Recent displays of the country’s revived military power have had as one of their main objectives to force ‘partners’ to listen to Russia’s arguments. As Fyodor Lukyanov put it, ‘by taking action in Ukraine and Syria, Russia has made clear its intention to restore its status as a major international player’ (2016).
It is no coincidence that Putin’s statement quoted above notes the need to strengthen not only the regular armed forces, but also the special services and other security-related agencies, which are predominantly responsible for dealing with domestic order and stability. This is because Russia’s view of sovereignty is characterized by a distinctly intertwined nature of its internal and external dimensions. The Kremlin believes that its sovereignty to conduct its internal affairs without outside interference can only be preserved if it can also pursue an independent foreign policy abroad. As Ziegler described this, Russian policy shows a ‘close linkage between the recentralizing project domestically, and the reassertion of Russia’s position as a great power on the international scene’ (2012: 401). Russia has long regarded international adherence to the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states, which is central to the ‘traditional’ Westphalian view of sovereignty, as the key to protecting its freedom of action at home. Since the end of the Cold War, a general shift in views of security from a state-centred focus towards a more human-centred interpretation, meant that this principle as an absolute has come into question. In cases where states themselves present a threat to their citizens, state sovereignty is no longer always seen as a barrier to outside intervention to enforce compliance with humanitarian norms (Thomas and Tow 2002: 180). This view was enshrined as a new principle in international law, the Responsibility to Protect, by the UN in 2005 (Bellamy 2009).
Russia has supported interventions with a humanitarian remit in certain cases (Averre and Davies 2015: 823). However, the belief that the West is using such norms as a pretext to get rid of inconvenient regimes and to spread its own influence has become engrained and is seen as a serious threat to the country’s sovereignty. This belief dates back to the Kosovo War in 1999, when Moscow interpreted NATO’s Operation Allied Force as an act of unilateral aggression against one of its allies. As Yeltsin noted in an address to the OSCE in 1999, European security was endangered by ‘calls for “humanitarian intervention” – a new idea – in the international affairs of another State, even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms’ (Yeltsin 1999: 132). US-led interventions leading to regime change in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011 were seen as further evidence of this. As Putin put it in 2012, ‘armed conflicts started under the pretext of humanitarian goals [are] undermining the time-honoured principle of state sovereignty, creating a void in the moral and legal implications of international relations’ (Putin 2012a). The Kremlin’s belief in the West’s intent to expand its power by interfering in the internal affairs of other states has also informed its suspicions over Western support of the ‘colour revolutions’ in the CIS region and, ultimately, over civil society projects in Russia itself that are operating with outside funding (Averre and Davies 2015: 826). All of this has been interpreted as part of a wider plan of expanding the West’s influence, if required by military force, and as such as a threat to Russian sovereignty.
Internationally, a revived military has enabled Russia to stand up to what it sees as Western efforts to undermine the principle of sovereignty as the basis of international order. Having been unable to prevent the forceful deposition of the Serbian government during the Kosovo War in 1999 as it saw it, a stronger military enabled the Kremlin to prevent a similar scenario in Syria in 2015. At home, concerns over sovereignty have led to growing centralization and state control over all aspects of society. This has included restrictions on media freedom and civil society through registration laws and other means (Bacon et al. 2006). It also has led to a process by which those force structures tasked predominantly with internal security and public order have been increasingly strengthened. This will be discussed at length in chapter 3.
Finally, it is important to note that ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty, at least as Russia subscribes to it, sees sovereignty as an absolute right of great powers that does not necessarily accord the same right to lesser powers within their sphere of influence (Deyermond 2016: 958). This explains Moscow’s seemingly contradictory readiness to pursue interventionist foreign policies towards the ‘near abroad’, which has left ‘Russia open to charges of hypocrisy and double standards’, as Graeme Herd has remarked (2010: 26).
Imperial legacy
Imperialism, including imperialist expansion, have featured variously in Russian foreign policy throughout the country’s eventful history. The annexation of Crimea raised suspicions about the (re)awakening of Russian imperialism and expansionism. Although Russia’s imperial legacy is still a factor in its foreign policy today, the meaning of this factor in its contemporary form is far from straightforward.
The Russian Empire, from the seventeenth century until its demise as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, was an empire in the classical sense of the word. An empire, according to Ronald Suny, can be described as ‘a polity based on conquest, difference between the ruling institution and its subjects, and the subordination of periphery to the imperial center’ (2012: 21). As with all great empires of the past, the Russian Empire was created on the basis of expansion through territorial conquest. Expansion was pursued to avert potential threats by rival powers, but it also gave Russia access to valuable natural resources and granted it international prestige as a great power. The problematic belief that expansion was the only means to ensure the state’s security shaped the foreign policies of many empires in the past (Snyder 1991: 1). The Russian Empire, at various points of its existence, was no exception. As the historian William Fuller wrote, ‘throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russia entertained vast ambitions. In an age in which the only choice was to conquer or to be conquered, Russia wished to neutralize its three most dangerous enemies – Sweden, Poland and Turkey’ (1992: 435). Although dissenting voices on the merits of expansion were not absent in the Russian Empire’s history (Jones 1984), for most of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the glory of Russia’s tsars, empresses, and generals was measured by the territory they conquered.
There was another side to the coin of territorial expansion as it also created new threats, challenges and possible costs. Expansion increased the number of potential foreign enemies and absorbed large swathes of various ethnic and religious minorities into the Empire. This meant that in the event of war, Russia ran the risk of fighting against a foreign enemy at the same time as combating an internal insurrection (Fuller 1992: 52).
The Russian Empire came to an end with the Russian revolution in 1917. The early Soviet state was intended to be temporary and transitory in the immediate post-imperial years and there were expectations that the Soviet Union would ultimately serve as ‘an example of equitable, non-exploitative relations among nations’ (Suny 2007: 48). Although anti-imperialist rhetoric regularly featured in official Soviet discourse until the country’s collapse, ironically, as Suny noted, ‘almost from its inception the Soviet Union replicated imperialist relations’ (2007: 48). The foreign policy of the Soviet Union is often described as imperialistic. However, expansion through the conquest of territory did not figure in Soviet foreign policy making after the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Union during the Second World War and the addition of some further territories to existing republics immediately after the War. In this sense, imperialism here is used as a metaphor for external relations with neighbouring states, lack of legitimacy and instability (Suny 2012: 23). Imperialism is often associated with expansion, but the two do not necessarily always go hand-in-hand. In a similar vein to Suny’s definition, Johan Galtung’s influential account characterized imperialism as a ‘special type of dominance of one collectivity, usually a nation, over another’, where domination can be political, economic or cultural (1971: 116–17). It is in this sense that descriptions of Russia’s conduct today towards the other former Soviet states as imperialistic, or post-imperialistic as Dmitri Trenin has called it, should also be understood (Trenin 2011; H. Smith 2016).