Sumit Ahlawat
In his high-stakes Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin has spelled out his list of non-negotiable demands for ending his three-and-a-half-year-old war in Ukraine.
The list includes three kinds of demands: No NATO membership for Ukraine, which by extension means an end to NATO’s eastward expansion, territorial gains for Russia, including Ukraine’s withdrawal from Donbas, and formal recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, and religious and cultural rights for Russian speakers in Ukraine.
While most of the commentators, including in the US, the EU, and Ukraine itself, have focused on the territorial aspect of Putin’s demands and how his forceful changing of international borders hurts at the very heart of rules-based international order and the UN charter, it is the third aspect of Putin’s demnds – a guarntee for safeguarding the religious and cultural rights for Russian speakers in Ukraine – which is most dangreous.
With this demand, Russia is perpetually establishing itself as a party to internal political dynamics within Ukraine. If Moscow ever feels that the religious and cultural rights of Russian speakers are threatened in Ukraine, as Putin claimed he felt first in 2014 and then again in 2022, which forced him to invade Ukraine, he might take the same step again, notwithstanding the security guarantees given to Kyiv.
This, in effect, puts the onus on Kyiv for not provoking Moscow to invade it again.
In fact, not just Ukraine, this logic – that Russia is a natural protector and guarantor of religious and cultural rights for Russian speakers all over the world, especially in former Soviet Union states, and can use the full spectrum of diplomatic/economic/military means for their protection – establishes Russia as a party not just in the internal politics of Ukraine but in a host of former Soviet Union states from Lativia to Kazakhstan, and from Moldova to Estonia.
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