During the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s FSB was permitted to infiltrate the SBU, and Yanukovych was instructed to curtail Ukrainian counter-espionage activities targeting Russian recruitment in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. The coup de grâce was administered when Yanukovych fled Kyiv in February 2014: the SBU’s headquarters were ransacked, data on over 22,000 agents and informants were stolen, and every hard drive and flash drive in the building was destroyed. The former SBU Head and his entourage soon surfaced in Moscow. His successor, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, concluded that Ukraine had lost “everything that forms a basis for a professional intelligence service.”
The Ukrainian case shows the importance Moscow assigns to preventing the emergence of serious counter-intelligence efforts in neighboring states. The same is true in Georgia: when the Georgian government arrested four Russian operatives of Russian military intelligence in 2006, Moscow was so upset at this affirmation of Georgian sovereignty that it curtailed all air, rail, road, and postal links to the country and began harassing Georgian immigrants in Russia.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/securit
This analysis will consider these questions as they relate to Russia’s immediate neighborhood, also known as the ‘near abroad’, and in particular to the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russian interests in the near abroad are clearly visible; here Moscow has already twice deployed troops to pursue these interests in clear contravention of international law.
More recently,Russia’s military doctrine has clearly stated that Moscow reserves the right to use its armed forces to “protect the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens,” as well as,“to protect citizens of the Russian Federation abroad from armed attack on them. This narrative has been advanced in particular since 2008 and will likely continue to be used by Russia to justify its military operations abroad. Interestingly, TASS used a similar argument in September 1939 to explain and justify the entry of Soviet troops into Poland. The TASS release was explicit in saying that the Soviet troop deployments were intended to protect Belarusians and Ukrainians from the “horrors of war.” In 1939, it had long been recognized that the Soviet Union was trying to export communist values to the rest of Europe and then the world.
There is no communism today and Russia has lost its military and political influence in almost all of the former Warsaw Pact countries. Yet it still claims ‘privileged status’ in the post-Soviet space and will continue to leverage its position in the near abroad through economic, political, and military means, including armed invasion.
Russian belligerence is thus not driven by a desire to become an empire once again, but by an attempt to rebuild fragments of the imperial privileges that the Soviet Union once possessed—to reclaim the status, and influence that would allow Russia to again play a dominant role in the region and beyond.
Asharp deterioration of relations within the Euro-Atlantic community, one which would seriously call into question the NATO’s collective defence mechanism,is one of only a few scenarios that could plausibly encourage Russia to contemplate military options against the three states. On the other hand, the large Russian diaspora living in these countries makes them targets for Russian propaganda, especially amongst those citizens who may be sympathetic to the Russian cause and tempted by the Russian view of the world. Russia will thus attempt to use active measures to infiltrate and influence decision-making processes in the Baltic states.( ... tālāk ... )
[I]n the 1960s [this] was known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine. A month after the Prague Spring was crushed, the Soviet ideologue, Sergei Kovalev, wrote an article in Pravda which defended the use of force against progressive socialist movements willing to deviate from the Leninist-Marxist line:
“Without question, the peoples of the socialist countries and the Communist parties have and must have freedom to determine their own countries' paths of development. Any decision they make, however, must not be inimical either to socialism in their own countries or to the fundamental interests of other socialist countries.... The sovereignty of individual socialist countries cannot be set against the interests of world socialism and the world revolutionary movement. . . . Each Communist party is free to apply the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate from these principles.... The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, and they cannot look indifferently upon this.”
Brezhnev later reaffirmed these views adding that,“when internal and external forces hostile to socialism are threatening to turn a socialist country back to capitalism, this becomes a common problem and a concern of all socialist countries.” This paradigm was later used to justify Soviet troop deployments into Afghanistan in 1989.
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