Moscow Leaving European Convention on National Minorities for Reasons Foreign and Domestic, Sidorov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 20 – Today, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was withdrawing from the European Convention of National Minorities that it signed in October 1994, an action that reflects the Kremlin’s rejection of the principles of that convention regarding both the domestic arrangements of the Russian Federation and its foreign policy, Kharun Sidorov says.

            The Prague-based analyst says this move reflects the fact that “the very conception of ‘national minorities’ isn’t needed by the Kremlin either at home or abroad.” At home it challenges Moscow’s effort to subsume ethnic groups within a notional “’Russian nation,’” and abroad to define a “quasi-national’ Russian world (idelreal.org/a/31621057.html).

            In announcing Russia’s withdrawal from the convention, Putin did not specify why he was doing so, Sidorov continues. In part, of course, this reflects the Kremlin leader’s preference to avoid being involved in international legal arrangements that people in Russia and abroad might be deploy against him.

            Fundamentally, the analyst says, Putin and his regime are engaged in “the denial of the multi-national nature of Russia,” not so much in the sense of denying the existence of various ethnic groups but about “leveling the legal and political status of specific ethno-national groups.” The convention at least in principle provides them with a defense against that.

            This Kremlin approach also works against ethnic Russians as a nation. They are recognized in Putin’s world only in terms of their language rather than as an independent actor. And this is the way in which the Kremlin’s objections to the provision of the convention interact with its policies in Ukraine.

            Moscow doesn’t want to defend the ethnic Russians of Ukraine as a national minority, Sidorov says. It wants to insist that they and Russian-speaking Ukrainians are part of the same linguistically defined nation. Hence, in the current crisis, Putin had a compelling reason from his perspective to exit the European Convention.