On February 28, 2014, Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Yurly Sergeyev
informed the Security Council that Russia had invaded the Crimean Peninsula, a semi-autonomous
region of the sovereign state. Heretofore, in exchange for Ukraine giving up
its nuclear weapons, Russia had agreed in a treaty to respect the territorial
borders of the Soviet Union’s former republic. After briefly discussing whether
Putin’s land-grab should have come as a surprise to the world, I take a
critical look at the Russian president’s rationale for invasion. I argue that
political realism (i.e., strategic interests of particular states being the
signature feature of international relations) undergirds Putin’s geo-political
view. This foundation is problematic as evinced by Putin’s inconsistencies on
national sovereignty.
Coming on the heels of the Olympic games meant to showcase
Russia to the world, Putin’s show of force must have come as a complete
surprise to the world.[1]
After all, on the day before the obviously-planned invasion, Vitally Churkin, Russia’s
ambassador to the United Nations had dismissed with a burst of haughty laughter
a journalist’s question on whether Russia was suddenly conducting its “military
exercises” near Crimea as a cloaked precursor to invasion. Indeed, the diplomat
even conveyed a sense of having been insulted by the very question! We, the
rest of the world, were being played like a sleepy fiddle.
A day or two before the invasion, unmarked Russians brought
in by bus (members of Putin’s favorite biker group being among them) took over
the provincial legislature. Once the Russian thugs were in control there, the
pro-Russian Crimean leader, Sergey Aksyonov, somehow found himself installed as
the region’s ruler. He “returned the favor” by asking Putin for help in
maintaining peace.[2] The
two-step dance by the emperor and his aspiring governor-to-be resulted in a
sham referendum quickly followed by a hasty annexation of Crimea as a region of
Russia. The sheer speed of these events belied the veracity of the Russian
narrative, a mere gloss for the de facto power
of possession.
Speaking with U.S. President Barak Obama on the first day of
the invasion, Putin stressed “the presence of real dangers to the lives and
health of Russians who are currently present in the Ukrainian territory.” Putin
stressed that Russia reserves the right
to defend its interests and the Russian-speaking people who live in Ukraine.[3]
Indeed, the Russian president claimed that Russia’s parliament had explicitly
given him the right to intervene in Ukraine militarily. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s
acting President Oleksadr Turchynov insisted that any reports of Russians and
Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens in the Crimean region being at all
threatened were pure fiction, and thus merely a Russian front or subterfuge for
raw military aggression.
Surely international law does not confer Russia, or any
other sovereign country for that matter, with the right to invade (not to mention annex) other sovereign states simply
because its ex-patriots may find their ethnicity is not fully protected;
strategic geo-political interests of a state runs up against the doctrine of
national sovereignty. Of course, this doctrine can give way, as a natural
rather than state-sourced (and thus delimited!) right arguably exists to
intervene across national boundaries if the systematic harm to inhabitants is
sufficiently grave (e.g., the Nazi holocaust). As a likely subterfuge for
taking the entire eastern half of Ukraine after having conquered Crimea, Putin
attempted just this rationale. “If the Kiev government is using the army
against its own people this is clearly a grave crime,” he said.[4]
It would indeed be, were Ukraine’s government turning against ethnic Russians
as Assad’s Syrian government had turned on protesters. Yet ironically Putin had
vetoed efforts by the UN Security Council to sanction efforts to intervene in
Syria, which unlike Ukraine could enjoy the absolutist variant of national
sovereignty. Putin’s inconsistency on national sovereignty undercuts not only
his credibility, but also that of his political theory of choice, political
realism.
Being based on the primacy of a state’s power-interests,
political realism implies a semi-permeable rather than absolutist rendering of
national sovereignty. In his seventeenth-century masterpiece, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argues that a
sovereign ruler should be given the power to do whatever he wants if peace is
the aim. A century earlier, Jean Bodin also held an absolutist view of
sovereignty, though unlike Hobbes, the sovereign is bounded by divine law while
still ruling rather than only in divine judgment in the afterlife. So even
within the absolutist camp, discernable differences exist (albeit premised on
the belief in divine punishment—which held considerable sway in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries).
Whereas the state that subscribes to political realism
(i.e., the primacy of the country’s own interests) regards its national
sovereignty as absolute (i.e., being invaded is not in the state’s
geo-political interests), the story is quite otherwise with respect to the
sovereignty of other countries (i.e.,
being invaded may be in the realist state’s interests). This inconsistency with
respect to national sovereignty points to a fault-line running through
political realism itself.
At least in Russia's case, the
absolutist interpretation is only to be selectively
defended (i.e., when violating it is contrary Russia’s geo-political national
interests), and with it the right to
intervene in another country’s internal affairs. The oxymoron of a
state-designated right being somehow valid beyond that state’s borders is
itself indicative of the sheer incredulity of Putin’s stance. Perhaps the truly
perplexing question bears on why the ruler of a modern empire would suppose
that such logical problems can safely be dismissed. Perhaps the answer is that
the world is all too willing to comply, being still too comfortable with antiquated ideas and ways.
[ii]
Chelsea Carter, Diana Magnay, and Ingrid Formanek, “Obama,
Putin Discuss Growing Ukraine Crisis,” CNN, March 1, 2014.
[iii]
Ibid.
[iv] Jacob
Resneck and Olga Rudenko, “Putin Issues New Threat,” USA Today, April 25, 2014.
