THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Back in December, over at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Mark Grimsley posted a brief essay by Andrew Rigney arguing that Russia’s complaints about independence for Kosovo weren’t backed up by the ability to do anything about it. I disagreed then (and said so in the comments) and I disagree now.

Russia has plenty of ways to make the US and US allies squirm by manipulating parallel cases of national self-determination. If we allow the principle that regional self-determination and popular sovereignty (of, say, the Kosovar Albanians) can trump the territorial integrity of a sovereign state (say, Serbia), then I’m not sure how we oppose the same logic in the cases Transdniester vs. Moldova, or South Ossetia and Abkhazia vs. Georgia. The Russians have drawn the same conclusion, as you can see here. I don’t know how one makes an argument with a straight face that the corrupt and violent politicians are all on the side we don’t like (Serbia, Transdniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia) and the democratic freedom fighters are all on the side we do (Kosovo, Moldova, Georgia).

But what I did NOT see coming was how exactly Russia might play the self-determination card in Ukraine. But Russia’s TV Tsentr (program V tsentre sobytii) just ran a show on the implications of Kosovo for the national aspirations of the Tatars and Russians of the Crimea. (No internet link–my source on this is BBC Monitoring relayed in Johnson’s Russia List)

What’s done is done, but Kosovo independence was a cause best kicked down the road a few years. No pressing need to resolve the issue now, and (as we have seen) several reasons to wait.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS