Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem Post, Feb. 22, 2022
“Russia is exploiting the situation that it helped create in 2014 by now creating a legal fiction for sending troops into these areas.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a long and important speech on February 21 as tensions with the US over Ukraine reached new heights. While the media focused on certain aspects of the speech, particularly Russia recognizing two separatist areas in Ukraine as sovereign independent states, there is much more there to unpack.
Let’s begin at the end. “I consider it necessary to make a long-overdue decision to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] and the Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR],” he said. These are two areas in eastern Ukraine that declared independence in April of 2014. Their decision was clearly motivated by a sense they had Moscow’s backing. They are in one of several small areas similar to this that have sought to become their own states with Russian backing.
Moscow usually does this as a way to keep its hands on the scales inside a former Soviet country. In Georgia, there is South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which sought independence in the 1990s – and there are other areas, such as Transnistria near Moldova.
Putin’s decision was made after years of trying to manage a conflict in Ukraine. He claims the necessity of recognition now, apparently to do away with the pretense that these are just separatist areas. Russia cares about international laws and norms; even if it exploits them for its own needs, it cares to have an appearance of doing things by the book.
That is why Russia’s Tass reported today that “Putin later ordered the Russian Foreign Ministry to establish diplomatic relations with the DPR and LPR and the Defense Ministry to maintain peace in the republics. According to one of the presidential decrees, the Defense Ministry was ordered to make sure that ‘the Russian Armed Forces maintain peace in the Donetsk People’s Republic’ until a treaty on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance is concluded. The Russian Defense Ministry received similar instructions in a decree recognizing the LPR.”
The point here is that Russia is exploiting the situation that it helped create in 2014 by now creating a legal fiction for sending troops into these areas. This will lead to the “peacekeeping” troops being on the line of potential contact with a Ukrainian army that Moscow says has sent 120,000 troops to the borders of these breakaway regions. Ukraine has called the operations against the separatists an “anti-terror” campaign.
LET’S LOOK at how Putin has presented this to understand why it might matter far beyond Ukraine.
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