Russia doesn't normally want to start wars. The state's economic and political weakness usually constrains its foreign policy. But on February 21, the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, voted to impeach president Viktor Yanukovych under pressure from the protesters in Maidan Nezalezhnost (Independence Square) and confronted the Kremlin with an existential threat to its own fragile legal order. The wave of uprisings that have transformed political systems in the Middle East suddenly washed up on Russia's own shores. The world around Russia changed dramatically.

Yet recent attempts to assess Putin's ultimate purpose in Ukraine as a form of revanchism regard Russia's behavior as remarkably new. That's because they assign too much significance to the late-February invasion and occupation of Crimea. The invasion was a dramatic, but merely tactical and limited application of military force. In order to understand Putin's long-term foreign-policy strategy, one must look at Russia's response to the Rada's decision to impeach Yanukovych and dramatically overhaul the government, not the invasion of Crimea.

Putin's long-term strategic goal in Ukraine is to protect the Russian state's legal order, not further military expansion. In Putin's conception of Russian statehood, foreign policy is determined by the needs of domestic order. From his 1999 political profession of faith, usually referred to as the "Millennium Message," to the March 18 celebration of the Crimean referendum, Putin has demonstrated a remarkably consistent commitment to the defense of standing legal systems as bulwarks against domestic social and political anarchy. For that reason, any policy responses from North America or Europe should focus on diplomatic engagement. Military containment or confrontation could drag Russia, Europe and North America into a long and costly military and economic confrontation. A destabilized region could also attract Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists to "defend" the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim minority in the newly annexed territory.

Revanchist Russia: Overstating the Strategic Significance of the Annexation of Crimea

The revanchist explanation of the Russian Federation's military incursion into Crimea understandably focuses on the novelty of Russia's use of military force. Russia was really motivated by the allegedly self-evident great-power interests of territorial expansion and increased influence in the domestic politics of other states: the Economist's April 19 cover showed that the insatiable Russian bear had returned, and a May 4 New York Times' editorial argued, "Putin displayed his true colors by invading Crimea and destabilizing eastern Ukraine."

Focusing on the military incursion makes intuitive sense. From the perspective of North American and European governments, Russia's continuing threat to use military force and an aggressive media campaign designed to generate support for its actions seem to be the crisis's most salient features. In the aftermath of CIA and DIA failures to forecast the invasion, Congress has put political pressure to bear on the military incursion. But even proponents of the revanchist consensus note that this operation has too many economic drawbacks in the long run to make the Crimean annexation or any further military incursions viable. Moreover, far from systemically criticizing the international legal order, Putin has justified the incursion in terms of international legal principles. So, what other pressures are part of Putin's calculus of Russia's interests?

Training our eyes on Russia's response to the Rada's potentially illegal decision to impeach President Viktor Yanukovych starts to bring these forces into focus. Justly or not, the Kremlin saw that event as the latest in a series of Western violations of sovereignty and legal norms stretching back to the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999. The appearance of a threat to Russia's sovereignty and constitutional order in a state with complicated historical and cultural ties to Russia threatened to embolden Russia's own political critics. After all, the Duma that was elected in December 2011 and the start of Putin's third term in March 2012 were greeted by public protests that Russia hadn't seen since the 1990s—echoes of the Arab Spring in Eurasia.

Domestic Legal Order: Promoting Russian Statehood since 1999

Putin, himself, has said as much in some underreported lines from his March 18 speech celebrating the Crimean referendum. He criticized NATO's armed interventions in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as well as the "Color Revolutions" and "Arab Spring" that have resulted not in "democracy and freedom" but "chaos, outbreaks in violence and a series of upheavals.” Underlining his criticism, Putin claimed, "the 'Arab Spring' has turned into the 'Arab Winter.'"

Putin's strategic vision for Russia has not changed since the "Millennium Message," but there is evidence that his short-term tactics have, for the time being. Putin's vision is organized around a conservative notion of Russian statehood that assumes significant weaknesses within Russia's society, economy, and, ironically, local government institutions. It's conservative because it regards the state as the sole, legitimate source of slow, legally structured modernization. Traditionally, this conservative vision of Russian statehood has constrained Russia's foreign policy.

As the Obama administration contemplates expanding economic sanctions against Putin's entourage and struggles to understand reports that Russian troops have been pulled away from Ukraine's borders, it should recall Alexis de Tocqueville's famous dictum that "the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually the moment when it begins to reform itself." Putin is not setting a reform agenda, yet. But he is struggling to find new ways to inoculate the Russian state against what he has called the "epidemic of disintegration" in his April 2005 address to the Federal Assembly; hence the violation of the principle of state sovereignty that has guided Russian foreign policy (in Libya and Syria, for example) and flirtations with nationalism.

The April address has become notorious for containing Putin's judgment that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Following Cold War half-truths of totalitarianism, western commentators have taken Putin's nostalgia for the Soviet Union as evidence of Russia's illegitimate expansionist intentions. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s along ethnic, religious, and economic boundaries showed how tenuously it had held these competing identities together. Much of Putin's political career since 1999 has been consumed with maintaining the integrity of the Russian Federation's federal structure to ensure the peace and prosperity, however imperfect, that has promoted the socio-economic development on which Putin's own popularity is based.

Putin's key policy statements indicate that he is truly motivated by a desire to preserve international legal order, however self-serving this may be. From the "Millennium Message" to his most recent addresses and interviews, Putin has expressed a remarkably consistent message. In his first policy statement, Putin clearly endorsed Russia's "own path of renewal" out of the Russian Federation's "economic backwardness" that "depend[ed] on combining the universal principles of the market economy and democracy with Russian realities." Putin encapsulated this vision of the Russian state with the "Russian Idea": dignified and inclusive patriotism, Russia's status as a great power, recognition of the leading role of the state in Russia's modernization, and social solidarity.

The principles of statehood laid out in the "Millennium Message" can be seen in subsequent statements. In March 2003, for example, Putin condemned the UN resolution allowing the use of military force against Iraq as "the law of the fist" that undermines "the principle of the immutable sovereignty of the state." Presciently, Putin defended the inviolability of state sovereignty as a bulwark against "the area of instability that has arisen [and] will grow and cause negative consequences in other regions of the world." He expressed the same vision in the 2005 "Address to the Federal Assembly" in which he claimed that the "collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" because it released an "epidemic of disintegration that spread to Russia itself" and threatened the very viability of "Russian statehood." Those principles, combined with a savvy media campaign for consumption in the post-Soviet space, informed Russia's overreaction to Georgia's recklessness in the August 2008 five-day war.

Although Putin's invocation of Russia's preternatural spiritual connection with Crimea in his March 18 message may seem mendacious, he linked this concept to a commitment to international legal norms that undergird his conservative vision of Russian statehood. There's little evidence for Putin's claim that "Crimea was always and will remain an inalienable part of Russia in the hearts and consciousness of people." However, he also affirmed his commitment to legally structured relations with Ukraine when he insisted that "good relations with Ukraine are the main thing for us, and they ought not be hostage to dead-end territorial disputes." Putin went on to add that "we have, of course, expected that Ukraine will be our good neighbor, that Russians and Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine, especially in its southeast and in Crimea, will live in the conditions of a friendly, democratic, and civilized state, and that their legal interests will be secured in accord with the norms of international law."

The Social and Economic Sources of the Russian State's Weakness

If these statements are taken seriously, then from the perspective of Russian officialdom, the whole edifice of Russian state and society has been under threat since December 2011. The wave of protests against the Duma elections in December 2011 and Putin's own election in March 2012 revealed the gulf between Russia's government and the rising middle class that Putin's reforms helped to create. (Hence the series of increasingly stringent Internet restrictions enacted piecemeal since November 2013.) Conservatives in government are likely to overreact to any evidence of political disorder, but there is striking evidence that social and economic transformations are threatening the informal social compact that has underwritten Putin's system.

In the provinces, the social fabric has shown signs of wear along ethnic, religious, and economic lines. In August 2013, the governor of Krasnodar Region, Aleksandr Tkachyov, caused a stir when he allegedly intended to create a "Cossack police" force to "take care of" the problem of illegal immigration—code for the presence of North Caucasus ethnic groups trying to escape the officially reported 13.1 percent unemployment rate in the North Caucasus Federal Province as of 2012. And in the same month, the governor of Stavropol' Region, Valerii Zerenkov, resigned—willingly or unwillingly—in connection with a minor confessional scandal, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a regional law forbidding students to wear hijabs as part of their school uniforms. The October 2013 Biryulevo riots in Moscow dramatically illustrated that these tensions were present even in the capital.

Weakness has plagued the Putin system since before his return to the presidency. The social media-driven protests from December 2011 to May 2012 reflect a profound generational and cultural abyss between the government and the upwardly mobile created by the social and economic reforms over which Putin presided and can legitimately claim success. According to the Levada Center, a Russian polling agency, Putin's approval rating spiked 11 percent, from 69 percent in February to 82 percent in April. With the exception of governors, approval ratings across the government have improved. This sort of popularity was short lived after the Georgian war, and it is not clear whether the rise in approval ratings reflects Russia's citizens' support for Putin's governing system or delight in dressing down NATO.

The evidence of Russian online news and social media suggests that the Kremlin has only tenuous control over public opinion in Russia's urban centers. Shortly after the incursion into Ukraine, Evgenii Gontmakher, a Russian economist and pundit, expressed concern that the creation of a "mobilizational economy" could stunt the country's social and economic development. Users of Russian social media have criticized the Kremlin's economic slogans in more colorful terms. According to an April 28 Kommersant report, for example, Putin announced that regional cuisines—Ossetian and Tatar meat pies, for example—could be produced commercially on a scale to compete with McDonald's. Some 100 Facebook readers nearly unanimously ridiculed the idea as absurd political ruse.

Social media from eastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia suggests a more serious security threat for the region. Users of an online forum for residents of Rostov-on-Don, a city located near Crimea, voice a bewildering array of attitudes that testify to the oversimplification of looking at local populations in terms of pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow activists. Even more troubling is the news that Igor Strelkov infiltrated eastern Ukraine from Crimea and has orchestrated the violent resistance to the new Kyiv government from Slovyansk. How much direct control can Moscow have over a man who, if his forum posts are genuine, derided the USSR, the Kremlin and its staff—and called himself a monarchist. His vision of an ethnically homogenous "historical Russia" has little in common with any of the Kremlin's statist policies. Evidence from social media suggests he is one example of a widespread subculture of ex-military reenactors. If Moscow and other European powers have sown the wind by interfering in the Black Sea basin, ultimately, the locals will be left to reap the whirlwind.

The Only Good Solution Now Is Federalism

Having slowed down the political changes in Kyiv and shown recklessly, but unambiguously, the divisions in Ukrainian politics and society, Putin is unlikely to move troops any further into eastern Ukraine. That is unless Ukraine's unfortunately provocative "antiterrorism" campaign in the east spirals out of control. Unfortunately, Kyiv is amplifying as many disparate voices in support of its policies as Moscow has since before the invasion. As Anatol Lieven has recently noted, Putin has already made a federal political solution to the crisis of political authority in Ukraine the only viable solution.

Whatever the origins of the crisis in Ukraine, it is in the interests of North America, Europe, Russia and Ukraine to ensure this solution can be codified by the May 25 presidential elections. Otherwise, the echo chamber of social media threatens to bring the political disorder of the so-called Arab Spring onto the European continent. On May 16, the leaders of Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (JAMWA), a Caucasian fighting group in Syria, called for Muslims to defend the Muslim Tatar minority in Crimea. Unfortunately, Putin appears to be oblivious to this threat given his recent condescending treatment of the new representative of the Crimean Tatar community, Lentul Bezzaziev, who has risen on the back of Mustafa Dzhemilev, since the latter has been barred from reentering Crimea. For better or worse, stability and security in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia run through Moscow.

Sean Gillen is an analyst with a defense contractor in Tampa, Florida. In 2012, he earned a PhD in Russian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dissertation on liberal and conservative discussions of the political order in the context of war and terrorism in late-nineteenth-century Russia. 

Image: Kremlin photo