What Putin Thinks He’s Up to In Crimea

Yesterday, Crimea held a referendum on whether to join Russia. Today, Vladimir Putin issued a decree recognizing Crimea as an independent country. Tomorrow, he will address Crimea's future status before Russia's parliament. Despite intense US-led diplomatic efforts, it doesn’t look like anything is going to keep Putin from getting everything he wants in Crimea.

Following the occupation of the region by unmarked Russian troops — Putin’s production of #OccupyCrimea enacted by Anonymous (as played by the Russian army) — the residents of Crimea had themselves a heck of a referendum on whether to boldly cut ties with Ukraine and assert their independence by asking to be absorbed by Russia.

Western observers have been claiming that the referendum’s 97 percent vote in favor of secession was illegitimate since it was essentially carried out under the guns of the “anonymous” Russians. But that's utter nonsense — Crimean election officials are easily competent enough to fix an election without relying on crude intimidation. Their electoral expertise is well in evidence: the vote count in Sevastopol apparently exceeded its population by about 88,000. That they chose to overdo the voting so dramatically is interesting; there was a high probability that the barrage of propaganda alone would have produced the desired outcome.

Now Crimea is busily figuring out what, exactly, it has gotten itself into. Its parliament announced that it will nationalize Ukrainian state property, and it has adopted the Russian ruble as a second official currency, alongside the Ukrainian hryvnia, which will remain in use until January 1, 2016. Meanwhile, a Crimean delegation has flown to Moscow to figure out what their autonomous republic has signed up for, how to proceed, what paperwork needs filling out if it wants to join Russia, and whether or not Crimea will need to present two forms of identification with its application.

Meanwhile, the Western response still appears to be primarily one of shock — which is fair, considering that this crisis was just about angry protestors in Kiev a month ago. It almost seems as though the West isn’t so much upset that Russia is gobbling up a chunk of Crimea as it is that Putin is bulldozing a cherished narrative about international relations, diplomacy, negotiation, and the power of engagement. Because of this, coverage of the unfolding situation has largely missed what Putin thinks he’s up to.

Powerful nations are generally sensitive about things happening on their doorstep. A country that can exert influence and control in their neighborhood is stronger and more secure. The United States got into this in a big way in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine, which can be paraphrased as, “Don’t any of you get any bright ideas about getting colonially, politically, or militarily involved in any place in North America or South America.” With a few notable exceptions, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, this more or less held.

But if a powerful country is made stronger and more secure by holding sway in its own sphere of influence, it's also true that powerful countries can threaten nations by messing around in their backyards. See: the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As the Soviet Union collapsed into an array of countries with strange and sometimes hard-to-spell names, Russian control over what it considered to be its sphere of influence collapsed as well. After the mutual defense Warsaw Pact was disbanded, former Soviet allies were joining NATO as fast as they could. From Putin’s perspective, Europe (meaning NATO, meaning the anti-Russian military alliance, meaning the diplomatic cover for US military aggression) kept relentlessly expanding further and further east. Elsewhere in the world, the US continued to serve its interests by finding innovative ways around complications of international law. Not only did the US have its way in Iraq (kinda), in the late 1990s NATO helped Kosovo break from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (a long-time Russian ally, today known as Serbia and Montenegro) and become an independent region against strenuous Russian objections.

Putin evidently believes that if the US and West were left unchecked, Russia would be relegated to an Epcot Center pavilion, and he would be stuck selling cute little nesting dolls at a souvenir stand for a living.

Putin delivered a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine at an international security conference in Munich in 2007 — he basically told the rest of the world that they had gotten all up in Russia’s geopolitical personal space, making Russia very uncomfortable. This sailed right past Western members of the audience, who were busy comparing their new iPhones.

Now, to be sure, this doesn’t make Putin any less of a dick… but it does make him a dick who thinks he’s been backed into a corner.

The West got very excited about Euromaidan protesters ousting the Kremlin’s man in Kiev, Viktor Yanukovych. It may have had something to do with the captivating spectacle of attractive, passionate young people getting righteously angry and chanting incoherently at older, fatter government officials.

For Russia, this exhibition was a mess in its own backyard. Putin took it about as well as Reagan would have taken a pro-Soviet revolution in Canada. Russia flipped out and doubled down on protecting its interests, rather than stand idle as a major next door neighbor switched its allegiance.

But the US hasn’t seen it that way. While Russia was getting more hard-nosed about controlling its sphere of influence, in 2013, the US announced it was abandoning the Monroe Doctrine. This helps explain why the West has been slow to develop a diplomatic or economic response that communicates to Putin in a language he’s willing to admit he understands.

Now that the Crimean referendum has taken place, the Russian foreign ministry has moved into this conceptual gap with its own proposal for a diplomatic settlement in Ukraine. The proposal makes some pro-diversity suggestions that are intended to protect ethnic Russians while pleasing Western audiences: preservation of diversity in culture; respect for the interests of the multinational people of Ukraine; support for the legitimate aspirations of all Ukrainians and all regions of the country to live safely and peacefully; free use of native languages; freedom to maintain their customs and traditions. An even more crowd-pleasing element is the call for “inadmissibility of a revival of neo-Nazi ideology, the need for Ukrainian politicians to disassociate themselves from the ultra-nationalists.” The proposal did, however, stop short of demanding free Starbucks gift cards for all.

But the meat of the proposal is a call for Ukraine to rewrite its constitution, creating a more federal political system with stronger local government and weaker central authority. This would be like going from the US political system to something more like the European Union — Ukraine would remain a government but it would be more a collection of parts than a cohesive whole. The Russian proposal also calls for Ukraine to officially adopt a position of geopolitical and military neutrality. Russia is basically announcing that it does not want Ukraine in Europe’s sphere of influence.

While this may seem very arcane, outmoded, and old school to some in the diplomatic community, the emergent facts in Crimea mean that Russia is presenting the West with a diplomatic “off-ramp” to exit the crisis, instead of the other way around.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan