In December 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disintegrated and 15 countries emerged from what had been a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from Moscow. Recently we've heard a lot about one of those post-Soviet republics—Ukraine—but Ukraine is just one of 14 such states (excluding Russia), which attract varying degrees of interest and influence from Moscow.
Part of the concern of the fallout with Crimea is not only the justification or the use of Russian speakers as a pretext for intervention, it's the actual possible use of Russian bases and facilities to interfere in the domestic affairs of a lot of these countries that these governments are concerned about.
The three tiny Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—were only part of the USSR from the 1940s, and since declaring their independence they've become members of the EU and NATO, the military alliance established after the Second World War to counter Soviet power. Professor Alexander Cooley, author of Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, says that although they made western integration an absolute priority, two of these three tiny states have been left with a significant Soviet legacy.
‘Well, the Baltic states were always the most nationalistic and the most anti-Soviet in terms of their orientation, even during Soviet times, but in Latvia and Estonia you have quite large Russian-speaking ethnic minorities,’ he says. ‘Handling the issue of the status of their citizenship has proven to be quite tricky. There are citizenship laws in place in both countries that deny citizenship to Russian speakers, so they are on so-called grey passports. This is why you hear the Kremlin in Moscow make comments about the plight of Russian citizens or Russian ethnics in the Balts. I think one of the consequences of the Crimea crisis is that you're going to see now NATO recommit itself to the territorial integrity of the Balts.’
South of the Baltic states, between Russia and the rest of Europe, are Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, Europe's poorest nation. Belarus enjoys a close relationship with Russia and has benefitted economically from cheap supplies of Russian energy. Moldova's relationship with Russia is complicated by Transnistria, a breakaway region where the population is divided roughly into thirds—Moldovan, Russian, Ukrainian—and where the presence of Russian troops can be considered to give Russia effective authority.
Further south-east along Russia’s border are the South Caucuses—Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan—and three further ‘frozen conflicts’. Georgia's dispute with Russia over its breakaway regions—South Ossetia and Abkhazia—was effectively settled militarily by a short war in 2008, and Russian forces remain in both areas. Armenia and Azerbaijan have a long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region recognised by the UN as part of Azerbaijan but where the population is 95 per cent Armenian.
There are also significant Russian minorities in northern Kazakhstan (one of the five former Soviet states in Central Asia) and in the urban areas of Central Asia, where there was a Russian-speaking, educated, professional elite. Although a lot of them have migrated back to Russia, some are still there. The issue of minorities in the former Soviet republics—Russian populations as well as groups of people who didn't identify with the dominant population—has been one of the major complications in their relationship with the Kremlin. A further complication is the presence of Russian military forces in these now independent states.
‘In Crimea you had both,’ says Cooley. ‘You had a large Russian population there, plus you had the largest Russian military facility outside of the Russian Federation at Sevastopol. So you also have major Russian military bases in Tajikistan. In its capital city, Dushanbe, you have 5,000 Russian troops. You have a Russian airbase in Kurdistan, you have Russian troops in Moldova, in Transnistria, you have Russian troops now stationed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and you have a big Russian base in Armenia too. Part of the concern of the fallout with Crimea is not only the justification or the use of Russian speakers as a pretext for intervention, it's the actual possible use of Russian bases and facilities to interfere in the domestic affairs of a lot of these countries that these governments are concerned about.’
Edward Walker, author of Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union, says that if Russian troops enter Eastern Ukraine, it's unclear what their military objective would be and how far they would go.
‘If that happens it's possible that the Russian military planners would charge their army essentially with moving as rapidly as possible across the southern and eastern parts of the Ukraine on a line from Kharkiv to Transnistria, to Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria. This Russian protectorate in Transnistria, which is what it is ... the local government there has recently requested that Russia annex it just the same way it annexed Crimea, and the Russian legislature has passed a law that basically means that if the Russian government legally wants to do that it can do it very easily under Russian law. It's quite possible that they would be charged with extending Russia's borders in effect all the way to Transnistria.’
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After the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine formed a new federation, the Commonwealth of Independent States. The leaders of eight additional former Soviet Republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—also signed up that month, bringing the number of participating countries to 11. The Baltic states never joined and Georgia joined later and then withdrew. In 2011, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed a new agreement to work toward the establishment of a Eurasian Economic Union, modelled on the EU.
‘The idea of a Eurasian Union was the pet idea of the Kazak president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, during the '90s,’ says Lilia Shevtsova, chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center. ‘Suddenly Putin revived, re-energised this idea two years ago and it became his pet project. Why? Well, my explanation is that he started to think about the key idea of his new presidency, and he started to think about some kind of re-creation … he understands that to restore the Soviet Union is absolutely impossible, maybe it's a crazy idea, but some new entity as a new galaxy around Russia, Russia as a pole in the centre, and then dependent nations on Russia's orbit.’
Shevtsova says the idea is a throwback to the ideas of the Russian nationalists of the early twentieth century, who wanted to counterbalance western influence and create a kind of philosophy of Eurasia as a unique civilisation in the space that covers both Russia and Siberia and the Far East. Russia’s President Putin adopted this idea and has created a customs union that includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and, very soon, Armenia. This new political alliance will have above-nation structures, leadership in the Kremlin, and apparently act as a kind of counterbalance to the European Union. However, Shevtsova believes Russia will need to buy the loyalty of its members.
‘This is the bitter irony—that states, including Kazakhstan, are ready to participate in this Eurasian Union only on their terms, if they get financial assistance from Russia. For instance, now in order to keep Belarus on the orbit, Moscow has to subsidise it and give Belarus $2 billion annually. And Armenia is also anticipating Russia will help it substantially to survive without much developed industry. And Kazakhstan being a member of the Eurasian Union, is also at the moment losing and not prospering because Kazakhstan has to agree to import Russian goods instead of Chinese goods, and Russian goods are much more expensive than Chinese goods.’
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Since the end of the Cold War, the west, through the European Union and NATO, has set up programs to engage with the former Soviet republics. One of the EU programs is the Eastern Partnership, a forum involving the EU, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine that holds out the promise of a free trade agreement, possible visa waiver facilitation, and an expansion in foreign aid.
‘When the EU adopted this Eastern Partnership initiative, Moscow reacted quite negatively,’ says Cooley, ‘because it saw it as a direct geopolitical confrontation and threat. Certainly there were people in the EU that viewed it that way, but some of them didn't, they just saw this as one of many vectors that these particular countries could pursue. Moldova, certainly, wanted this partnership. The other country that is very enthusiastic about the partnership is Georgia, which has tried to develop closer ties with the West ever since 2003 and the so-called Rose Revolution. But I don't think that Brussels was really prepared for the intensity of objection on the part of Moscow.’
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NATO has a similar program, Partnership for Peace, that was aimed at creating trust between NATO and the states in Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the 1990s and 2000s, NATO adopted a membership action program that also contained conditions similar to the EU’s, says Cooley.
‘NATO was saying, okay, if you want to join you need to be a democracy, you need to have a certain proportion of your GDP spent on defence, you need to be interoperable with other NATO military members, you need to have civilian control over the military, reform all your defence industries, and if you meet these conditions then you can join NATO. What really set off the Russians was the discussion of NATO expanding even further eastward beyond Bulgaria and Romania, both on the Black Sea, that were taken as NATO members in the late 2000s, expanding even further eastward to Ukraine and Georgia. This was on the agenda in 2008. The Georgians desperately wanted to … of course there were internal divisions within the alliance saying, no, if we do this it is really going to antagonise Russia. Besides, Georgia already has frozen conflicts and we don't want to embroil NATO there.’
‘So in 2008 at the Bucharest NATO Summit we have one of the famous historical declarations of the post-Cold War time where, in this attempt to craft a compromise and give Georgia and Ukraine something, the compromise language is “although we don't offer a MAP [Membership Action Plan] program today, Ukraine and Georgia will inevitably become NATO members”. This really lit a fire under Putin in Moscow ... for Russia these two countries in particular were real lines in the sand.’
Given these programs set up by the EU and NATO to directly engage with these former Soviet states, surely it’s not an unreasonable reaction by Moscow to see the west as interfering right in its backyard?
‘I don't think it's unreasonable to regard it as interference if your world view is one of a zero-sum game,’ says Cooley. ‘I think one of the most revealing speeches Putin has had was in an initial presser over events in the Ukraine where he compared the democratic activists who led the Maidan protests and were trained I think in Lithuania and Poland, when he sort of compared them to special forces operating in the country. Because in Putin's worldview in this highly charged geopolitical zero-sum world, democratic activists, NGOs, NATO, EU trade agreements, these are all instruments of influence that the west has. And the projection of one is necessarily the loss of the other.’
Rear Vision puts contemporary events in their historical context, answering the question, ‘How did it come to this?’