The Russian Challenge
20150605RussianChallengeGilesHansonLyneNixeySherrWoodUpdate
20150605RussianChallengeGilesHansonLyneNixeySherrWoodUpdate
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<strong>The</strong> <strong>Russian</strong> <strong>Challenge</strong><br />
<strong>Russian</strong> Foreign Policy Towards the West and Western Responses<br />
large ethnic <strong>Russian</strong> population and oil wealth. 149 Putin and<br />
Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbaev are relatively<br />
close, but the latter runs a tight, clan-based regime which<br />
is harder for Russia to penetrate. When Nazarbaev departs,<br />
however, presumably within the next 10 years, northern<br />
Kazakhstan may be in the Kremlin’s crosshairs, especially<br />
if the wider geopolitical situation deteriorates. Belarus is<br />
probably even more at risk if it were to undergo a ‘colour<br />
revolution’. And in Tajikistan, there is great concern in<br />
Dushanbe’s government that 250,000 Tajik migrants in<br />
Russia now have <strong>Russian</strong> passports. <strong>The</strong>se migrants could<br />
become the focal point for a xenophobic backlash. Tajikistan<br />
has reportedly seen a 20 per cent drop in remittances since<br />
the summer of 2014. 150<br />
<strong>The</strong> Black Sea<br />
In the Kremlin’s view, if access to the Black Sea with its<br />
warm-water coastal ports were restricted, its regional<br />
influence would contract. <strong>The</strong> <strong>Russian</strong> military elite sees<br />
regaining Crimea as momentous in restoring strategic<br />
competences. Military support for and renewal of the Black<br />
Sea fleet is under way. 151 Some analysts have suggested that<br />
this indicates an effort to restore the peninsula as a platform<br />
for power projection into the Black Sea and beyond – and to<br />
prevent its loss were a pro-Western Ukrainian government<br />
to revisit the Kharkiv Treaty granting Russia leasing rights<br />
until 2034. 152 Heavy militarization outside Sevastopol<br />
suggests that Crimea is intended to be a bridgehead – not<br />
dissimilar to Kaliningrad. It is conceivable that the Kremlin<br />
really did think, as it has contended, that had it not acted,<br />
the new Ukrainian government would have invited NATO<br />
into Sevastopol.<br />
Russia is now likely to seek to translate land-based gains<br />
into an extension of its maritime territory in the Black<br />
Sea, by claiming Ukraine’s continental shelf and exclusive<br />
economic zone as its own. In addition to serving Russia’s<br />
wider geopolitical agenda, such a move could offer access<br />
to unexploited hydrocarbon deposits. Other countries<br />
bordering the Black Sea would almost certainly not<br />
recognize the legality of such a claim, but Moscow could try<br />
to circumvent their objections by unilaterally renegotiating<br />
maritime boundaries with them. This may explain why<br />
Moscow has incrementally changed the independent<br />
status it had accorded Abkhazia, first by giving itself more<br />
official control under a November 2014 treaty and then by<br />
eliminating border controls altogether in February 2015.<br />
Customs, Economic and Eurasian Unions<br />
Vladimir Putin has long convinced himself that ‘colour<br />
revolutions’ (as in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan)<br />
are directed from the United States and, as with<br />
supposed direct US support for the Arab Spring, have a<br />
malign geopolitical purpose. As noted over the <strong>Russian</strong><br />
interpretation of NATO’s intentions in Crimea, such false<br />
perceptions are nevertheless a reality to the <strong>Russian</strong><br />
leadership. To counter this, the Eurasian Union is Putin’s<br />
big geopolitical idea to consolidate people and lands – his<br />
self-declared front-line of continuity. While he appears to<br />
concede that a Soviet Union Mark II is impractical if not<br />
undesirable, the putative borders of the Eurasian Union do,<br />
coincidentally, conform to those of the USSR, minus the<br />
probably-lost-to-Europe Baltic states.<br />
Putin’s Eurasian Union is still a long way from becoming a<br />
real political entity. He has been forced to move slowly with<br />
the other newly (if nominally for him) independent former<br />
Soviet states. <strong>The</strong> alliance evolved from a straightforward<br />
customs union in 2005 to a Eurasian customs union in 2010,<br />
becoming the Eurasian Economic Union in 2015 – all useful<br />
economic preliminary steps towards a full – i.e. political –<br />
Eurasian Union. This, finally, is intended to provide Russia<br />
with the instruments for control in creating an alternative<br />
pole to the EU-centric order. But the Eurasian Union is<br />
intended to be more than a legal framework for dominion<br />
over ‘wayward’ one-time dependencies – it is designed<br />
to be a new geopolitical force capable of standing up to<br />
all competitors on the world stage. Eurasianism provides<br />
the ideological glue and Russia, of course, is the selfappointed<br />
head of the Eurasian civilization. <strong>The</strong> concept<br />
of Novorossiya is an ideological extension and historical<br />
justification of this project. 153<br />
Each iteration of the union has so far had only moderate<br />
success in attracting members among a wary group of<br />
countries. Membership has been limited to those countries<br />
over which Moscow has the greatest hold. Russia’s<br />
worsening economic situation means that the union is<br />
149<br />
<strong>The</strong> Foreign Policy Concept of the <strong>Russian</strong> Federation sets out Russia’s obligations to its diaspora population, particularly in CIS countries. See, for example, Article 5<br />
and Section IV: http://kremlin.ru/acts/news/785.<br />
150<br />
Jack Farchy, ‘Tajikistan looks to China as <strong>Russian</strong> remittances dry up’, Financial Times, 22 October 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2c87ee20-58f9-11e4-9546-<br />
00144feab7de.html#slide0 [subscriber access].<br />
151<br />
Details of military reinforcement and reform of the basing system of the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol by summer 2015, and future plans, can be found in Dmitry<br />
Boltenkov and Maksim Shepovalenko, ‘<strong>Russian</strong> Defense Arrangements in Crimea’, Moscow Defence Brief 43 (5), 2014, http://www.mdb.cast.ru/mdb/5-2014/item4/<br />
article1/.<br />
152<br />
See Roy Allison, ‘<strong>Russian</strong> “deniable” intervention in Ukraine: how and why Russia broke the rules’, International Affairs 90: 6 (2014), pp. 1278 and 1280.<br />
153<br />
Putin first mentioned the concept ‘Novorossiya’ in his ‘Address to the Federal Assembly’ on 18 March 2014. Novorossiya was the name of the formerly Ottoman<br />
territory conquered by the <strong>Russian</strong> Empire in the Russo-Turkish Wars, which now covers much of southern and eastern Ukraine. It became part of the Ukrainian Soviet<br />
Socialist Republic during the Soviet period. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union the term ‘Novorossiya’ has been used controversially by <strong>Russian</strong> nationalists.<br />
Chatham House | 35