Power and Conflict in Russia's Borderlands

The Post-Soviet Geopolitics of Dispute Resolution

Helena Rytövuori-Apunen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788316927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As Cold War battle lines are seemingly re-drawn, Russia's various 'frozen' war zones (ongoing separatist conflicts) are often cited as particularly volatile and assumed by some Western commentators and policymakers to be 'next' on Putin's 'wish list'. But, as Helena Rytövuori-Apunen demonstrates here, this is a gross (and dangerous) oversimplification that will only serve to fuel the vicious circle of reciprocal military escalation. Drawing on a range of empirical research and across separatist conflicts in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), Moldova (Transnistria and Gagauzia) and Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh) and the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, her timely book provides a balanced assessment and critique of the assumptions and misunderstandings that inform mainstream discussions, as well as placing the conflicts in their proper and complex historical contexts. At a time when there is an increasing tendency to view Russia as the source of all instability in Eastern Europe, Power and Conflict in Russia's Borderlands is essential reading for anyone interested in the geopolitics of post-Soviet Russia, as well as policymakers and practitioners of peace/conflict resolution studies.

Part One

Russia’s Encounters with Georgia and Its Faltering Ways in the International Community

1

Conventional Rules and the Habitual Experience in the Justification of the War in August 2008

The right of nations to self-determination cannot justify recognition of Kosovo’s independence along with the simultaneous refusal to discuss similar acts by other self-proclaimed states, which have obtained de facto independence exclusively by themselves.

– Statement of the Chamber Council of the Federation Council and the Council of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian

Federation concerning the consequences of the self-proclamation of independence by the territory of Kosovo (Serbia), 18 February 2008.⁵⁴

In its war with Georgia, Moscow attempted to play according to the rules of the international community of states but also to ‘boomerang back’ the norms and principles set up by the United States and NATO together with the EU in their resolution of the conflict over Kosovo. The United States and the EU had paved the way for the recognition of Kosovo’s independence by arguing that Kosovo was sui generis, of ‘its own kind’, i.e. that it should be treated as a singular and special case which would not constitute a precedent for other cases. On the basis of the Ahtisaari plan and with strong support from the United States, Kosovo’s independence came into being in February 2008, initially with a status which was reminiscent of a trusteeship area in the old terminology of the League of Nations.

Russia argued that South Ossetia, just like Kosovo according to Western states, was a special case: The many years in which the conflict had been on the international agenda showed that it could not be resolved in any other way than by a final separation from Georgia. It claimed that it was its intervention alone in August 2008 that had prevented ethnic cleansing.⁵⁵ The two kinds of arguments that, according to Western states, had made Kosovo sui generis were emphasized to be even more applicable to South Ossetia. First, the more formal condition of referenda demonstrating that its people clearly wanted independence from Georgia had been fulfilled. Shortly after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, on 19 January 1992, South Ossetia had held a referendum on independence and becoming merged with North Ossetia on the Russian side of the international border between Russia and Georgia. The majority of the people residing in the region had shown their support for these ideas. (However, what these references to earlier history elide is that by this time the majority of the pro-Georgian population had already departed from South Ossetia.) Russia also reminded its international audience that on 19 November 1992, the South Ossetian Assembly voted to secede from Georgia and to join the Russian Federation. Second, Russia explained its military intervention by arguing that Georgia’s action in August 2008 showed that independence was the only way to escape from the cycle of violence that had developed over the past decades. In South Ossetia large-scale violence had occurred during 1989–92, in the years of the dissolution of the Soviet Union – several years before Kosovo (1998–9). At that time President Yeltsin tried to negotiate a resolution with Eduard Shevardnadze, who had come to power in Georgia with Moscow’s help. In August 2008, President Mikhail Saakashvili was accused of repeating the type of bloodshed reminiscent of the effects of the ‘Georgia for Georgians’ policies of late President Zviad Gamsakhurdia in 1991–2.

Accused of breaching Georgia’s sovereignty, Russia explained that throughout the post-Soviet period it had recognized the sovereignty of Georgia and, prior to August 2008, seventeen years had been spent in a joint peacekeeping mission. The Georgian government’s attack in Tskhinvali on a civilian population which it considers to be the country’s own citizens de facto undermined Georgia’s sovereignty and integrity, and Russia could not act in any other way but to try to prevent the escalation of the conflict through its military intervention.⁵⁶ Russia argued that its actions were intended to prevent its peacekeepers from encountering the kind of situation in which the Dutch contingent had found itself in Srebrenica – not to be able to prevent mass killings on an ethnic basis.⁵⁷ Should the Russian peacekeepers have run away, like ‘some peacekeepers ran away from Srebrenica’? Russia’s Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin enquired at the session of the UN Security Council on 10 August 2008.⁵⁸ Later that month (26 August 2008) President Medvedev explained to the BBC:

the aggression and genocide unleashed by the Saakashvili regime have changed the situation. Our main mission was to prevent a humanitarian disaster and save the lives of people for whom we are responsible, all the more so as many of them are Russian citizens. We therefore had no choice but to take the decision to recognise these two subjects of international law as independent states. We have taken the same course of action as other countries took with regard to Kosovo and a number of similar problems.⁵⁹

‘Aggression’ and ‘genocide’ were terms in a political ‘blame game’. They were not words with which Russia was able to legitimize its military intervention towards the international community. Although the final conclusion of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia was that Georgia had started the war, this did not justify Russia’s actions in the eyes of qualified international opinion.⁶⁰ Russia had used the term ‘genocide’ with reference to the events in the Tskhinvali area during the first days of the war.⁶¹ However, the mere fact that the Georgian military had attacked Ossetians, members of another ethnic group, in the conflict area did not suffice to make this attack genocide, a term which presupposes systematic and intentional action to make extinct a population defined on basis of its ethnicity. Instead, this conflict was about the control of territory. Confronted with such criticism, Russia was left only with the argument that genocide had occurred during the previous, acute phases of the Georgian–Ossetian conflict of the early 1990s, and that it was about to occur again: therefore, Russia presented its action as being ‘about preventing genocide’.⁶²

The reference to the responsibility to save lives resonates with Russia’s initial, failed attempt to reactivate the UN principle of the Responsibility to Protect as justification for its military intervention. According to this principle, states have the responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. If they ‘manifestly failed’ in this, the international community was to take action through the mechanisms of the UN Charter.⁶³ The thin line of reasoning offered by Russia for the validity of this justification was that it immediately, as soon as the violence started on the evening of August 7, had requested the UN Security Council to call for a ceasefire and, therefore, had appealed to the right authority. In other words, it had hoped to gain ex post facto authorization for its intervention from the Council. This had been the case with the Council’s approval of the ECOWAS peacekeeping intervention for cease-fire monitoring (ECOMOG) in the civil wars in Liberia in 1992 and in Sierra Leone in 1997. However, the crucial difference was that Russia had simultaneously launched a war on its own. In the debates of the Security Council Russia in vain sought the acknowledgement of the other members of the Council for its interpretation that Georgia was an ‘aggressor’ against its own people and that Russia’s intervention was justified in order to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and even genocide.

When the role of the UN had been discussed earlier in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Russia’s position was that ‘responsibility to protect’ adds little (if anything) to already existing norms and that it, in fact, erodes these norms by being instrumentalized so easily for political purposes. Russia’s argumentation showed some variation but the starting point remained consistently the same: only humanitarian intervention based on an endorsement by the UN Security Council was permissible.⁶⁴ Russia’s position was articulated in the discussions of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty which, in response to the concerns that had been raised by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 1999 and again in 2000, examined the ‘responsibility to protect’ as an international obligation. These discussions were continued in connection with the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, through which Annan a few years later sought to activate international opinion for reinforcing the global organization’s authority.⁶⁵ The report of the first-mentioned project (The Responsibility to Protect, 2001) provides six criteria for the justification of military intervention (i.e. a just war): right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects.⁶⁶ Because it had initiated a war alone, Russia failed on the first point. The military mobilization and the geographic scope of the action, which included parts of Georgia outside the separatist regions and destroyed Georgian military infrastructure and materiel, again were considered clearly ‘disproportionate’. This was the evaluation of the situation made by US president George W. Bush immediately after the Russian intervention.⁶⁷

The Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) explained that Russia’s use of military force – which they referred to as a ‘peace-making’,⁶⁸ ‘peace enforcement’ and ‘peace coercion’ operation⁶⁹ – had been the last resort necessary in order to prevent the escalation of a humanitarian catastrophe. This catastrophe was argued to have left more than two thousand people dead, most of whom were Russian citizens, and to have caused a major refugee problem not only for Georgia but also for Russia in its republic of North Ossetia-Alania.⁷⁰ Humanitarian catastrophe, a term which refers to a great magnitude in the loss of lives or the number of people whose living conditions have dramatically deteriorated, arguably described the situation during and after the five days of war.⁷¹ However, the question remains whether the magnitude would have been less had Russia not mobilized for military intervention. When it did so, it also heightened the moment for secession; and this, in turn, increased the strength of the argument that this move was a ‘last resort’ and an immediate ‘remedial’ solution to long-lasting violence following the example set by Kosovo.⁷²

Towards the end of August 2008 Russia’s reasoning about the humanitarian grounds had resulted in legal and political entanglement. Making reference to a United Nations General Assembly Resolution, which on the occasion of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the organization in 1970 had declared the principles of international law on friendly and cooperative relations between states (UNGAR 2625), Russia maintained that President Saakashvili himself had undermined the territorial integrity of Georgia. Moscow now reminded that in accordance with the 1970 declaration ‘every State has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peoples of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence’. Russia argued that Saakashvili had demonstrated his inability to comply with ‘the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’, which requires that a government must represent ‘the whole people belonging to the territory’.⁷³ However, this argument, which, at best, could be considered customary international law, remained weak in any legal sense. Russia began to emphasize a very traditional principle as the basis for its action: the United Nations Charter Article 51, that is, the right to individual or collective self-defence.

Whilst collective self-defence was not logically a viable frame for explaining action (because South Ossetia was formally a part of Georgia), it was possible to refer to individual self-defence: Russia pointed out that its peacekeepers and civilian citizens had been attacked. When the war started and the Georgian troops rolled in, twelve Russian peacekeepers had been killed, some of them by their Georgian counterparts. However, it was not only members of the military who were Russian citizens in Georgia’s secessionist regions. Half a decade before the war, Russia had started to hand out Russian passports in large numbers throughout Georgia’s secessionist regions. The passport policy became an indirect way to tell the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that Russia was prepared to defend them. By the summer of 2008 almost the entire population of South Ossetia (40,000 out of the 45,000 who were left in the war-torn region in 2008) had Russian passports. The corresponding figure in Abkhazia during the same time was 150,000 out of 200,000.⁷⁴ Russia explained the passport policy by referring to humanitarian reasons: because they felt threatened in Georgia, it was important for South Ossetians to be able to affiliate with their kin and to be able to run their practical affairs and connect with family in North Ossetia-Alania on the Russian side of the border. Likewise in the case of Abkhazia Russian policymakers and experts argued that the population had been thrown into military conflict and that it was Russia’s moral obligation to help them.⁷⁵ For the population of these regions possession of the passport of the former fatherland – Russia as the successor state of the Soviet Union – was also natural. In South Ossetia and Abkhazia owning a Russian passport became general practice prior to the introduction of the separatist regions’ own identity papers.

This passport policy is a modern version of the historical relationship of protection offered by Russia to smaller ethnic groups who have wished to escape the domination of their ‘parent states’ or other regional powers. It is a way to build vertical relations by supporting a group of people within another state, and to do this in such a manner that claims to be justified in terms of horizontal international relations: The ethnic groups under Russia’s protection become Russian citizens, which Russia has the right to protect even beyond its formal borders. However, in this particular case self-defence was not a plausible explanation, because Russia’s operation in this sense had been ‘disproportionate’. Russia ultimately conceded to the view that its war in South Ossetia had been a humanitarian intervention. Its reasoning remained weak against the criticism that, in fact, it was precisely the kind of demonstration of the unilateral use of force which the responsibility to protect was meant to avoid. In March 2009, Chairman of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs Konstantin Kosachev emphasized that for Russia the August war was a ‘humanitarian mission’ to protect people in dire need of protection. In comparison to the Kosovars, whose case evoked sentiments of solidarity in many countries, in South Ossetia in August 2008 there was ‘simply nobody to protect them’. Kosachev repeated President Medvedev’s argument of August 26, saying that the only way to save these people was to recognize the regions as subjects of international law.⁷⁶ In the discussion, which continued until the next spring, Russia explained its point in relation to established principles of international law: While the respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states remains the fundamental principle of international law, the right of nations to self-determination prevails over this in only one case: when a people are threatened with physical extermination and the only way to save them is to establish a separate state. The rule that was articulated in this way left the possibility of its application contingent on the political context. How can it be known that it is ‘the only way’ when one cannot sit and wait for ‘Srebrenica’ to occur? Russia’s answer to this problem is that in South Ossetia such a case was based on what could be expected as an event in the future and what could be assumed as the intentions of the Georgian leadership.

Wayward reasoning against the background of history

Russia’s argumentation concerning Abkhazia followed lines in that it claimed that Abkhazia would be next on Saakashvili’s agenda. When Georgia denounced the agreement on the presence of the Russian peacekeeping mission in Abkhazia and declared them occupying troops on 13 August, Russia reacted by arguing that the Russian withdrawal would mean a collapse of the entire fragile arrangement to safeguard peace in Abkhazia. A statement of the Russian MFA on 13 August concludes:

Thus, in case of the realization of the absurd demand of Mikhail Saakashvili to end the peacekeeping operation in Abkhazia the region risks getting bogged down even deeper in the quagmire of crisis brought on by the unhealthy ambitions of the present Georgian leadership. Such a scenario is categorically unacceptable for the peoples inhabiting the region. It is fraught with new bloodshed, with new thousands of refugees and with a widening of the humanitarian catastrophe.⁷⁷

Following the line of argument that the Western states had used in the case of Kosovo, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs argued that Abkhaz opinion had to be taken into account. However, Russia also needed to avoid the impression that it had now accepted NATO’s use of force in the war between Serbia and Kosovo in 1999. This resulted in extremely detailed arguments about how Georgia failed to offer conditions under which South Ossetia and Abkhazia could exist, and that this was in spite of the fact that the concessions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Transliteration
• Introduction: Russia’s Deep Borders in the Making
• Part One Russia’s Encounters with Georgia and Its Faltering Waysin the International Community
• Part Two Dealing with Divided Moldova: Failed Resolution andRussian Policies of Vertical Power
• Part Three Nagorno-Karabakh: Leverage for Controlling Russia’sDeep Border Arrangements with Armenia and Azerbaijan
• Conclusion: Russia’s Deep Border Practices in Its Post-Soviet Borderlands
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint