Rather than a timetable or a formalized set of policies, the proposed seven-phase scenario reveals the aims of and provides context for the seemingly disparate Russian policies that until now have been under the radar. This is not a timetable to predict if and when Moscow will seek military protection of Russian compatriots and territorial annexation in, say, Kazakhstan or Estonia. However, the scenario signals that if a state has already been a target of the previous five phases of soft power, humanitarian, compatriot, passportization, and information policies, then the groundwork has been laid for potentially more aggressive tactics in the future. Across all former Soviet republics, Russia has already achieved various degrees of success with these policies from country to country. Still, annexation is far from a certain outcome but rather a possibility. Likewise, despite consistent policies to lay the groundwork for influence and control over territories where Russian compatriots reside, Moscow’s specific policy outcomes cannot be predicted or guaranteed.
Some may argue that Moscow’s policies in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and beyond have been haphazard rather than planned, and that there is no consistent discernable trajectory in Russian government policies. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, the evolution of Moscow’s policies toward compatriots has taken time to develop and demonstrated inconsistencies and even initial incoherency. However, the some twenty different Russian policies and laws related to compatriots enacted from 1994 to 2015 and outlined in the next chapter clearly demonstrate that the Kremlin has awarded increasing attention to its diaspora as a tool of foreign policy. It is also reasonable to conclude that Putin’s actions and particularly their timing have been driven by opportunism. Certainly, the 2014 Ukraine’s Maidan movement, which sought to bring the country closer to the West and resulted in bloody clashes between pro-Russia and pro-West groups in Kiev, and in the deposition of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, created instability in Ukraine and in turn a ripe moment for Moscow to take back Crimea and stoke conflict in the eastern part of the country.3 Likewise, the Georgian military operation to retake its breakaway territory of South Ossetia in 2008, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed, was another opportune moment for Russia to officially move its troops into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On a much smaller scale, the Estonian government’s 2007 decision to relocate Tallinn’s Soviet-era war memorial also proved opportune for Moscow to stoke riots by Estonia’s Russian minority. Nonetheless, opportunism can go hand in hand with careful planning. “Fortune favors the bold” says a Latin proverb, but Louis Pasteur said that “fortune favors the prepared.” The reimperialization trajectory fits well with both maxims.
In the following sections, I will detail the seven phases of the reimperialization trajectory as a road map of Russian foreign policy toward post-Soviet states with large ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking minorities, providing the framework for the later country case study chapters that will locate states like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and others on the trajectory. It will be in the case study chapters rather than here that extensive examples of reimperialization policies will be provided. Those chapters will also demonstrate an element of common timing when the reimperialization trajectory turns from softer to more aggressive policies. This has generally been when countries like Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia turned Westward and sought closer relations with NATO or the EU. The states in question then generally experienced a rapid progression from Russia’s soft power policies to intensified information warfare, arming and training of separatist groups, and passportization.
STAGE 1: SOFT POWER
According to American political scientist and leading scholar of soft power, Joseph Nye, that form of power is a state’s ability to wield influence based on its culture, political values, and foreign policies, which must be perceived as legitimate and having moral authority. Soft power facilitates a state’s public diplomacy by building long-term relationships that influence the context for government policymaking.4 Over the past decades there has been debate over whether Russia even has any soft power and, if so, what sets Russia’s soft power apart from that of other states. Russia scholar James Sherr has demonstrated that Russia’s influence is based on “hard diplomacy” and “soft coercion.” The latter is an “influence that is indirectly coercive, resting on covert methods (penetration, bribery, blackmail).”5 He also argues that Russia uses co-optation of various business, political, and private groups through the establishment of networks bonded by mutual interest to promote its objectives.6
Russia’s objectives and the means used to achieve them raise concerns for the target states. Russia’s discourse and policies demonstrate its resolve to maintain a “zone of privileged interest” in the post-Soviet states and postcommunist Europe often irrespective of the wishes of these countries. To achieve these objectives Moscow uses a combination of hard and soft power. Disentangling Russia’s soft power from hard power is difficult because it often takes forms that are covert, implicitly coercive, or of dubious legality.7 For this reason, and because Moscow often interlinks different issue areas, in this book softer methods like cultural, religious, and linguistic appeals will be discussed together with harder methods that usually fall outside the scope of soft power like economic coercion and sanctions. Furthermore, as the country case studies demonstrate, Moscow uses soft power not to avoid hard power methods, but in order to pave the way for subsequent use of hard power.8
While Russia’s instruments of influence have varied from energy exports to culture and business networks, all of these instruments have been greatly securitized. In other words, cultural and business interests have often been conceptualized by the Russian government as being in the same sphere as security and military matters, thus legitimizing Moscow’s reliance on extraordinary means to secure against perceived or constructed threats toward Russian language or culture. For instance, Russian culture is defined by the Foreign Policy Review of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as “an instrument to ensure Russia’s economic and foreign policy interests and positive image in the world.”9 Russian culture is shared by not only ethnic Russians but also Russian speakers and those under Russian influence.10 Russian compatriots have also served both as a target of Russia’s soft power and as Moscow’s means to wield soft power over target countries such as Ukraine, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. Lastly, unlike most states where soft power is largely produced by civil society, Russia controls the institutions and individuals that help shape the country’s image and thus its soft power, such as the media, NGOs, cultural figures, universities, and the church.11