Russian President Vladimir Putin a few days ago recognized two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent entities. Hours later, he crossed a point of no return: he announced a “special military operation” in Donbas and large explosions were recorded at various points in eastern Ukraine. With artillery shelling, heavy equipment and small arms, Russian troops launched attacks in different parts of the country, with an estimated balance of 40 dead so far.
In his earlier speech, Putin described Ukraine as an integral part of Russian history, saying that eastern Ukraine was former Russian land and that he was confident that the Russian people would support his decision. Despite the specifics of the Ukrainian crisis, analysts note that Putin’s move was in keeping with a recent pattern in Russian military operations, aimed at bully neighbors into submission, stopping any eastward expansion of NATO in the process.
This was the Russian Federation in 1991:
The Kremlin has long used so-called “frozen conflicts” to extend its reach beyond Russian borders. For the past three decades, he has backed a pro-Russian regime in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria. In 2008, launched a conventional invasion in Georgia in support of the separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two provinces with large Russian-speaking populations. Six years later, Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and began supporting an insurgency by pro-Russian separatists in Donbas.
This map shows the unrecognized entities in Europe and reintegrated breakaway regions. Places through which Russian troops have passed during these 30 years in an expansionist wave under different pretexts.
In each case, fears of a move away from Russia’s sphere of influence precipitated Moscow’s actions, while the presence of ethnic Russian populations provided the Kremlin with a pretext to intervene as a protector. The same logic was at play during Putin’s speeches, in which he claimed, without evidence, that the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine were being subjected to a “genocide”.
These mini-expansions and the war in Ukraine stem from a deep nationalist streak on the part of Putin, very determined to recover the lost greatness of the tsars and of territories that a part of Russian nationalism considers “theirs” but snatched away.
Transnistria
This reasoning supports Russia’s continued presence in Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria, where attempts to impose the Romanian language in the early 1990s were fiercely resisted by the region’s largely Russian-speaking population. The very concept, protecting ethnic Russians, would later serve Putin to justify his interventions in Georgia and Ukraine.
Although Russia has not recognized Transnistria’s independence, it has weakened Moldovan sovereignty and frozen its Western integration for the past 25 years. This uncertainty has served to trap Moldova in a geopolitical gray area between east and west and has forced it to act as a vehicle for the corruption of Russian capital money.
Transnistria is a breakaway territory located mainly between the Dniester River and the Republic of Moldova’s eastern border with Ukraine. Since the 1992 war, it has been governed as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, an unrecognized state that claims the territory east of the Dniester River, the city of Bender and its surrounding towns. Moldova still considers it a region of its own.
South Ossetia and Absajia
Another Putin war was also in the post-Soviet space, but in this case in a foreign country, in Georgia. Precisely, this case may be a little more reminiscent of what was experienced in Ukraine, because Georgia was also a Soviet republic increasingly closer to the European Union and with several pro-Russian separatist regions: South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In 2008, Georgia ordered an offensive in Ossetia and the Kremlin responded by invading the country and expelling the Georgians from Ossetia. Moscow justified the war against Georgia on the grounds that the country’s ethnic minorities were in danger.
That is a recurring argument. In fact, it is exactly the same argument that they used to invade the Crimean peninsula. Furthermore, Russia maintains that the majority of the population of the Crimean Peninsula is practically supported the entry of Russian troops in its territory. The reality is an argument that Russia can use with some freedom because it is a fact that there are Russian minorities in practically all the post-Soviet republics. But the biggest problem in this case is that it was a conflict that spread to Donbas in a few weeks.
The conflict in South Ossetia (which included the neighboring territory of Abkhazia), which lasted from August 7 to 12, 2008, was only a conclusion of a series of events that had started 18 years earlier, with another conflict similar after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And it shot up precisely in 2008 after this region decided to ask the United Nations (UN) to recognize it, after several attempts, as an independent nation. Just as it had done shortly before with Kosovo.
This did not please Georgia, which had always considered South Ossetia as its own, so it decided (justifying itself by the fact of some attacks by South Ossetian separatist soldiers) to attack the troops that were in the region on 7 August 2008. The Russian response, which turned its army in favor of the South Ossetian separatist militias, surprised many. In five days Russian troops managed to dislodge the soldiers Georgians from South Ossetia and the neighboring territory of Abkhazia.
And that was where Russia took its own path marked by friction with Western countries: it recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations, contrary to what the European Union, the United States and even NATO thought. That same strategy was the one that she used in Crimea in 2014. In 2008 she did not want to invade Georgia, as with Crimea she did not want to enter Ukraine. And what was it that interested you in 2014? A territory populated by Russian-speakers who supported Putin within a strategic point in the region.
crimea
In 2014, when pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed in the 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution after months of protests in Ukraine, Russian troops occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and, after a hasty referendum, the Kremlin annexed Crimea and Sevastopol. The annexation was not recognized by Ukraine or by most other members of the international community. A few weeks later, an armed conflict broke out in the Ukrainian region of Donbas, in which the Kremlin denies having an active role.
The Donbas
Ukraine is at the center of a geopolitical rivalry between Western powers and Russia, and that rivalry is bursting one more time. Two regions along the Russian border, Donetsk and Luhansk, have been a conflict zone since 2014, when pro-Russian separatists began clashing with government forces.
The following map shows the relative contact zone between the two opposing forces. donbas region conflict zone ZomBear, Marktaff, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Russia currently has troops and military equipment amassed at various points along the border between the two countries, as well as in neighboring Belarus.
During these days, Vladimir Putin ordered troops in two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, recognizing them as independent states. This recognition serves as definitive end point to the seven-year peace agreement known as the Minsk agreement. As this conflict intensifies, it remains to be seen what will happen to the estimated 5 million people living in Donbas.
Maps: European Council on Foreign Relations | Wikimedia Commons | BBC | Washington Post | euromaidenpress