Crime and Punishment: The consequences of the West’s reaction to Russia’s activities in Crimea

Rome, 11^th March 2014

 

Crime and Punishment: The consequences of the West’s reaction to Russia’s activities in Crimea

On Sunday, the inhabitants of the Crimea will vote in a referendum on secession. They will answer two questions:

1.       ‘Are you for the entry of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea into the Russian Federation?’

2.      ‘Are you for the restoration of the constitution of 1992 and the preservation of the Crimea as a part of Ukraine?’*

The leaders of the peninsula’s minority Tatar population have already said they will boycott the plebiscite. But the ethnic Russians who make up 60% of the territory’s population will almost certainly vote in favour of leaving Ukraine, probably overwhelmingly. In Sevastopol, posters encouraging them to do so read: ‘Let’s go home, to Russia!’ (Домой, в Россию!) If that’s what they decide to do, how will the West react?

Russia has chosen Sunday’s referendum as the means to legitimize the seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine unidentified, but certainly Russian, forces carried out almost two weeks ago. With its ethnic Russian majority and longstanding strategic significance to Moscow, most Russians, it seems, already understand the desire of many in Crimea for ‘reunion’, as the Russian media mainly refer to the referendum’s expected outcome.

Led by the United States, however, the West has refused to see the situation in such terms. Although Crimea was in fact Russian until 1954, when a redrawing of the Soviet Union’s internal boundaries transferred it to Ukraine, the West has insisted on casting Russia’s takeover of part of its neighbour’s territory as all but an invasion. In this sense, Sunday’s referendum is part of Moscow’s effort to draw a line under the crisis in relations with the West that Ukraine’s February revolution has entailed.

The referendum in fact presents the West with an unpleasant choice. Either it accepts its outcome and endorses what it perceives to be a trampling of Ukrainian sovereignty and a gross violation of international law—not to mention a dangerous precedent that might embolden Russia to more such takeovers. Or it rejects it and adds further sanctions to those it has already imposed as a result of February’s events with the aim of isolating Russia, politically and economically, until forced to disgorge its prize.

Given their rhetoric so far, Western leaders seem set to choose this second path. If seizing Crimea was Russia’s crime, sanctions are the punishment most in the West seem to agree it’s fair to exact. As Sunday’s referendum shows, however, Russia appears equally determined to normalize its Crimean fait accompli, meaning that the West, if its principles are to prevail over what Moscow has already achieved on the ground, will have to be prepared to enforce a very high degree of political and economic isolation. So long as Russia resists, what this means is the creeping criminalization of Russia and its activities in the world.

Quite apart from whether this is even practical (especially in view of Europe’s dependence on Russian gas), is it as a policy really in the West’s interests? Surprisingly, some eminent figures in foreign policy circles think it is (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/opinion/crimea-a-pyrrhic-victory.html?ref=international). Certainly, there is much about the Russia of Vladimir Putin that is corrupt and unpleasant and making it generally more difficult for its oligarchs to launder their funds through Western stock markets and stock exchanges would be a good thing (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anne-applebaum-russias-western-enablers/2014/03/05/bcba2a88-a4a6-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html). But, given the Crimea’s symbolic and strategic value to Russians, and the humiliation both Russia and its president would suffer in letting it go now, the West would need to impose more biting sanctions than this to achieve its goal.

If the first problem with sanctions aimed at isolating Russia is that they’re likely not to be tough enough to work, the second is that they will antagonize it anyway, driving it into a self-imposed isolation from which the West has probably the most to lose. For this reason, Western leaders should think twice before turning Russia—a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council—into the world’s bandit-at-large. On a range of international issues, from Syria and Iran to the future of Ukraine itself, Russia’s cooperation is not an optional extra; it’s vital.

 

In other words, if the West uses sanctions to punish Russia, it can forget about Russian help when it needs it next. In the Security Council it will meet Russia’s veto again and again. And, having made Russia a criminal, the West will need a clear idea how it can effect its redemption. But what if Russia holds firm on Crimea? Sooner or later the West will have to compromise. Russia is simply too big and, as permanent member of the Security Council, its consent too important in legitimizing the West’s projects elsewhere, to isolate sufficiently to get it to back down in a region it considers germane to its national interest. For the West to pretend otherwise amounts to hubris.

Is there another way out?

 

Perhaps. What’s interesting in this crisis is the respect for the law that Russia itself seems to insist that it is observing. From the start, Russia has insisted that President Yanukovich remains the sole legitimate president of Ukraine. What the West considers a revolution, it calls a coup against a democratically elected leader and an established constitution. Trained to expect Orwellian ‘double speak’ from the Kremlin, many Western commentators will reject this as disingenuous—and, at least in part, it is. But Russia’s concern for the law, which masks a deeper desire for legitimacy, may none the less offer the best, if still imperfect, means for resolving the crisis.

Certainly, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, seems to be going to great lengths to give the return of the Crimea to Russia as great a cloak of legality and hence legitimacy as possible, lengths that don’t end with Sunday’s referendum. This morning, for example, Russian news sources reported that the Russian State Duma will begin discussion of a law that would create the legal basis for Crimea to become part of Russia by giving Moscow the right to approve the addition of new territories without the consent of that state (i.e. Ukraine) of which any such a territory is already a part. The conditions the bill imposes are two: a local, ‘democratic’ referendum in favour of such a change and the absence of ‘effective, sovereign state authorities, prepared to protect their citizens and preserve their rights and freedoms’. In the Crimea, the Kremlin will doubtless considered both fulfilled come Sunday.



Given that last week all of the parties represented in the Duma expressed their support for Crimea’s admission to the Russian Federation, there can be little doubt that the bill will pass. It’s tempting to see this as a smoke screen.* But what’s really striking here is Mr Putin’s apparent desire to ensure that the annexation he is determined to bring about is (or is seen to be) legal, at least under Russian law.

Parliamentary votes, referenda, the rule of law: these are the trappings of democracy that have distinguished the West from Russian ‘autocracy’ for at least two centuries. We might see it as a dictator’s pathetic ruse, yet even the lack of identifying insignia on the uniforms of the Russian soldiers in Simferopol may actually reflect Mr Putin’s awareness that something like international law exists and that an actual out invasion would be illegal. So long, then, as Russian troops aren’t seen to be occupying Crimea, its referendum can be presented as a plausible act of self-determination, a principle which, as the West taught him in Kosovo, international law does in fact provide for.

Perhaps the West should take the compliment and look on Sunday’s referendum as what it is—the only place to start defusing the confrontation that risks criminalizing a country that seems bound for the foreseeable future to be essential to the West, even if doesn’t share its values. After all, the Kremlin’s preoccupation with elections and the law as a route to legitimacy suggests those values might be indirectly shaping Russia’s actions more than even it would ideally like to admit.



What if, then, the West took Sunday’s referendum as the starting point for a discussion with Russia and Ukraine on the Crimea’s future? Europe and the United States have already missed the opportunity to send observers or pressure Moscow to put measures in place to ensure the voices of the peninsula’s minorities are heard. But to consign Crimea and its ethnic Russian majority set on self-determination (‘going home’), with Russia as its patron, to a permanent black hole seems self-defeating.

At the moment the West seems bent on humiliating a country whose interests in the Crimea are, by our own admission, infinitely greater than our own. If we succeed, it may be that the only thing worse than letting Russia get away with its seizure of Crimea is preventing it from doing so—with or without a fig leaf of legality.

 

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* «Вы за вхождение АРК в качестве субъекта в состав РФ?», «Вы за восстановление Конституции Крыма 1992 года и сохранение Крыма как составной части Украины?»

 

* Worryingly, although Sunday’s vote in Crimea is clearly the bill’s immediate context, it would apply to any state or territory that sought ‘reunification’ with the Russian Federation. Abkhazia, which detached itself from Georgia in 1992-3, and Southern Ossetia, which Mr Putin seized from the same country in 2008, spring to mind as obvious candidates.