Putin’s Petard

I participated last night in SAIS’s Central Asia-Caucasus Forum, which convened a panel on “Putin’s Kosovo Card: its Meaning to Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia” that included Kurt Volker and Mamuka Tsereteli with the skillful moderation of Fred Starr. These are my speaking notes:

• Vladimir Putin has persistently and insistently claimed that what the US did in Kosovo sets a precedent for what Russia has done in Ukraine.
• He has conveniently forgotten that Russia argued in 1999 that only the UN Security Council could authorize bombing of Yugoslavia, so if Kosovo is a precedent it is one Russia should not be following in Ukraine without UN approval.
• Putin has also conveniently forgotten that Russia played a critical role in urging Slobodan Milosevic to yield control of Kosovo to NATO.
• I have no doubt that in his mind what he is doing in Ukraine is in part retaliation for what the US did in Kosovo, over Russian objections. But that is quite different from claiming Kosovo constitutes a precedent.
• The claim it is a precedent is based on a bizarre and false analogy with no serious validity. Let me count the things that are wrong with it:
1. NATO intervened against Serbia to protect Kosovo Albanians from a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the Serbian government. There have been human rights violations, but no comparable campaign of mass atrocity and expulsion by the Ukrainian government against Russian-speaking Ukrainians either in Crimea or in Donbas.
2. Russia intervened overtly in Crimea, taking territory by military force and annexing it. The US never sought to annex Kosovo’s territory, or to attach it to any other country, something its internationally imposed constitution now prohibits.
3. The UNSC voted an end to the Kosovo war in June 1999 with resolution 1244, which confirmed the outcome and made the issue of its legality moot. There is no such resolution for Crimea or eastern Ukraine. I hope there will never be one unless Russia agrees to withdraw and yield sovereignty back to Ukraine.
4. The UN established a protectorate in Kosovo and governed it until 2008, ensuring that it transitioned to democracy and implemented all the requirements of the UN-sponsored Ahtisaari plan, including in particular protection for the Serb population in Kosovo. Russia has blocked any international engagement in Crimea to protect non-Russians. There is no sign that Crimea or any Russian-controlled part of Ukraine is headed for democracy, and ethnic cleansing of both Ukrainians and Tatars is ongoing.
5. Kosovo is now recognized de jure as sovereign by more than 100 other states and accepted de facto by many more. The Russian annexation of Crimea and the supposed independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have obtained few international acknowledgements.
6. Russia has also intervened covertly in eastern Ukraine, constantly denying its official presence and prevaricating about its military aid to the Russia-sponsored insurgents. It is currently launching an offensive against Mariupol, which has a large Russian-speaking population (44.4% in 2002, 48.7% Ukrainian). There was no such covert intervention in Kosovo, where the NATO air campaign, its preparations for a ground offensive and even its support for the Kosovo Liberation Army were well-known at the time.
• If there is a Kosovo precedent for what Russia is doing in Ukraine, it is not NATO’s protection of the Albanians but rather Russia’s own attempt to grab the Pristina airport by force in June 1999 as prelude to the arrival of Russian forces by air and occupation of northern Kosovo.
• An even more significant precedent is Slobodan Milosevic in the early 1990s, who claimed to be protecting his co-national Serbs from mistreatment while expelling Croats and Bosniaks from territory the Yugoslav National Army seized in Croatia and Bosnia.
• The pattern is a familiar one: exaggerated reports of mistreatment, organization of militias to protect against largely fictional mistreatment, provocation by those militias against legitimate state forces, then intervention to protect co-nationals from any efforts to restore law and order.
• Russia has repeatedly engaged in this pattern of creating problems in order to control territory with Russian-speaking majorities in the former Soviet space: Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Transnistria, it should be noted, pre-dates Kosovo.
• Moscow has gotten away with it before, so it will try again. Maybe in Kazakhstan. And it will encourage copy-cat efforts in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska and Nagorno-Karabakh, trying to ensure that the sovereign states in which those entities are located cannot exert effective control.
• This is a strategy of destabilization and control by military and paramilitary means.
• One more thing: if Putin seriously thought Kosovo was a precedent for Ukraine that he is justified in following, Moscow would accept the results of the NATO intervention and recognize Pristina. Fat chance of that.
• So as the Russian army attacks Mariupol, let’s call it what it is: naked aggression on neighboring state with the aim of grabbing territory populated in part by Russian speakers.

The discussion revolved in part around criteria for statehood and sovereignty as well as partition questions. Putin’s card is a petard, which is a small explosive device with a tendency to explode in ways that “hoist” the owner. The Russian Federation may well eventually face internal problems inspired in part by Putin’s own behavior in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, not to mention Syria.