Towards the end of the Soviet Union, a number of ethnic conflicts which had been repressed by the communist authorities re-emerged. And by the time the presidents of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus agreed between them to dissolve the USSR through the Belavezha Accords in December 1991, a number of ‘small wars’ had broken out within and between former Soviet republics. Longstanding grudges were let loose, often exacerbated by arbitrary Soviet boundaries. Legend has it, for example, that the now-annexed Crimean peninsula was first attached to Ukraine by Soviet premier Khrushchev when he was drunk.

Few of these wars were settled with any finality and they have earned the sobriquet ‘frozen conflicts’ to describe this intractable nature.

Today, tracts of land exist across Eastern Europe that are held by one group but recognized by the international community as belonging to another. Enclaves like the Donbas region, Trans-Dniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia or Nagorno-Karabakh are part of a sovereign state that does not control them, but are financially, militarily, and diplomatically dependent upon Russia for protection (or, in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, on Armenia, with Russia’s tacit consent). As Russia under President Putin has sought to invoke a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine over former Soviet space in recent years, the potential usefulness of these regions has grown.

Until recently, Russia could have relied on the Soviet legacy of personal connections, joint infrastructure, institutional culture, and sheer habit to maintain its Eurasian hegemony. However, with the passage of time the former republics have inevitably begun to develop down different paths and move away from Moscow. In Eastern Europe, states like Georgia have tried to follow the example of the USSR’s former satellite states and integrate into Western institutions. This is anathema to the Kremlin, which after flirting with the idea of joining the European mainstream itself, has firmly rejected Western influence in Russia since at least the 2008 Russo-Georgian war.

Although Moscow seems to have accepted that its former satellite colonies, and perhaps the Baltic States, are lost to the West, it regards the rest of what it terms ‘the near abroad’ as an exclusively Russian sphere. It has reacted to EU partnership overtures by proposing its own Russian-dominated economic bloc, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEC). To guide former Soviet republics back into Moscow’s fold, the Kremlin has used a stick-and-carrot approach. Schemes such as subsidized gas and paying pensions are the carrot; punishments such as revoking visas for guest workers sending remittances back home are the stick. Therefore, though the EEC has slowly gained traction with the less developed ex-republics (which are still heavily dependent upon Russia for revenue) it has caused many rows, not least because Russia sometimes treats the sovereignty of the other members as subordinate to Russian national interests.