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Russia's Monroe Doctrine: Peacekeeping, Peacemakingor Imperial Outreach?

the foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, and the president himself, promoted ideas similar to those advocated by the nationalists. In the second place, the liberał tonę in foreign policy seems to have been tailored specifically for Western consumption, or at least with an eye to Western reaction. Once it became elear that the West, in particular the United States, was ready to recognize Russia’s great power status and its “legitimate” strategie interests in the former Soviet imperial zonę, the liberał camouflage of the “near abroad” policy has been dropped.

A milestone here was Russia’s automatic accession to the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council with no questions raised by the Bush administration, as well as Secretary Warren Christopher’s November 4,1993, assurance to the U.S. Con-gress’ Foreign Relations Committee, that the new Russian military doctrine, which ex-plicidy authorizes Russian military intervention in Soviet successor States, does not vio-late the „crucial principle” of respect for these States’ sovereignty and territorial integ-rity¹. Another milestone has been the Western governments’ acąuiescence to Russia’s veto of NATO membership for East Central Europę, as well as their blindness to Ukraine’s desperate pleas for security guarantees in exchange for givingup nuclear weap-ons. The message received by Russia was that it has a green light to pursue its imperial interests in the “near abroad” unfettered. By extension the same applies also to East Central Europę.

President Yeltsin’s first assessment of Russia’s relations with other union republics after the failed August 1991 coup was that they had the right to independence but that Russia’s borders may have to be modified to include contiguous Russian population. The border modification demand was muted later, because of the need to keep Ukrainę in the proposed commonwealth and because of the generał sensitivity of the issue. But the president’s attitudes may be gauged by his decision to send troops to stop Chechenya’s unilateral declaration of independence (within the Federation) in the fali of 1991. This action was not supported by Russia’s Supreme Soviet, which was then in a non-interventionist mood, and the troops were withdrawn, as were the troops (in March 1992) from Nagorno-Karabakh that had been sent there by Gorbachev. The “withdrawal” mood then was reflected also in Yeltsin’s March 1992 concessions to the Federation’s ethnic republics.

At that stage Russian foreign policy, then identified both with President Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Kozyrev, was based on close cooperation with the West and a strong emphasis on the protection of human rights and the prevention of aggression, with

1

Cbristopher Spells out New Priońties, “New York Times”, November 5,1993, p. A8.