes to the efforts of understanding Russia’s legitimization endeavours by looking at the policy narratives centred around the so-called Kosovo precedent and the way they were perceived by different actors from Ukraine, Russia, and international experts. The aim of the paper is to scrutinize the process of politicization of contested international norms (in particular, territorial sovereignty and the right to self-determination) in the case of Russia’s legitimacy claims in Ukraine. In assessing the instrumentalization of the ‘Kosovo precedent’ in the Crimea crisis, we focused on three main elements identified in the selected policy narratives: the reinterpretation of history, the humanitarian and ethnic factor and the reinterpretation of Western actions in the Balkans.     

Causes of the Collapse of the USSR

The paper studies Russia's Ukraine policy since the Orange Revolution. Russia's policy toward its western neighbor has evolved from unhappy relations with Victor Yushchenko to rapprochement with Victor Yanukovich and then confrontation over the revolutionary power change in Kiev in February 2014. The paper argues that Vladimir Putin's actions following February revolution in Kiev demonstrate both change and continuity in Russia's foreign policy. Although these actions constituted a major escalation, relative to Russia's previous behavior toward Ukraine, the escalation of relations with Kiev also reflected a broader policy pattern of Russia's assertive relations with the Western nations adopted by the Kremlin since the mid-2000s. What made Russia's conflict with Ukraine possible, even inevitable, was the West's lack of recognition for Russia's values and interests in Eurasia, on the one hand, and the critically important role that Ukraine played in the Kremlin's foreign policy calculations, on the other. The paper provides an empirically grounded interpretation of Russia's changing policy that emphasizes Russia–Ukraine–West interaction and a mutually reinforcing dynamics of their misunderstanding. It also addresses four alternative explanations of Russia's Ukraine policy and discusses several dangers and possible solutions to the crisis.     

Framing yourself into a corner: Russia,Crimea, and the minimal action space

A long-held axiom, political leaders are said to favour an action space sufficiently wide to allow them, as a minimum, a face-saving exit. This makes it particularly interesting for us to study those rare cases where political leaders seem to be deliberately reducing their policy options to the point of having merely one line to pursue. The handling by Russian President Vladimir Putin of the early 2014 crisis over Crimea, eventually leading to the annexation by Russia of the Ukrainian Peninsula on 21 March 2014, seems to represent such a rare case. Through the use of state-controlled media, a highly dichotomized framing of the crisis was presented to the Russian audience, essentially leaving Putin with just the one option of acting to “save” the Crimeans from the Ukrainian Government by bringing them into Russia.     

The politics of recognition of Crimean Tatar collective rights in the post-Soviet period: With special attention to the Russian annexation of Crimea

This paper examines the process of how Crimean Tatars strived to attain group-differentiated rights since they have returned to their homeland in the early 1990s. Whereas the politics of minority rights were viewed through security lens in earlier literature, we emphasize the significance of cultural constructs in influencing the minority policies, based on qualitative content analysis of “speech acts” of elites, and movement and policy documents. Focusing on the interaction of the framing processes of Crimean Tatars with the Crimean regional government, Ukraine, and Russia, we argue that the “neo-Stalinist frame” has played a major role in denying the rights of Crimean Tatars for self-determination and preservation of their ethnic identity in both pre and post annexation Crimea. The Crimean Tatars counter-framed against neo-Stalinist frame both in the pre and post-annexation period by demanding their rights as “indigenous people”. Ukraine experienced a frame transformation after the Euromaidan protests, by shifting from a neo-Stalinist frame into a “multiculturalist frame”, which became evident in recognition of the Crimean Tatar status as indigenous people of Crimea.