Crimea Redux: Russia invades the Don Valley

Rome, 14^th April 2014

 

Crimea Redux: Russia invades the Don Valley

 

This morning, Ukrainian forces attacked the pro-Russian fighters that had taken over the town of Slovyansk in the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Republic of Donetsk’, a Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine’s Don River valley. A number of those fighters bear Russian arms and appear to be advance units of the Russian forces massed along Ukraine’s eastern borders.

An undeclared Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine is now underway: Moscow seems only to be waiting for an armed Ukrainian response to send in its regular forces to protect the region’s Russian speakers from Ukrainian ‘aggression’.

If that happens, Russian forces will be far more numerous and better equipped than Ukraine’s. Their superiority will mean that Ukraine will not be able to withstand a Russian advance without outside help, for which it will inevitably turn to NATO.

NATO will have to make a careful decision about how to respond to Kiev’s requests. It can try either to resist and roll back the Russian advance or contain it. Each course of action comes with different costs and potential paybacks; each relies on a different assessment of the kind of threat Russia presents.

Stopping and then reversing a Russian takeover of eastern Ukraine will require the use of force, either directly by deploying NATO planes and tanks or indirectly by supplying the Ukrainian army with such equipment. This is a high-cost option whose potential risks and benefits the alliance needs to weigh carefully.

Because Russia considers eastern Ukraine rightfully Russian territory, it won’t give up lightly whatever portion it ultimately seizes. The loss of prestige Moscow would endure would be so great that it will be prepared to suffer heavy losses to avoid it. And a history of stoical resistance to foreign invasion—whether against the Poles in 1613, the French in 1812 or the Germans in 1941—would dispose the Russian public to patriotic support for the Kremlin’s defence of the ‘Fatherland’.

If it decided to try to stop a Russian invasion or roll one back, NATO would have to be prepared to match Moscow in commitment. This would lead to an all-out war with Russia in a scenario where its own forces were directly employed, or to a ruthless and bloody Yugoslav-style civil war if the alliance decided to limit itself to equipping the Ukrainian army with the assets necessary to wage a guerrilla resistance.

Civilian casualties would be high and damage to the region’s infrastructure great, which would exert a steady pressure on many alliance members to abandon or run down their support for the operation. Russia is much readier to tolerate both than NATO. The chances of success would be remote.

Even if NATO were successful in forcing Russia out of Ukraine, it would be left to foot the bill for the region’s reconstruction. And it would have to prevent nationalist-minded Ukrainians from exacting revenge on Russian-speaking friends and relatives who perhaps supported Moscow’s invasion.

It would also be forced to prop up Ukraine as a whole indefinitely, with little leverage to bring about the reforms the country needs to stamp out economic corruption or political extremism. An impoverished, dysfunctional and still divided Ukraine is not an alliance partner NATO needs or wants.

Above all, Russia—a country of some 140m and a permanent member of the Security Council—would become the West’s sworn enemy for at least a generation. Cooperation on anything of importance to the West would be next to impossible. Geopolitically, it would gravitate even closer towards China.

The alternative—containing a Russian invasion to eastern Ukraine—is a better goal. This can still be achieved by a combination of diplomacy and the threat but not, at least in the first instance the use, of force.

The aim would be to agree to avoid both a direct NATO-Russia confrontation and a Yugoslav-style civil war through a partition of Ukraine with Moscow that left it in control of the eastern districts it hankers after, but preserved the survival of a truncated Ukrainian state centred on Kiev and the country’s Ukrainian-speaking west.

To do this, NATO will have to pressure on Kiev not to try to retake the eastern cities, by refusing to offer it help in the event of the inevitable Russian counter-attack. It will have to talk directly to Moscow, offering it the possibility of recognition—perhaps through OSCE-organized referenda—of its gains. NATO’s price for agreeing to such a redrawing of the border would be Russia’s foreswearing any designs on Kiev itself and its giving up its objections to the admission of a rump Ukrainian state to NATO and, in time, the EU.

NATO should also visibly increase the deployment of its forces to the Baltic states, Poland and Romania. This will send a clear signal that the alliance will match its words with force if Russia reneges on its commitments (for example by making an advance on Kiev). Its members—above all the United States—should state clearly and repeatedly that they will honour their treaty obligations to one another in the event of Russian aggression against one or several of them.

Such a course of action would go against the alliance’s best instincts—seeming to represent the surrender of national freedom before naked aggression. And critics will call this a second Munich, a sell-out of Ukraine indistinguishable from Britain and France’s sell-out of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938.

But both notions should be resisted. Ukraine is clearly divided—perhaps not as much as Russia claims but certainly more than its better-functioning neighbours—and those divisions are the underlying reason for its weakness. NATO isn’t obliged to defend a form of freedom even a sizeable minority of the population feel ambivalent about.

Secondly, Putin’s Russia isn’t the threat to European let alone world peace Hitler’s Germany was. Russia isn’t seeking to overturn the world order but ensure its place in it as a great power. Outside Russia’s backyard, NATO’s strategic advantage—political, economic and military—is overwhelming, its security guarantees credible where the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland was more an expression of moral support.

Fundamentally, Putin’s effort to regain historically Russian or Russian-majority territories is about prestige not Lebensraum. A desire for prestige makes Putin especially receptive to diplomacy (in a way Hitler never was). He understands the risks of war and is cautious by nature—as his restraint in the 2008 war with Georgia demonstrates. He also knows that a negotiated outcome is the only way of bestowing international legitimacy on his acquisitions. But to be induced to make a deal, he needs to be assured that the West takes Russia’s interests seriously—something NATO’s frequent insistence on a complete back down in his view tells against.

Confronting Russia, directly or indirectly, might be morally more satisfying and easier to explain to the public. But it doesn’t in fact serve the alliance’s interests. NATO’s primary purpose is guaranteeing the security of its members. For many good reasons, Ukraine isn’t a member of that alliance.

Indeed, NATO can guarantee its members’ security without committing itself to a war over Ukraine. By resorting instead to diplomacy, it can at the same time preserve the footing for a pragmatic relationship with Russia, something of great long-term value beyond the current crisis.

Some will say that ‘standing up’ to Russia is important to demonstrate the sanctity of international frontiers. But at what price ‘should’ NATO defend this principle? And, given Ukraine’s history and divided politics, are those particular borders really worth it?

If we hold our noses and ready NATO to defend its members if and when they’re threatened, diplomacy can still make the same point without the bloodshed. So far, Moscow has been able to swallow Crimea. But, who knows, perhaps in the ethnically more diverse Don Valley, where public opinion doesn’t seem as united behind the Kremlin as it was in Simferopol, Russia’s bitten off more than it can chew. It can after all ask Washington about what it’s like to get bogged down in a guerrilla war with nationalists.

On the other hand, if Moscow’s new territories happily accept the restoration of rule from the Kremlin, then perhaps they’re better off Russian rather than Ukrainian anyway. Certainly, a smaller, more ethnically coherent and culturally more Western-oriented Ukraine would be a much more valuable candidate for both NATO and EU membership.

‘Ukraine isn’t a state’, Vladimir Putin is said to have remarked. Millions of Russians seem to agree. Before 1992 Kharkov, Donetsk and Lugansk had been ruled from Moscow for over 300 years. It never planned to let them go.

With their monuments to Lenin and heavy Soviet past, these cities mean infinitely more to Moscow than they do to us.

We lose nothing by keeping this Russia’s crisis.

 

Illegal But Not Unlawful: What Crimea says about Putin's Russia

Rome, 8^th April 2014

 

 

Illegal But Not Unlawful: What Crimea says about Putin’s Russia 

 

 

On 18^th March before the assembled deputies of both houses of the country’s parliament, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law an annexation treaty with the recently proclaimed independent republic of Crimea. The setting—the Kremlin’s marbled and gilded tsarist-era St George’s Hall—was gaudy and awkward at times, but on the whole stately and not undignified.

 

Of course, the United States and European Union have repeatedly called both the treaty and the referendum that preceded it ‘illegal’ and ‘illegitimate’. But everything about the symbolism of that afternoon in the Kremlin seemed designed to convey quite the opposite message: that this was the act of a state governed by the rule of law.

 

This seems deliberate and part of a broader strategy. Writing last week in Foreign Policy, Katie Engelhart noted the elaborate lengths to which Putin has gone to give his annexation of Crimea an aura of legality. [1]  

 

Because the Russian constitution actually bans the admission of new territories without Moscow’s signing a formal inter-state treaty from which they hope to secede, on 28 February the Duma introduced a bill that would have done away with the need for such a treaty in cases where: 1) a state had failed to maintain law and order in the territory seeking admission (as, in fact, Russia claimed Ukraine failed to do in the aftermath of the Kiev revolution); 2) and where the people had expressed their desire for admission to the Russian Federation through a ‘democratic referendum’.

 

As Engleman points out, however, the Council of Europe’s legal commission strongly criticized the proposed legislation as unconstitutional. Surprisingly, perhaps, this was enough to prompt the Russian leadership to drop the bill and opt for another route to legalize Crimea’s annexation.

 

This was by having Crimea declare independence from Ukraine, which it duly did just before the referendum on accession to the Russian Federation on 16 March. As an independent sovereign state, Crimea was then able, two days later, to sign its own accession treaty with Moscow without any reference to Ukraine.

 

That the West still called all of this illegal did nothing to diminish Putin’s solicitude for the law. On the contrary, as Engleman notes, he immediately sent the treaty to the Constitutional Court for judicial approval and to the Duma’s upper and lower houses for ratification by the legislature. Both bodies enthusiastically endorsed it.

 

And Engleman is surely right in suspecting that this annexation will be but the first of many: the same legal script could be followed in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria which are all already ‘sovereign states’ in theory but Russian territories in practice.

 

If I object to anything in Engleman’s analysis, however, it’s her idea that Putin’s new-found preoccupation with the law is just a charade, a feigned ‘legalism’ designed to win domestic support for the annexation and mollify the West.

 

She writes, for example, that this is all ‘part of a broader trend of sham legalism that was a hallmark of Soviet despotism and remains firmly entrenched in the Kremlin today.’ For confirmation she cites Maria Lipman, chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Society and Regions Program:  ‘Putin has this obsession with the letter of the law, with no regard to the spirit.’

 

To me, there are two problems with this view. The first is that it’s not Putin’s punctilious observance of the legal niceties that explains the popularity among ordinary Russians of his activities in Crimea citizens—national feeling seems to have sufficed. As for the West, the Kremlin must have noticed that it’s beyond mollification on this one.

 

There’s a problem with the notion that Russia is just reverting to type. The Soviet Union never tolerated referenda of the kind Putin relied on in Crimea. Neither did it remotely tolerate anything like the cycle of elections that have become the norm in post-Soviet Russia. And no tsar ever made the duma as essential a partner in power as Putin has done—and certainly not Nicholas II whose 1905 Manifesto brought the first Russian parliament into existence.

 

Rather, the assumption that Putin’s legalism is purely a charade is wrong—a failure to understand what’s really going on in Russia that has come about through the constant imposition of Western analytical categories on Russian history and experience.

 

I have compared Putin to the eighteenth-century empress Catherine the Great before. Apart from extending Russia’s frontiers deep into Poland and down along the shores of the Black Sea, Catherine is also remembered for her legal reforms. An autocrat, certainly, Catherine none the less conceived of her powers in terms that perhaps throw some light on the way Putin understands the origins and purpose of his own.

 

Consider, for example, how Russia-expert Geoffrey Hosking describes Catherine’s ‘vision of the rule of law’:

 

She believed that law is a means by which the state mobilizes the resources of society to augment its own strength and wealth and to provide for the welfare of the population. It was not in her eyes an impersonal force mediating between autonomous and sometimes competing social institutions, but rather an instrument through which the monarch exercise authority and puts moral precepts into effect.

 

Hosking then quotes the empress herself. According to Catherine, ‘In a State, that is, in a Collection of People living in Society where Laws are established, Liberty can consist only in the Ability of doing what everyone ought to desire, and in not being force to do what should not be desired.’

 

This seems a decent description of Putin’s own inclinations, where recent laws outlawing the promotion of homosexual activity or stricter bans on the use of ‘offensive language’ in print or online are presented as protecting the wider Russian community from harm.

 

Perhaps, like Catherine, Putin sees such laws as helping Russians to do what they ‘ought’ to desire and, in that sense, as liberty-promoting—a notion outrageous to us but which, as Hosking points out, nevertheless has its roots in the European Enlightenment. 

 

Episodes like last month’s Crimea treaty-signing remind us that, like Catherine, Putin also seems to believe it important to have, as Hosking puts it, ‘the law validated by representatives of her peoples.’

 

This might also describe the Duma’s role in Putin’s Russia.

 

We see a rubber stamp. From the point of view of the Russian legal tradition embodied in Catherine’s reforms, however, the Duma might be said to play an essential role in the ritual of power, giving visible expression to the covenant between ruler and people whose object is not the promotion of the rights of individuals or the relative welfare of competing social groups but the health and prosperity of the nation as a whole.

 

This isn’t a pantomime emptily aping reality; it’s a ceremony designed to imbue it with significance. Ask a Catholic priest about the difference.

 

Where does this leave us?

 

Let’s go back to the Kremlin. Dressed in a slim black suit and flanked by the double-headed eagle of the presidential insignia, Putin came across as a kind law-giving basileus serenely restoring order to his kingdom with a flourish of his pen and his own unassailable strength of will. All in all, we’re a long way from the bare-chested, tiger-hunting strong-man we’ve come to expect.

 

I think this is a sign of things to come. Expect more law-making from Putin’s Kremlin—but don’t necessarily expect Russia to become more liberal as a result. And to understand what it all means, do expect to turn to Russian, rather than Western, historical experience.

 

Russia isn’t the West. It’s Russia.

 

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[1] Englehart’s article is here: (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/24/putin_legalism_crimea_annexation)

 

 

 

 

Unhappy in Paris: Kerry, Lavrov and the First Partition of Ukraine

Rome, 31^st March 2014

Given the gulf between their countries’ positions, it’s not surprising that US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had little to show for their meeting in Paris on Sunday.

Yet a couple of things suggest that a ‘diplomatic solution’ to the crisis in Ukraine might now be more than just a bland form of words.

For the moment at least Russia seems to be stepping back from an invasion: Mr Lavrov has said publicly that Russia has ‘no intention’ of carrying one out. This might be a tactic to buy time and goodwill in those NATO capitals less disposed to Washington’s tough line. But the threat of war could resurface any time Moscow wants to apply more pressure.

America’s concession was agreeing to talk at all about anything other than sanctions—an approach unlikely to have achieved much other than Russia’s even deeper embitterment.

It’s now clear, though, that Putin is asking the West to partition Ukraine with him. He’s even getting Ukrainians to make his case. Thus, in the lead-up to Sunday’s talks, Russian media reported that in an address to the Ukrainian people, ex-president Yanukovich (in Moscow’s eyes still Ukraine’s only legitimate leader) called for a ‘referendum to determine the status of every one of Ukraine’s regions’.

And the federalized constitution Mr Lavrov argued for in Paris—enshrining Russian an official language and outlawing Ukraine’s membership of international ‘blocs’—is the same strategy the Kremlin has pursued all along: divide the country along its regional and linguistic fault lines and so prevent a disunited Ukraine gravitating into the West’s nefarious orbit, whether in the form of NATO or the EU.

The only real change is that Putin apparently now sees the ballot box as at least as effective an instrument for partitioning Ukraine as the rolling of tanks—and possibly a better one if he can win the West’s consent to it.

That Mr Kerry returned to Washington still fulminating about the ‘illegality’ of Russia’s fait accompli in Crimea and without plans to meet again with his Russian counterpart shows how tough it will be for the West to agree to such a hard-nosed, ‘Bismarckian’ solution. The problem is that it’s probably the only diplomatic outcome that will entice Russia to rule war out.

A diplomatic solution remains possible, but it doesn’t mean Mr Kerry—whose pained face on Sunday said it all—will, or even should, enjoy making it.

 

 

 

History, Diplomacy and Western Readings of the Crisis in Ukraine

Rome, 28^th March 2014

The West’s difficulty in understanding Russia’s position isn’t helped by the historical models the Western media and commentators have employed to explain events in Ukraine. Many have groped for parallels drawn from the historical confrontation between the liberal, democratic West and its totalitarian adversaries during the twentieth century.

As a result, it’s become popular compare Mr Putin’s defence of the rights of Russian speakers in southern and eastern Ukraine to Hitler’s crusade on behalf of central Europe’s German minorities in the 1930s and to liken Russia’s annexation of Crimea to the Soviet Union’s brutal crushing of dissent in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968: Hilary Clinton’s analogy between Putin and Hitler is perhaps one of the most obvious examples.

Tempting though they are, these comparisons are wrong. From a policy point of view, they’re also dangerous. That’s because such narratives rehearse a model of confrontation between east and west, autocracy and democracy, whose moral and ethical lines are so well drawn as to make serious thinking about the right response to them almost redundant.

Hitler’s duping of Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 taught us that it’s the West’s moral duty to stand up to expansionist dictators and we expect our leaders to do so. Freed of any shades of diplomatic or geopolitical grey, policy-making for Ukraine becomes a relatively easy choice between the ‘goodies’ (us and our aspiring democratic allies) and the ‘baddies’ (repressive and autocratic Russia).

Yet history offers us others parallels that are both morally murkier and politically more complex. As I’ve written before, the First Partition of Poland in 1771 offers us a model through which to read Russia’s actions in Ukraine that puts the emphasis on Ukraine’s own divisions and Russia’s historically vigorous defence of its national interest on the broad plains of Eastern Europe.

The same model suggests the naivety, not to say irresponsibility, with which the United States and European Union entered into strategic competition with Russia in a region which the Kremlin has always identified as critical to its national interest. And it neatly, if tragically, sheds light on the full complexity of the factors that ought to shape the Western response, where some of the options are less bad than others but none really good.

History isn’t a morality play. If it teaches us anything, it’s that diplomacy is often a choice between evils.

Russia, the West and the Problem with Sanctions

Rome, 28 March 2014

 

I’ve written before that in confronting Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the West’s options aren’t much better than Austria and Prussia’s in 1771. Unwilling to fight, Frederick the Great and Maria-Theresa reasoned that Catherine’s Russia was too big and too important to the European system to be ignored, punished or excluded for long. The only other option, however ignoble, was to talk.


When it comes to talking today, however, the only thing the West seems willing to talk about is sanctions. It’s very unlikely that this will get us anywhere.

Sanctions, it’s worth remembering, are not so much a diplomatic as a coercive, not to say a punitive, instrument. It’s clear they won’t force Putin out of Crimea. Neither will they do anything to deter a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. The only thing they will certainly achieve is Russia’s humiliation and embitterment towards the West, confirming what Putin has of late been saying (that the West is out to oppose Russia) and uniting Russians behind him. Both outcomes will make real diplomacy, in the sense of a negotiated compromise, more difficult.

Today, we don’t know what will keep the Russian army out of eastern Ukraine but we cannot now be under any illusion about what will bring it in: any move by the West to guide Ukraine closer to its sphere of influence, in the form either of NATO or the EU. Both the United States and Europe must be very careful about giving the impression that either organization is preparing to offer Ukraine anything more than moral support.

Putin is sending the West an unequivocal message: either leave the rest of Ukraine alone as a buffer between Russia and NATO/EU, or partition it with him—peacefully or violently. He has hinted that the outcome he now wants is a federalized Ukraine that would allow each of its various regions to choose its own foreign and trade policies. And this morning, the Russian media is reporting that, in an address to the Ukrainian people, Yanukovich himself called for ‘a referendum to determine the status of every one of Ukraine’s regions’. Whether by the ballot box or the rolling of tanks across Ukraine’s eastern and southern plains, it seems Putin will have what he sees as that part of Ukraine necessary to Russia’s security.

The problem with the West’s current approach is that it fails to listen to what Russia wants: a guarantee that the United States and Europe won’t try to draw Ukraine any further into what it sees as a hostile Western camp. The more sanctions they apply, the stronger Western leaders speak out in support of Ukrainian revolution and its desire for ‘democracy’, the more loans and other aid they offer, the more in fact they alarm Russia—and the more likely they make an invasion.

Ukraine: is a diplomatic solution still possible?

Rome, 28 March 2014

 

Almost a month since protesters in Kiev forced President Viktor Yanukovich to flee for his life to southern Russia and almost a fortnight since Crimea’s referendum on secession, the crisis in Ukraine looks no closer to resolution. On the contrary, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision last week formally to annexe Crimea to the Russian Federation, and the sanctions which the United States and the countries of the European Union have imposed—albeit some more reluctantly than others—in response, reflect a hardening of positions on both sides.

Western leaders still speak hopefully of a ‘diplomatic solution’, but there was little evidence of a desire to talk in the G-8’s suspension on Monday of Russia from its meetings or President Obama’s spirited rejection in Brussels of the reasons Russia has advanced for its actions. With Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern borders, war seems not less likely, but more.

In his Brussels speech, Mr Obama claimed boldly that ‘no amount of propaganda can make right what the world knows to be wrong’. This is a funny way to go about diplomacy. A precondition for negotiations is an understanding of your opponent’s position, a willingness to put yourself in his or her shoes and see the issue under contention from his or her point of view. The problem is that Western leaders have rarely given the impression of taking Russia’s position or its concerns seriously. By failing to do so, they share a large share of the blame for the polarization that has since resulted.

When, for example, Russia declares—as it has done for over two decades—that it identifies a core national interest in Ukraine not acceding to either NATO or the EU, or that Crimea, the home of its most important fleet, is of key strategic value to it, it’s not announcing a global challenge to democratic values or its intention to upend the international system: it’s just doing what all countries do and wondering why nobody in the White House or Brussels is listening. Neither, in responding to Russia’s claims, is the West being asked to make a moral or ethical judgement about the quality of Russian democracy or the accounting practices of its leaders. It’s simply being asked to treat Russia’s interests as a state with the same respect it seeks for its own.

The point is that, for all the rhetoric about democracy and international law, the West is asking Russia to part with far more of its national security than the United States, or any other Western country, would be prepared itself to do. Consider, for example, that when the United States announces, as it has, the deployment of more F-14 and F-16 fighter jets to Poland and Estonia, American pilots will, in the latter case, be patrolling the skies a mere 150km from Russia’s second city and former capital, St Petersburg. Were Russian planes based anywhere near as close to Los Angeles, Chicago or Dallas, the United States would protest furiously.

The fifty-six-year old American embargo on Cuba demonstrates the kind of punishment the United States is prepared to impose on neighbours who choose their foreign partners wrongly. In fact, the embargo, which America still enforces and which cuts off almost all American trade with the country, was Washington’s fall back after its preferred option—invasion—was scuttled at the Bay of Pigs. This ought to throw Russia’s threatened gas cut-off to Ukraine into some relief, without excusing either.

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.