Silencing the contestant. Legitimizing Crimea’s annexation by mimicking the West

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Russia’s endeavours in legitimising the annexation of Crimea in the eyes of the Western community. The paper argues that Russia’s strategy of “silencing” the international contestation has been focused on the use of the West’s “language” for the justification of contested actions. Starting from the assertion that the formulation of Russia’s foreign policy is determined by Western normative frameworks and by the West’s international behaviour, the article scrutinised Moscow’s official narrative after March 2014 by comparing it with the West’s arguments used in particular in the cases of NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia and the recognition of Kosovo’s independence.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian politics
• Crimea annexation
• near abroad
• legitimization
• silencing

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank dr. Cindy Wittke (IOS Regensburg) and dr. Marc Ozawa (NATO Defence College Rome) fro their valuable feedback; and the research group “Frozen and Unfrozen Conflicts” of Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) Regensburg for hosting me during the writing of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Vasile Rotaru is a senior researcher in International Relations. Dr. Rotaru has conducted academic research at NATO Defence College in Rome; the New Europe College in Bucharest; the Leibniz Institute for Southeast and East European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, Germany; Georgetown University in Washington DC; the University of Tartu, Estonia; the University of Leuven, Belgium; and the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania. His research interests are Russian foreign policy, the former Soviet region, the Eastern Partnership, and the Eurasian Economic Union.

Notes

1 In current Russian official narratives, the West refers to the US and the Western Europe. President Putin usually does not employ the term “the West” as a collective name, he uses instead the “United States and (Western) Europe” or “Western Europe and North America” (see Putin 2007, 2014a, 2014e, etc.) when referring to the Western community. For the ease of reading, we will use the West while referring to both the US and Europe.

2 When President Putin requested the Federal Council to ratify the treaty on admitting to the Russian Federation Crimea and Sevastopol.

3 We are aware that the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was endorsed by the UN only in 2005, however, the arguments used by Western community in the 1999 Kosovo intervention fit this concept.

4 We acknowledge that not all the Western countries (yet, the majority) have recognised the independence of Kosovo, however, for the clarity of the text we will use the collective concept of the West when referring to the countries that have recognised Kosovo.