The Foreign Service Journal, March 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2020 27 v In late 2008 Russia invaded Georgia, following a long period of military prov- ocations against the Cau- casian state. The invasion of Ukraine came in 2014. Both military actions were designed to reassert Russia’s claims to regional hege- mony and to keep NATO frommaking Ukraine and Georgia members of the Alliance. Putin justified Russian action on the grounds of protecting Russian-speaking residents wherever they might live. Russia held a referendum in Crimea on March 16, 2014, and claimed that, with an 83.1 percent voter turnout, 96.77 percent voted for the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation. Voters were not given the choice to remain an autonomous oblast within Ukraine under the current constitutional structure, an option that U.S. International Republican Institute polls in the years before the Russian invasion had consistently shown was favored by a plurality if not a majority of the Crimean popula- tion. In a May 2013 IRI poll, for example, 53 percent of Crimean residents interviewed responded to a question on the future status of Crimea by saying they wanted to remain autonomous in Ukraine; 23 percent wanted to be separated and given to Russia; and 12 percent wanted autonomy for Crimean Tatars in Ukraine. Russian policy did not have to follow a confrontational path. Russian experts have articulated in private and in public an alternative approach that the Kremlin did not take. Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in March 2018, for example, that Russian policy had not served Russian interests: “Since the start of the conflict in Donbas, the formation of the Ukrainian political nation has proceeded on a clear anti-Russian platform. It did not have to be, had Russia’s foreign policy been more enlightened. The emergence of independent Ukraine—as well as Belarus—is a natural process, something that Russia would be better off understanding and accepting as a fact. “As independent nations,” Trenin continued, “Ukraine, overtly, and Belarus, less so, are tilting toward the European Union, for the same reasons as Romanians and Bulgarians. A clever Russian policy should have seen that and offered them a concept of how to ‘go West’ without breaking with Russia. This is too late for Ukraine but can still be done with Belarus.” A Ukrainian soldier on guard duty and an armored vehicle troop carrier on the front line in Donbas, 2016. ARTHURBONDAR Russians and Ukrainians march for peace in Moscow, 2014. AUTHURBONDAR ARTHURBONDAR