Staunton, July 1 – To avoid a Yugoslavia on the territory of the former USSR, the post-Soviet states in 1991 accepted the administrative borders the Soviet government had imposed as the state borders of their countries, Sergey Markedonov says; but developments in these countries and Russia’s conflict with the West mean these lines are no longer “sacred.”
Speaking to a youth forum in Yekaterinburg, the MGIMO scholar says that this changed reality must be kept in mind when talking about events in Ukraine. Moscow’s dispute with the West there is not a struggle for “some pieces of territory” but rather a much larger political contest (nakanune.ru/articles/122309/).
For Russia as for all other countries, Markedonov says, “it is always important and necessary to know what is happening in countries with which yours has a border.” That in turn is “largely a problem of identity: where do we begin and where to we end? Where are our borders?”
What he calls “the Beloveshchaya borders” were initially accepted by Russians because they expected outsiders to stay out and the new states to behave with respect toward all the ethnic groups, including Russians on their territories. But as the West has intervened more often and these countries have increasingly harsh policies toward minorities, that attitude has changed.
Indeed, Markedonov says, “we can now say that there has been a collapse of ‘Beloveshchaya nationalism’ and the union republic borders established in Soviet times have ceased to be sacred.” And consequently, there is every possibility that the borders agreed to in 1991 will be changed in the future.
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