Sovereignty of Nation States

The vision of sovereignty is grounded in a realist approach to international politics, with the cornerstones of a Westphalian system ² of sovereign nation states and the principle of non-interference. The most important models of foreign policy in realist interpretation are spheres of influence or interests (that can evolve into a balance of power) and great power management. The common denominator for all these models is the Kremlin’s eagerness to be recognized in the West as a legitimate hegemon in its region. Theoretically, the great power management model is feasible, but in practice, it does not work due to mutual misperceptions and incorrect assessments of intentions. The normatively loaded idea of sovereignty as an underpinning principle of international relations is transformed into Russia’s defence of the Westphalian normative order and the rule of international law.

According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk,Reference Sloterdijk ³ the tendency to compensate one’s lack of personal self-respect by indulging in the imperialist glory of one’s home country can be observed especially in the nation states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are for him ‘experiments in collective self-esteem and self-aggrandizement, directed by the mass media.’ The foreign policy of these national states, ‘insofar as it included imaginary competition, was always dramatized by tension of respect and disrespect.’ This element must not be underestimated. It clearly still plays an important role in present-day Russia, where citizens, whose political freedom are more and more restricted, long for ‘national greatness’ and a recovery of ‘Russia’s glorious past.’

A messianic mission radiates throughout all Russian foreign policy, from the sixteenth-century idea of Russia as ‘the Third Rome’. Following the Time of Troubles in the sixteenth century, Russia gathered strength as rival centres of power – Sweden, Poland, Turkey, and Persia – began their decline. LeDonneReference LeDonne ⁴ sees this as the reason why Russia was able to advance steadily toward the full occupation of the heartland, creating a permanent frustration that the empire’s natural contours remained incomplete. Russian behaviour had a settled and solid core: Russia regularly sought the ‘destabilization of the frontier by exploiting local opposition’, regularly worked to incorporate the elites in the contested ‘zones’ into ‘an Imperial ruling elite’, and regularly strove to weaken the other core areas from within. LeDonne finishes by asking:

Soft Power

A narrow definition of soft power was adopted, confined to co-option through the advancement and promotion of cultural ties, with this seen as the main component of Russia’s regional soft power offensive. As Tsygankov notes,Reference Tsygankov ⁵ ‘soft power speaks to people and societies, rather than governments and elites.’ Some commentators have interpreted the new focus on soft power in Russian foreign policy as just another imperialist tactic. The emphasis on society that underpins the shift, however, suggests a different interpretation. The series of so-called ‘colour revolutions’ across post-Soviet space towards the end of Putin’s second term drove the realization that the absence of pro-Russian governments necessitated a focus on the cultural ties that bind citizens across the region. The change of orientation was articulated in a speech made by Putin in 2004, in which he argued that Russia is ‘not using sufficiently well the historical credits of trust and friendship, the close ties that link the peoples of our countries.’Reference Putin ⁶ The statement’s emphasis is implicitly on bolstering Russia’s ideological stability through the strengthening of cultural ties with former dependencies and particularly the sizeable Russian diaspora. This is particularly evident in the Baltic sub-complex, where the familiarity with Russian language and culture and existing business links are used to establish what Grigas terms, ‘Kremlin-friendly networks of influence’ throughout society.Reference Grigas ⁷

Russia does not utilize soft power for the sake of fostering Europeanization and comprehensive modernization; instead, Moscow uses soft power to voluntarily detach itself from the group of democratic nations that share common normative approaches to world politics. It is against this backdrop that the completely political pedigree of Russia’s soft power has to be assessed, with such cornerstone concepts as multi-polarity, sovereignty, spheres of influence, domestic and foreign policy conservatism, and the protection of Russian speakers. Sometimes Russian soft power can be brazen. In April 2007, Estonia – at that time, in the midst of a controversy surrounding the relocation of a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier – was subject to a massive cyber-attack. ⁸ Banks, media, and the Parliament all faced major disruptions in their activity. The attacks are believed to have originated in Russia; with the pro-Putin, youth group Nashi claiming credit. Estonia, a NATO and EU member, has the grave misfortune of sharing a border with Russia and having an ethnic Russian populace of roughly 25%. Putin does not have to invade to keep Estonians awake at night. Efforts at retaining a strategic energy infrastructure across the post-Soviet space in the 1990s were followed by a domestic campaign during Putin’s first term to consolidate state control over energy flows. This facilitated use of energy as a tool in the Kremlin’s subsequent foreign policy towards its neighbours, a tactic enshrined in Russia’s 2030 Energy Strategy.Reference Smith ⁹ Use of the ‘gas weapon’ to exploit regional dependency on Russia’s reserves was at the same time calculated against the potential domestic repercussions of such a policy. Dominance over regional networks can thus be used as a tool to apply pressure for political change abroad and as an incentive for political and economic alignment with Moscow. In both cases, it can serve to bolster the regime’s political stability and facilitate the ‘great power campaign’ when aggressive behaviour abroad is needed to galvanize public sentiment.

The former Soviet Union’s Zone of Influence

Putin’s reference to Russia as a ‘civilization’Reference Galeotti and Bowen ¹⁰ signals itself a return to the time-honoured belief that there is something unique about Russia rooted not only in ethnic identity but in culture and history – a belief that began when the country became the chief stronghold of Eastern Orthodoxy after the fall of Constantinople. As Putin put it in his 2012 state-of-the-federation address:

The notion of an empire built based on a civilization is crucial to understanding Putin. There are neighbouring countries (‘near abroad’), such as those in the South Caucasus, that he believes ought to recognize that they are part of Russia’s sphere of influence, its defensive perimeter, and its economic hinterland. However, he stops short of wanting forcefully to bring them under direct dominion because they are not ethnically Russian. Even when Moscow separated the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008, for example, it set them up as independent puppet states; it did not annex them into the Russian Federation. Putin does insist, however, that Moscow is the protector of Russians worldwide.

Putin called the Georgia war a ‘humanitarian intervention’ on behalf of Russian separatists in the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Chess master Gary Kasparov says of Putin, the motto is simply ‘Let’s steal together’. Kasparov’s comment is reminiscent of the remark made by Senator Henry Jackson, who once said the ‘Russians are like a burglar going down a hotel corridor, trying all the doors. When they find one unlocked, they go in.’ It is not just Ukraine and Georgia where Putin has been at work. For more than a dozen years now, he has burgled Eastern Europe and the territories of the former Soviet Union. Putin’s weapons of choice have not been tanks and MiG fighters; he has mastered the dark side of soft power. According to Cohen and Hamilton, ‘Russia launched the war against Georgia in August 2008 for highly valued strategic and geopolitical objectives, which included de facto annexation of Abkhazia, weakening or toppling the Mikheil Saakashvili regime, and preventing NATO enlargement in the Caucasus.’Reference Cohen and Hamilton ¹¹

Vladimir Putin announced his strategic doctrine regarding ‘post-Soviet space’, as he calls the lands of the former Soviet Union, early in his first presidency and has stuck with it ever since. In a speech to the Russian Federal Assembly on 16 May 2003, he declared, ‘We see the [Commonwealth of Independent States] area as the sphere of our strategic interests.’ In his April 2005 speech to the same body, Putin called for unanimity within the Commonwealth of Independent States, hailing the Second World War victory that unity had made possible. ¹² Although he did pay lip service to the independence of the CIS nations and their ‘international authority’, he hinted that independence from Russia was not quite what he had in mind: ‘We would like to achieve synchronization of the pace and parameters of reform processes underway in Russia and the other members of the CIS.’ In other words, Moscow wanted a say in, how fast political change took place in neighbouring states, and what form it would take.

Putin’s assertion that Russia has the right to protect Russians and Russian-speakers outside of Russia’s borders is an alarming development within Putin’s doctrine, opening a door to Russian military intervention in the post-Soviet space, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea challenges the post-Cold War order and America’s role as a global arbiter. It also provokes NATO’s defence strategies and challenges the vision that Europe is whole and free. Vladimir Putin has Russia’s neighbours fearing and many Russians believing that, in effect, he has announced his objective to bring the former Soviet space once again under Russian influence, if not incorporated into the Russian state. Russia enforced its dominance in the ‘near abroad’ states and increased its efforts to launch the Moscow-dominated Eurasian Union. It seems that the Kremlin had adopted a new strategy: to expand Russia’s military presence in its ‘near abroad’ states, and to keep former Soviet republics in Russia’s orbit. Moscow started to intensify its military build-up in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood, and increased its pressure on neighbouring countries to join the Moscow-dominated Eurasian Union. In parallel, Russia pushed the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russia-dominated post-Soviet security block. In fact, in 2009, soon after the Georgian war, Russia pressured Kyrgyzstan to close its US military air base at Manas, near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. A year later, Russia extended its lease for the military base in Armenia to 2044 and supplied large amounts of military hardware to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the two Central Asian countries that also host Russian military bases.

Some Western politicians have likened Russia’s invocation of the woes of ‘compatriots’ to Hitler’s justification for protecting Volksgenossen in Czechoslovakia. That is unfair to Hitler. It is true that the Nazi propaganda cynically whipped up the grievances of the Sudeten Germans, and that Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was an outrage. However, the authorities in pre-war Prague had given the Germans within their borders genuine reason to complain. German was not an official language. Czechoslovakia’s identity was based on Czech and Slovak ethnic and linguistic pre-eminence, which gave little space for Germans (or Hungarians) to feel loyal or included. Vladimir Putin seemed intent on moving the historical clock backwards to the age of nineteenth-century Russian imperialism. As the leader of an economically weak and vulnerable country with a corrupt governing class, the Russian president acted with brazen disregard for international law and norms. In the case of Armenia, Moscow was able to use the threat of withdrawing its support regarding Nagorno-Karabakh, a largely Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, to induce the Armenians to abruptly switch policy, from joining the Eastern Partnership with the EU to starting the process of becoming part of the Kremlin-controlled Eurasian Union. In sum, Moscow has been able to ‘unfreeze’ these ‘frozen’ conflicts at will to pressure and bully various post-Soviet republics. All this has been part of the larger Kremlin goal of re-creating a Russian-controlled empire within the former Soviet space. Moscow will keep reasserting control over what it considers its legitimate sphere of influence for Russia.

Chauvinism and Irredentism the Basis of Russian Policy

‘Putin has made Russian chauvinism and irredentism the basis of Russian policy,’ says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former Deputy Secretary of State. For now, it is limited to Ukraine. Without sending a single tank across the border, Putin has engineered an armed rebellion in the country’s eastern provinces.Reference Crowley and Shuster ¹³ Putin retains the right, granted by the Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian Parliament) to intervene wherever he believes ‘Russians’ are threatened. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced (via Twitter on 12 April 2014), ‘The world order is being restructured ... [And] the West has to accept it.’

Russians in the Putin mould will not forget that, during the Cold War, Bulgaria was considered one of the USSR’s staunchest allies. As for Macedonia, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was there just last year, praising the country as a key Kremlin ally in the Balkans. Putin has kept his eye on the Russian-populated strip of Moldovan territory called Transnistria, which lies along Moldova’s border with Ukraine. We will not be surprised if this is the site of his next ‘humanitarian’ intervention. Moscow granted the majority of the Abkhaz, South Ossetians, and Ukrainians Russian citizenship. This is a tool of geopolitics that other regimes in Europe practised in darker eras (1930s in Sudetenland). The use of Russian citizenship to create a ‘protected’ population residing in a neighbouring state to undermine its sovereignty is a slippery slope that may lead to a redrawing of the former Soviet borders, including in the Ukraine, and possibly in Northern Kazakhstan (Ref. 15, p. ix). Putin’s strategy is to weaken domestic opponents and so shift the domestic balance of forces in his favour. Alternatively, and much more seriously, Putin’s final objective may be to weaken external adversaries, and so to shift the balance of forces in Europe. To do this permanently would mean to redraw frontiers by creating a new empire of all Russia with a cordon sanitaire of neutralized states on its borders. He will continue to work to subordinate Ukraine and Belarus in a Eurasian Union, while isolating and neutralizing all Russia’s less-compliant neighbours, which include Georgia, Poland, and the Baltic states.

Putin’s logic is that the Yanukovych regime had violated its social contract with the Ukrainian people, thereby enabling them to assert their natural democratic rights, in the exact same manner as the drafters of America’s Declaration of Independence did in 1776. Putin’s devotion to constitutionality is selective: the outrage he expressed at Yanukovych’s ouster was decidedly absent when, in 2010, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was driven from power in Kyrgyzstan and replaced by a pro-Russian interim government headed by opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva.

The law ‘On State Policy of the Russian Federation with respect to Compatriots Abroad’ defines compatriots as ‘people living in other states deriving from some ethnicity that has historically resided in Russia’, along with people who have ‘made a free choice to be spiritually, culturally and legally linked to the Russian Federation.’ ¹⁴ This choice can include ‘an act of self-identification, reinforced by social or professional activity for the preservation of Russian language, the native languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation, or the development of Russian culture abroad.’ There is a fundamental indeterminacy in this definition, but much like the indeterminacy of the ‘responsibility to protect’ invoked by the West, it gives Putin the flexibility to choose to intervene only when it is in the service of other political objectives. ¹⁵ No matter what language it uses as justification, Russia intervenes on behalf of its ‘compatriots’ in breakaway provinces if and only if doing so serves its goal of re-establishing the sphere of influence it lost in the 1990s. Within the breakaway provinces, both separatists and their Russian allies have worked hard to create a daily sense of being under siege from the de jure states and to create an image of the militarized Russian state as a necessary protector of minority rights. Putin challenges the idea of a world divided among recognized territories and creates zones from which the fundamental terms of politics, place, and belonging in Europe are redefined.

It was this situation that Putin exploited in an adventurous undertaking bordering on true greatness with his campaign to reunite Crimea with Russia. In grabbing pieces of Russian-speaking Europe, Putin has counted on this same erosion of international order. He does not want to strengthen the United Nations – his dream is of a Eurasian alliance led by Russia. He justifies the annexation of Crimea by blaming the United States and NATO for setting the precedent in Kosovo in 1999, an air war fought without the blessing of the Security Council, although it was precipitated by an imminent Serbian genocide against Kosovar Albanians, not by a popular movement against a corrupt leader, as was the case in Ukraine with Putin’s client, Viktor Yanukovych. Putin’s ‘New Russia’ is historically dubious, a work of convenient fiction – and a cover for his assault on Ukraine, featuring the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk region. Yet Putin has done the world a favour by bringing the word Novorossiya back into circulation. Novorossiya is the perfect word to describe the messianic, autocratic, and increasingly dangerous regime Putin has been engineering over the past three years. The annexation of Crimea and Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine should be considered an epiphenomenon of Russian politics. Putin has been changing his regime from a ‘softer’, largely non-ideological, corrupt ‘electoral authoritarianism’ to a highly personalist, far more repressive, and ideologically inspired dictatorship.

Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, used only the word rossiyane ‘citizens of Russia’ to describe the populace. However, in the past two years Putin has taken to using the term russkie ‘ethnically Russian’. In an 18 March 2014 address following the annexation of Crimea, he used this term 27 times. In an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, he used the word in a context unseen since Stalin’s post-Second World War dithyrambs to the ethnic Russians as the ‘leading people’ of the Soviet Union. Putin has declared the russkie the ‘core’, the ‘binding fabric’, the ‘cultural nucleus’ whose ‘great mission’ is to continue to ‘unite and bind this civilization’, In April, Putin concluded his annual, nationally televised Q&A call-in session by extolling the ‘Russian soul’ as well as the ‘heroism and self-sacrifice’ that allegedly sets his people apart from ‘the other peoples’. The definition of Russian patriotism has become a distinct political phenomenon.

President Vladimir Putin called the 1991 Soviet breakup ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’ and does not hide his aim to reassemble the Soviet Union by incorporating the ‘near abroad’ states into his Eurasian Economic Union, first signed in 2011. His 2014 occupation of Crimea to protect ethnic Russians and the Russian Black Sea fleet, also warned Ukraine not to join NATO, an improvised heavy-handed move that may push Kyiv to do precisely that. Leonid Reshetnikov, the director of the Russian Federation Institute of Strategic Studies – allegedly Putin’s think tank – recently stated that Russia opposed Montenegrin membership in NATO and added, ‘It is absurd that Russian missiles will have to be turned toward Montenegro in case of need, but there it is.’ Reshetnikov also argued against membership of the EU, claiming falsely that Russia’s Eurasian integration programme actually offers an alternative to many Balkan and Eastern European states: the Baltic states, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, and so forth.

Putin always intended to recreate an authoritarian, expansionist Russia; one could also argue that an authoritarian, expansionist Russia was the inevitable result of Putin’s need to protect himself, his cronies, and their money. Once a year, beneath the neo-Gothic spires of the Foreign Ministry building in Moscow, Russian diplomats from around the world gather to receive their President’s orders. The summit last year took place in July; a few months after Russia had invaded and annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. The address from President Vladimir Putin laid out the new priority for his diplomatic corps: defending ethnic Russians not living in Russia itself. In Ukraine, Putin said, ‘militant nationalists’ were rising again, leaving millions of ethnic Russians marooned and helpless outside the borders of the motherland. ‘I want you all to understand; our country will continue to defend the rights of Russians, of our compatriots abroad, using everything we have in our arsenal.’

‘When the West said that Russia is aggressive,’ says Kasyanov, Russian ex-prime-minister,

‘In order to wage a hybrid war,’ says Konstantin Sivkov, who served as a strategist for the Russian General Staff from 1995 to 2007 and now heads a military think tank in Moscow, ‘you need a serious opposition force inside the target country, a so-called fifth column, which is a force that is prepared to rise up in support of the foreign invader.’ Putin has used this tactic in Ukraine with great success, annexing Crimea and stirring a pro-Russia separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine. In both cases, local Russian-speaking communities acted as that fifth column.

It is not just in Ukraine that Vladimir Putin’s regime has been advancing its agenda. There were the 2007 cyber-attacks on Estonia. There was the 2008 invasion of Georgia. There is diplomatic and economic pressure today on Moldova, Macedonia, and Montenegro to discourage these countries from further Western integration. While the US was concentrating on Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab Spring, and while the EU has been largely preoccupied with its sovereign debt crisis, a Putin Doctrine toward Eastern Europe has emerged. The Putin Doctrine is straightforward. If you are not in the EU and NATO by now – Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova top the current list – forget it. You belong to the Russian sphere of influence. If you are already a member of these Western organizations, Moscow will work to make you weak, divided and dependent. To this end, Russia has been supporting extremist parties in a number of countries across the region, including in Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovakia, and Hungary. Moscow provides financial assistance to separatists in Moldova and Georgia. The Kremlin pursues an aggressive media strategy, stirring up anti-Americanism and distrust of the West generally, wherever it can.

Politically, at the least it raises a question about the safety of Russian neighbours that are independent states yet not part of NATO. Are they fair game for Russian coercion or expansionism? Will Russia test NATO by moving against a NATO country with a significant population of ethnic Russians? Strategically, not much has changed, because Russia already controlled Crimea as a naval base through agreement with the government of Ukraine. Legally, Russia has violated the bedrock international law, prohibiting the use of force, becoming a belligerent occupant in Crimea in the process. The fact that ethnic Russians who are Ukrainian citizens may want to become Russian citizens and take Crimea with them does not enable Russia to meet the test of self-defence, however expansively interpreted to include anticipatory self-defence. The ideological aspects of Putin’s ambition ought not to be ignored; the world has too much experience trying to understand ideologues that, ultimately, have had to be taken seriously in their own terms. It bears watching to see whether Putin’s Eurasian Union indeed proves to be the antidemocratic, anti-rule-of-law collectivity observers such as Timothy Snyder fear. ¹⁷ If so, the likelihood of a new version of ideological struggle, with elements akin to aspects of the Cold War, should not be discounted.

Putin’s Geopolitical Goal: The Restoration of the Lost Empire. The Case of Ukraine

Condoleezza Rice:

In the 1994 memorandum, the United States, Britain and Russia committed themselves to, among other things, respect the territorial integrity and political independence of Ukraine, not to use or threaten the use of force, not to engage in economic coercion, and to consult in the event of a question arising about these commitments. ¹⁹ Russia has violated each of these commitments, while saying that the 1994 memorandum is no longer binding, because Ukraine is no longer the same as it was in 1994. This position represents bad faith and poor legal reasoning as well as doubtful strategy: commitments do not change with governments unless explicitly renounced.

In April 2008, at Bucharest NATO summit, Putin remarked that Ukraine ‘was not even a State’ and ‘would break apart’. In 2003, Putin proposed that Belarus should return to Russia and join the Russian Federation as Six Oblast (provinces), a proposition that was refused by Belarus. In 2008, Putin’s government distributed Russian passports in Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine, knowing that the Ukrainian Constitution strictly forbade dual nationalism.

Yanukovych’s ouster from the Ukrainian presidency was the inevitable catalyst for a decisive expression of a new imperialism. Russia’s aggressive and opportunistic policy towards Ukraine must be framed in the context of Ukrainian weakness, and of the outside world’s inattention and complacency. Following the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005, supposedly pro-European and reformist leaders in Kyiv squandered every chance to run their country properly, paving the way for the election in 2010 of the dismal Mr Yanukovych. Putin’s Russia may have a general goal of containing the West, but its specific moves are situational. Putin is constantly experimenting, seeking new venues and manoeuvres and testing Western reactions. For instance, as long as Yanukovych held power in Kyiv, Moscow had no need to weaken Ukraine’s central government by annexing Crimea. However, once Yanukovych fled and leaders unwilling to dance to Moscow’s tune took his place, the Kremlin switched tactics and began working to make Ukraine a failed state.

Putin, from the moment Ukraine’s sovereign status entered into play after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, has regularly sounded both themes.Reference Higgins and Kramer ²⁰ He declared Crimea an integral and historic part of Russia. He described the eastern parts of Ukraine as Novorossiya (New Russia) a nineteenth-century coinage that signalled his belief that they belong in the Russian Federation. In crystalline irredentist terms, he asserted the right of Russia to intervene in Ukraine, and perhaps other states in his ‘near abroad’ – e.g. Moldova, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia – to protect Russians whom, contrary to modern Soviet and then Russian Federation practice, he suddenly defined as speakers of Russian.

On 27 February 2014, Russia seized Crimea by force and purported to annex it on 21 March. Now, Russia occupies Crimea, a province of Ukraine, just as it does South Ossetia and Abkhazia, regions of the independent state of Georgia. By manufacturing a pro-Moscow insurgency in Donbas, Putin effectively invaded Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s plans for Great Russia do not include an independent Ukraine, and he does not care for diplomacy. Although Putin has acted incrementally so far, there is little doubt about his ultimate goal of not only the economic but also the full political integration of Ukraine into a ‘Greater Russia’. During his triumphalist visit to Crimea on 9 May 2014, for instance, he called the illegal annexation of that territory ‘affirming fidelity to the historical truth and the memory of our ancestors’. Putin continues to insist on ‘federalism’ in Ukraine, which in the current Russian imperialist lexicon, as noted, is a prelude to annexation slice by slice, and has maintained Moscow’s brutal economic pressure on Kyiv. Seminally, the Kremlin continues its large and stealthy military presence in eastern Ukraine and in some ways has enhanced it, sending in more professional and disciplined forces such as the combat-experienced Vostok Battalion to bring order to the secessionists and to streamline and strengthen Moscow’s control in key parts of the region. Putin and his ideology increasingly prefer to accentuate identity rather than material interests. This is well illustrated by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which is overwhelmingly portrayed by the officialdom as an indispensable element of retrieving Russian territories and reassembling the fragmented world of Russian-speakers. Russia’s ‘normative offensive’ is more identity-driven than grounded in rationality and economic calculus. This explains why Putin’s version of realism merges with the conservative tradition in international relations, which is present in many other countries as well. The Kremlin’s conservative turn, which evolved into the core element of Moscow’s official political philosophy since the commencement of Putin’s third presidential term, has to be understood against the backdrop of the events of 2011–2012, when the regime faced harsh domestic opposition (mass protests that questioned the legitimacy of the ruling elite) and international challenges.

It is not unimportant to emphasise that, in 2004, Putin declared that ‘if Ukraine wants to join the EU and if the EU accepts Ukraine as a member, Russia, I think, would welcome this because we have a special relationship with Ukraine.’Reference Applebaum ²¹