security and human rights 27 (2016) 273-288

brill.com/shrs osce Mediation in an Eroding International Order

Philip Remler retired u.s. diplomat

Abstract

The feeling is widespread in the West that the post wwii normative international or- der has been under severe challenge since Russia’s seizure of Crimea, now exacerbated by statements from the American president casting doubt on the institutions that un- derpin that order. Is there a future role for osce mediation as this order erodes? Study of the Ukraine crisis in light of other protracted conflicts on the territory of the former Soviet Union shows that the same challenges have existed for a generation. Because the conflicts were small, however, the international community chose to accept a fic- tion of convenience to isolate them from an otherwise functioning international order: the narrative that the separatists sought independence, not (as in reality) a re-drawing of post-Soviet borders. This isolation is under pressure both from the new experience in Ukraine and from the extension of ever-greater Russian control over the separatists, amounting to crypto-annexation, despite a backlash from Moscow’s clients, including in Armenia. There is little likelihood of a resolution to the Ukraine crisis, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and prospects for mediation to resolve the conflicts remain dim. However, continued talks may resolve some humanitarian issues and pro- vide a release valve to prevent pressures boiling over into renewed open warfare.

In 2015 the present author published an article outlining some effects of the Ukraine crisis on protracted conflicts in the osce area and on osce mediation in those conflicts.1 He has been asked to revisit his assessment of that time in

* Philip Remler is a retired u.s. diplomat with experience in osce missions and mediation efforts: he served with the osce Assistance Group in Chechnya (1995), collaborated with the osce Minsk Group (1993, 1996–98), and headed the osce Mission in Moldova (2007–2012). He also served in Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. He has written on protracted conflicts, including a study of negotiations to end the Karabakh war. 1 “Ukraine, Protracted Conflicts and the osce,” Security and Human Rights 26 (2015), 88–106.

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274 Remler light of subsequent events in world politics (in particular the advent of a new administration in the United States) and in the region. The new developments give little cause for optimism that settlement in any of the conflicts is closer. Rather, the question for the osce is whether the international community, in view of the challenges posed by the Ukraine crisis, should continue to engage in the fictions that have allowed it to manage the conflicts since their begin- nings in the collapsing Soviet Union.

Keywords mediation – separatism – frozen conflict – border – osce – Armenia – Azerbaijan – Georgia – Moldova – Russia – Ukraine – Abkhazia – Crimea – Donbass – Karabakh – South Ossetia – Transdniestria i Russia-West Tensions and the osce

Uncertainty is the major handicap to analyzing the effects of East-West ten- sions on the osce and its mediation efforts. Some of the uncertainty was gen- erated in anticipation of a series of European elections. But to a much greater extent, the uncertainty derives from the blank slate of future u.s. policy to- wards Russia. No one knows what it will be, including those currently charged with making it. New developments appear constantly, and point in many con- tradictory directions. In such a highly fluid situation, contemporary analysis is of necessity journalistic. Much has been made of the praise candidate Trump lavished on President Putin. Indeed, the two were natural allies, since both wanted to upend the post- World War ii international order and recreate in its place a neo-Westphalian world in which ethnically defined nations advance their individual interests through bilateral relations dictated by relative strength and weakness. Since World War ii, an international order has been built through norms-based treaties and cooperative organisations aimed at regulating or mitigating in- ternational frictions. In contrast, as Trump’s chief security and economic advi- sors, H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote in a much-quoted joint Wall Street Journal­ op-ed on 30 May 2017, in Trump’s view “the world is not a ‘global com- munity’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage”. This complements the view of Trump’s “Alt-Right” advisors and supporters, who (along with far-right populists in ­Europe) see Putin as a proponent of their conservative social values and a

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 275

­defender of Christian and “European” civilisation against a perceived threat from Islamic terrorists and immigrants. Trump as President has therefore made clear that he would favor a rap- prochement with Russia. He has been vague, however, on what the u.s. could get out of it, limiting himself to little more than “getting along”, with the hope that in some undefined way Russia could help the u.s. in its struggle against the Islamic State. In the wake of Russian interference in the u.s. election there is broad bipartisan antipathy in Washington to any such rapprochement, and senior ­figures in Trump’s party have called for new sanctions against Russia, rather than a relaxation of existing ones. Investigations into Russian actions by several Congressional oversight committees and by a Justice Department Special Counsel are underway that will keep the issue before the public in a way that may render most of Trump’s prospective rapprochement politically unsustainable. Foreign policy shifts in this and other areas are not the purely inside-the- Beltway struggle between Trump and the Washington foreign policy estab- lishment that some have portrayed. Rather, real facts on the ground in the real world have made themselves felt, the more so because the prior level of knowledge was so low. Thus, North Korean nuclear and missile tests, the po- tential disaster of a trade war with China, use of chemical weapons and oth- er urgent issues in Syria, and the fallout from Russian attempts to meddle in u.s. ­elections – all of these, rather than a power struggle inside Washington’s ­maison sans fenêtres, are forcing u.s. policy into its new direction, and any president would be forced to make adjustments. What of Russia’s approach to the Trump presidency? It would appear that Russia has maintained the policy line it adopted in the wake of its annexation of Crimea in 2014.2 Russia has been clear on what it wants from a prospec- tive rapprochement with the Trump Administration; it wants exactly what it wanted previously: an end to sanctions and recognition as a member of a small group of Great Powers, with an uncontested right to a clearly defined sphere of influence, including border changes to legitimise facts on the ground. It ap- pears from leaked intelligence information that Russian figures believed that Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, was key to advancing these goals. Shortly after Flynn was fired, on 13 February 2017, Russian state media outlets were ordered to stop their positive coverage of Trump, according to a

2 Ample literature has emerged to explain Russia’s foreign policy course; a good analysis is available in Russia and the New World Disorder by Bobo Lo (Brookings Institution Press/ Chatham House, 2015).

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276 Remler respected Russian journalist and political analyst. Thereafter, it appears that Putin has returned to the line he adopted when the Obama Administration was in power: viewing relations with the u.s. as a zero-sum game and capitalis- ing on opportunities to advance Russia’s position and influence, especially in the Middle East. The situation on both sides portends a worsening in relations, not the reset Trump touted before coming to office. It is too early to tell whether this round of exacerbation will permit any action between Russia and the West on the sharp deterioration in arms control regimes: the Cold War-era Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (abm), Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (cfe) and, it appears, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (inf) are now non-functioning;­ new fields of conflict such as cyber warfare remain entirely unregulated. In reality, the most useful direction for u.s.-Russian relations since the 2014 crisis would have been stabilisation: avoiding further deterioration and re­ -establishing po- litical-military consultations, common during the Cold War, to avoid incidents and start laying the groundwork for re-establishing arms control regimes in the fields of nuclear, conventional and cyber weapons. Amid this turmoil, u.s. and Russian policies towards the osce are un- likely to receive much attention from either side. The u.s. has traditionally viewed nato as the principal forum for its security interests in Europe, but has supported­ the osce as part of the web of agreements and implementing organisations that underpinned an international order based on norms and values. That international order was strained in the years leading up to 2014, and in particular by Russia’s repudiation of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, but it was Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 that led the u.s. to believe that the entire international order is under attack. Russian meddling in demo- cratic processes in the u.s. and elsewhere demonstrates, to the u.s. foreign policy establishment, Russia’s active attempts to subvert and destroy this order. From the seizure of Crimea up to the advent of Trump, the u.s. had been reluctant to enter any process to repair individual aspects of the international ­order – cfe, for example – for fear of normalising Russia’s actions. Thus, the idea Russia floated for a new “Concert of Europe” was viewed as a crude att­ empt to gain a recognised sphere of influence in Central and Eastern ­Europe in which the wishes and fate of the affected populations and their governments were to be disregarded in favor of the realpolitik interests of great pow­ ers. Against that background, Western views of Russia’s long-standing interests in the osce – as a vehicle to advance Russia’s goal of having a droit de regard on all security decisions in Europe – are unlikely to change. Given Trump’s stated suspicion of all things multilateral, he is unlikely to select the osce as a new object of emphasis for u.s. policy.

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 277 ii Protracted Conflicts and Fictions of Convenience

As we approach the future of osce mediation in the context of the develop- ments outlined above, we must start with the conflicts in which the osce plays a mediation role. These traditionally include the Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transdniestria conflicts. The conflict in the Donbass, in Eastern Ukraine, appears to be in the process of becoming similarly protracted. To these we should also add the Russian annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol, though in the Russian view there is no longer any conflict, nor issues to discuss except practical ones such as electricity supply. But it is instructive to look briefly at Crimea, because it highlights one strik- ing similarity among all these conflicts: though all are separatist conflicts, and though the separatist sides all maintain they are seeking independence, in fact the original aim of all the separatists, when their movements began during the collapse of the Soviet Union, was not independence, but rather to belong to a political formation other than the one to which the Soviets, and subsequently international law, assigned them. Today, however, the separatists and their supporters go to elaborate lengths to maintain a narrative asserting that their struggles are for independence. They do so to maintain the fiction that the post-Helsinki international order has not been violated. And this fictional nar- rative has in fact been accepted, by and large, by the international community, which has been averse to allowing conflicts on such a small scale to upend the international order. As we shall see, the annexation of Crimea proved too much for the international order to swallow and it remains the casus belli of the tensions some are calling a new cold war. The original aims of the separatists in the “traditional” protracted conflicts are a matter of historical record. The initial slogan of the Karabakh conflict was “miatsum”: union with Armenia. The conflict started during the Soviet era, and the initial demand was to excise the Nagornyy Karabakh Autonomous Oblast’ from one Union Republic of the ussr – the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic – and incorporate it into another, the Armenian Soviet Socialist Re- public. That remained the goal until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the Alma-Ata Protocols of 21 December 1991, the Soviet Union’s Union Republics explicitly recognised one another – and not lower-level Soviet autonomies – as independent states within their Soviet-era borders (which put Nagornyy Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia inside Azerbaijan and Georgia), and the international community quickly adopted that judgement; admission of the new states to the un and osce was predicated on that commitment. As a newly independent state, and heavily dependent upon foreign assistance and acceptance, Armenia was not in a position to risk the ire of the ­international

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278 Remler community by claiming the territory of Karabakh for itself. The miatsum slo- gan was quietly retired and replaced by a stated goal of independence. To this day, however, Armenia has not recognised the independence of Nagornyy Karabakh, let alone made a move to annex it. In contrast to Karabakh, whose original motivations were opposed to the ­established Soviet order, the Abkhaz, South Ossetian and Transdniestrian movements were pro-Soviet: they took shape as reactions to the prospective separatism and independence of Georgia and Moldova as the Soviet Union or- der was collapsing at the beginning of the 1990s. The initial goal was to remain in the Soviet Union, whatever might happen to Georgia or Moldova. For the Ab- khaz and Ossetians, this was dictated by the belief that a small ethnic minority was better off as one of many inside a large, cosmopolitan country, rather than as a large and restive group inside a small country, especially as Georgia’s new leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was promoting a hard-line ethnic nationalism. For the Transdniestrians, the idea of union with Romania – the driving force of Moldovan nationalism at the time – was anathema, given the traumatic expe- rience of wartime occupation by Romania’s pro-fascist Antonescu regime. The pro-Soviet aspirations of all three were thwarted by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left them high and dry. In all three cases, fighting broke out when the weak new metropolitan states (Georgia and Moldova), perhaps goaded by provocateurs, attempted to “restore constitutional order” by force. Thereafter, the only option for the separatists was to declare independence. Despite extensive Russian support for the separatists in these three con- flicts, including military support, Russia maintained its formal adherence to Georgian and Moldovan (as well as Azerbaijani) territorial integrity, thus help- ing to preserve the notion that these conflicts were no threat to the interna- tional order – a notion that western countries were eager to embrace, since no responsible Western leader wanted to risk the stability of the entire osce region “from Vancouver to Vladivostok” over four tiny separatist territories whose combined population fell short of 1 million. Russia was also motivated by a serious challenge to its own territorial integrity in Chechnya, and wanted to ensure that the international community had no excuse to rethink its sup- port for Russian sovereignty. Thus there was no concerted international action against Russia in response to the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 and its after- math, which resulted not only in the ultimate Russian recognition of Abkha- zia and South Ossetia, but also in the seizure by Russian-backed separatists of Georgian territory outside the separatist regions, including both the occupa- tion of the Kodori Gorge by Abkhazia and the ongoing “borderisation” process by which Georgian lands are being confiscated by Russian forces and incorpo- rated into South Ossetia.

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 279

The same playbook has been run in the Donbass. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Russia has rigorously maintained that it is not involved on the ground and that it supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine. And despite the ethnic relationship and the initial slogan of “Novorossiya”, Russia has held off from recognition or hints that it would be willing to annex this area as it did Crimea. This is only in part due to aspects internal to the conflict and to Russian-Ukrainian relations. Strategic assets in Crimea, including the Black Sea Fleet’s home port of Sevastopol, overrode Russia’s considerations of all other aspects of Russian-Ukrainian relations and the opprobrium of the in- ternational community. When Russia approaches the separatist conflict in the Donbass, however, those other aspects weigh heavily: Ukraine is on an order of magnitude larger, more strategic and more central to Russia than Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova. Russia’s goals with regard to Ukraine include strategic interests such as ensuring that Ukraine does not enter what Russia considers to be an opposing military or economic bloc. And, to be sure, Russia does not want to suffer additional Western sanctions. But it is also true that in the Normandy process and elsewhere, Russia is tacitly collaborating with the West to ensure that the international order is not openly seen to be challenged – that the fictions we have seen in the other protracted separatist conflicts are maintained. Which brings us back to Crimea, where the fictions have clearly failed. In 2014, when Ukrainian President Yanukovych’s flight convinced Russia that its policies in Ukraine had failed, with the likeli- hood that Ukraine would remain hostile for the foreseeable future, and perhaps also with a desire to punish Ukraine for thwarting Putin’s will, Russia seized and annexed Crimea. Russia went through the motions of the fiction played out elsewhere, at first denying that the “little green men” were under Russian command and then organising a referendum overseen by Russian armed forces and local pro-Russian armed militias, all aimed at creating the narrative that the people of Crimea had risen up against their Ukrainian masters and chosen instead to “rejoin” Russia, from which they had been severed in 1954. The masquerade, however, was too blatant for the international community to swallow, either in Crimea or in eastern Ukraine, where “little green men” also appeared as the first wave. And in refusing to accept the Russian version of its intervention in Crimea and Ukraine, the international community is in the uncomfortable position of having to reject one fiction while continuing to accept very similar fictions of convenience, as it has for decades, in other pro- tracted conflicts. There are both quantitative and qualitative reasons for this. Quantitatively, as mentioned earlier, the four “traditional” protracted con- flicts involve tiny separatist populations, and the metropolitan states from which they are trying to secede are small, generally poor, and of moderate

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280 Remler strategic importance. Ukraine and the Donbass are an order of magnitude larger: the population of the Donbass separatist enclaves is over 3 million; and even without Donbass and Crimea, Ukraine’s population is around 40 million. Ukraine’s position is strategic enough to have been singled out for its signifi- cance by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Grand Chessboard (1997). Europe cannot look away. Qualitatively, the arguments used to justify the annexation of Crimea were based on ethno-nationalism and history, arguments not used to justify an an- nexation in Europe since the Sudetenland crisis of 1938. The Helsinki Final Act, and the acquis that developed around it, were designed specifically to preclude such challenges to Europe’s peace. Clearly the separatist movements have eth- no-nationalist aspects, but, for example, Armenia has shied away from the con- cept of annexation, precisely to avoid violating that acquis. If such arguments for annexing territory internationally recognised as belonging to another state are normalised, no European border will be safe. The international community can probably finesse its continued acceptance of fictions of convenience in Azerbai- jan, Georgia and Moldova while it rejects the much more serious challenge posed by Russia’s actions in Ukraine; but every new fact on the ground in the protracted conflicts is an incremental qualitative change that makes this harder to do. iii Events on the Ground

In the author’s earlier essay, he noted that starting in late 2011 Russia changed the leaderships of Transdniestria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in connec- tion with Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency. The leaders who emerged had smaller (or nonexistent) indigenous power bases, and were therefore more compliant to their Russian patrons. In the years since, those new leaders have proved extremely unpopular, partly because they were per- ceived to be neglecting local interests. A similar process is playing out in Arme- nia, where the escalation of April 2016 has both made the Russians extremely unpopular and put President Sargsyan in a precarious position. Transdniestria: In December 2011, a Russian media campaign against the Transdniestrian leader, Igor Smirnov, resulted in his last-place finish in the first round of “presidential” elections in the breakaway region. In the runoff election the following month, Transdniestrians chose Yevgeniy Shevchuk, who swiftly broke with his own local patrons, the Sheriff corporation,3 to cement

3 Sheriff is a Transdniestrian conglomerate founded by former police officials (hence the name) that plays a major role in the economic and political life of Transdniestria.

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 281 his ­relations with Russia. Severe internal upheavals in Moldova, a reaction to extreme corruption, distracted Moldova and the international community from negotiations on Transdniestria in the “5+2” format, in which the osce is a mediator, giving Shevchuk some room for maneuver. But Shevchuk proved to be a weak leader incapable of rectifying the dire economic situation. Elements of the old Smirnov regime, led by former “Minister of Internal Affairs” Vadim Krasnosel’skiy, received the patronage from Sheriff that Shevchuk had so lightly discarded, and made an electoral comeback in late 2015, Krasnosel’skiy becom- ing chair of the Supreme Council (legislature). In the “presidential” election of December 2016, Krasnosel’skiy easily defeated Shevchuk. Krasnosel’skiy, who comes from a Russian military family, is more reliably pro-Russian than Shevchuk. He once remarked that he hated the Communists because they had “wrecked the Russian Empire”. This sentiment fits in with the ideological cul- ture of Transdniestria, which sees itself as the farthest outpost of the Russian Empire of the time of Field Marshal Aleksandr Suvorov, whose image can be seen everywhere in the breakaway region. Meanwhile, in right-bank Moldova a Socialist was elected president on the slogan “Together with Russia”. This may have revived fears in Transdniestria that Russia would sell out Transdniestria in exchange for a better deal with Moldova (as Putin and then-President of Moldova Vladimir Voronin attempted in 2003 with the Kozak Memorandum). However, President Dodon is still in cohabitation with a Parliament dominated by a center-right coalition, and, at least for the moment, he is not able to pursue the type of deal that Voronin, Dodon’s erstwhile patron, offered Russia in 2003. Nonetheless, there is no ques- tion that Russia has taken a significant step towards achieving greater influ- ence in the Moldovan political process. South Ossetia: In the same month that Igor Smirnov lost power in Transd- niestria, December 2011, popular demonstrations forced South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity to resign. The runoff elections in April 2012 brought to power Leonid Tibilov, a former kgb officer. In November 2014, after the seizure of Crimea and imposition of Western sanctions, the first announcement came that South Ossetia and Russia were working on a “Treaty of Alliance and Inte- gration” (this followed by several months a similar announcement in Abkha- zia). The Treaty was signed on 18 March 2015, pretty much in the form of the draft Russia presented to South Ossetia. The Treaty called for the incorporation of many South Ossetian government structures – including military, police, security and border units – into their Russian Federation analogues. (The pro- cess began on 31 March 2017, with the signing of a supplementary agreement between the defense structures, officially incorporating units of the South Os- setian “Ministry of Defense” into the Russian Ministry of Defense.)

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282 Remler

At the same time, Tibilov was also pushing for a referendum to incorpo- rate South Ossetia into the Russian Federation, announcing that this would take place in 2016. In public, Putin was cautious and vague on the issue,4 but it was soon clear that in private he opposed the move and had his envoy for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Vladislav Surkov, dissuade Tibilov. No referen- dum took place in 2016. Instead, with the approach of new “presidential” elec- tions scheduled for 9 April 2017, and facing an electoral challenge from former leader Eduard Kokoity, Tibilov announced a referendum – to take place along with the “presidential” elections – to change the name of the breakaway re- gion to include “The State of Alania”, harking back to the medieval kingdom that covered most of what is now North and South Ossetia (Alania is now also part of the title of the North Ossetian autonomous republic within the Russian Federation). For good measure, Tibilov’s Central Electoral Commission reject- ed ­Kokoity’s candidacy to be “president”. Publicly blaming Surkov, Kokoity’s supporters took to the streets for several days. In the 9 April elections, voters roundly rejected Tibilov, electing Parliament speaker Anatoliy Bibilov with an absolute majority in the first round. Bibilov, who was denied the presidency in 2011 on a technicality, is known to want to incorporate South Ossetia into ­Russia. At the same time, voters overwhelmingly (78% to 20%) favored renam- ing the breakaway entity “Alania”. Abkhazia: After Abkhaz “President” Sergei Bagapsh died on 29 May 2011, the Kremlin-backed candidate, Raul Khajimba, came in third in the elections to replace him; the victor was Bagapsh’s deputy (and Acting “President” after the death of Bagapsh), Aleksandr Ankvab. Khajimba led violent extra-parliamen- tary protests aimed at unseating Ankvab, and after the intervention of Rus- sian officials, notably Vladislav Surkov, Ankvab was removed from power on 1 June 2014 (as the crisis was still unfolding in eastern Ukraine) and replaced by Khajimba. Khajimba soon began working on a “Treaty of Alliance and Integra- tion” with Russia, but the initial Russian draft proved too much for the Abkhaz elites, and a much watered-down version, a “Treaty of Alliance and Strategic Partnership”, was signed on 24 November 2014. Over the following two years implementing arrangements were ratified, including on the unification of Ab- khaz and Russian military units located in Abkhazia (ratified November 2016). In the course of 2016, however, the Abkhaz opposition to Khajimba ramped up its activities, demanding extraordinary presidential elections and storming the “Ministry of Internal Affairs” headquarters to demand the resignation of the “Prime Minister”. Khajimba set a referendum for 10 July on whether to hold

4 “Slova Putina o prisoyedinenii Yuzhnoy Osetii vyzvali neodnoznachnuyu traktovku eksper- tov”, Kavkazskiy Uzel 15 April 2016, 23: 13.

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 283 extraordinary elections, and then ensured the defeat of the question. A vote of no confidence in the “Prime Minister” likewise failed, but after steady pressure, both the “Prime Minister” and “General Prosecutor” resigned on 27 July. Over the rest of 2016, Khajimba made offers to appease the opposition but without success. Finally, when Khajimba offered to appoint opposition figures to se- nior posts, including “General Prosecutor” and “Deputy Prime Minister”, the opposition agreed to end its mass protests. Khajimba’s broad unpopularity led to his party’s defeat in the parliamentary elections, which were held in two rounds in March 2017, and by preliminary indications Ankvab was set to be the most prominent member of the new parliament. However, in a series of machinations, parliamentary seats were secured for defeated rivals of Ankvab, maintaining Khajimba’s ability to offset Ankvab’s influence. Events in these three conflicts invite a brief comparison with the Donbass. There, the separatist leadership was originally from Russia. For example, the first leader in Donetsk, Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, was a Muscovite; and the for- mer head of the “Ministry of National Security” of Transdniestria, Vladimir Antyufeyev, appeared in Donetsk by the summer of 2014 to manage a similar portfolio, with the title of “Deputy Prime Minister”. Moscow soon came to see its direct involvement as a liability with the international community, and re- placed the Russian leaders with locals by the end of that year. Since then, how- ever, a spate of assassinations of local leaders and commanders indicates that Moscow is perhaps finding its local clients unamenable to direction as Rus- sia tries to fine-tune its involvement, with the ultimate goal being to maintain maximum leverage on Ukraine rather than to satisfy the Donbass population. Thus the conflicts in which Russia plays a principal role show some similar characteristics: Russian-installed leaders have run into popular opposition, in part because expectations of what Russia would do for the breakaway enclaves have not been met. A strikingly similar pattern can also be seen in the Kara- bakh conflict, the protracted conflict that has seen the most dramatic events in the last year. In this case, however, the leader whose Russia policy has cost him popularity is Serzh Sargsyan, the President of the Republic of Armenia. Sargsyan met Putin on 3 September 2013, just weeks before the scheduled initialing of an Armenia-eu Association Agreement and Deep and Compre- hensive Free Trade Agreement that had been negotiated for years. As a result of the meeting, Sargsyan announced that Armenia would turn its back on the eu and instead join the Russian-led Customs Union (now the Eurasian Eco- nomic Union).5 Sargsyan cited Armenia’s security concerns – the hostility of

5 See for example Armen Grigoryan, “Armenia Chooses Customs Union over eu Association Agreement”, caci Analyst, 18 September 2013, at https://www.cacianalyst.org/publications/

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284 Remler its neighbors Turkey and Azerbaijan – as the principal reason for the volte- face. Armenia is a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Orga- nization (csto); Azerbaijan is not, and Turkey is a member of nato, against which the csto defines itself. The security argument tamped down the objections of the Armenian pub- lic. However, the public naturally assumed that the csto security umbrella would include Nagornyy Karabakh, since in most things – and certainly in the security sphere – Armenia and Karabakh function as a single state. Thus, Russia’s reaction to the events of April 2016 came as a shock to the Armenian public. Fighting broke out along the Karabakh front on the night of 1 April. Fighting was reported along the entire Line of Contact over the next few days. During the clashes, Azerbaijan’s forces seized some strategic high points along the line of contact. Both Presidents Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Sargsyan of Ar- menia were in Washington dc at the time, at a Nuclear Security Summit host- ed by u.s. President Obama. Russia summoned the Azerbaijani and Armenian chiefs of staff to Moscow, where they agreed on a ceasefire on 5 April. Accord- ing to official figures offered by both sides, the combined Armenian/Karabakh forces lost 88 personnel, and the Azerbaijani side asserted that 31 of its soldiers were killed. Both sides reported an increase in casualties caused by snipers and other fires in the following weeks (averaging around 50 deaths per year along the line of contact). Most observers appear to believe that Azerbaijan initiated the fighting, the bloodiest since 1994, and that it had two objectives in mind: to register displeasure that the conflict and efforts to settle it had dropped well below the radar of international concerns, and to signal Armenia that Azerbai- jan’s extensive defense spending might be reducing the military advantage the Armenian side had enjoyed throughout the conflict. Although Azerbaijan may have achieved these goals (at least ephemerally), the fighting in fact had a different major result: a sudden loss of Armenian confidence in Russia. The populace was outraged that Russia, a treaty ally of ­Armenia, did not take Armenia’s side. Here, the charades put up over the course of the Karabakh conflict played against Armenia: Armenia has not formally claimed that Karabakh is part of Armenia, and Russia has never recognised it as such, formally accepting that this was, as Armenia had always maintained, a conflict between Karabakhi separatists and Azerbaijan. The Armenian side did not present a consistent story in defense of this position – on 8 April 2016, for example, the press secretary of the Armenian Ministry of Defense announced the death of 44 Armenian military personnel in Karabakh during the recent

analytical-articles/item/12817-armenia-chooses-customs-union-over-eu-association-agree- ment.html.

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 285 escalation, but the following day the same press secretary announced that nei- ther Armenian troops nor weapons were used in the fighting.6 In the Russian view, therefore, there was no reason why this outbreak of fighting on what it formally considered to be Azerbaijani territory – not Armenian territory, how- ever disputed the sovereignty – should trigger the reaction that the Collective Security Treaty would require if Armenia itself were attacked. The Armenian populace was not used to seeing the issue cast in such terms, and the public was quick to express its indignation, not least against President Sargsyan, who had rejected Europe’s offer in favor of Moscow on security grounds. The Russians, having brokered a cease-fire, tried to take the diplomatic lead and advance long-standing interests in the conflict. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited the region on 6 April, followed soon after by Prime Minister Medvedev, the Russians apparently proposed the introduction of a Russian-dominated peacekeeping force in exchange for the return of some Armenian-occupied territory around Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Russia had orig- inally demanded the introduction of its peacekeepers (i.e., Russian personnel under a cis aegis, as in Abkhazia) when it brokered the initial ceasefire in 1994, but Azerbaijan had persistently refused and ultimately the ceasefire went into effect without peacekeepers. This time, although Sargsyan initially said he was not opposed to a peace- keeping force (8 April 2016), public opinion in Armenia had swung strongly against Russia. Anti-Russian demonstrations began in Armenia on 13 April. The demonstrators demanded that Sargsyan reject the deployment of peace- keepers, and by 26 April Sargsyan was casting doubt on the wisdom of inviting them. When Sargsyan and Aliyev met in Vienna on 16 May with representa- tives of Russia, France and the u.s. (the co-chairs of the osce Minsk Group), there was no agreement on peacekeepers. Nor was there such a decision on 20 June 2016, when Sargsyan and Aliyev met with Putin in St. Petersburg. In- stead, the two meetings resulted in vague agreements to create an incident prevention mechanism and to increase the number of monitors in the mission of the Personal Representative of the Chairperson-in-Office on the Conflict Dealt with by the osce Minsk Conference, which perhaps twice per month and with the prior permission of both sides is able to monitor a tiny stretch of the line of contact (based on extended press reporting of the process, the inspections never turn up violations; rather, firing and deaths do not let up on inspection days, but they invariably take place on other parts of the front line). Neither of these agreements has been implemented.

6 Kavkazskiy Uzel, 8 and 9 April 2016, at http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/280520/ and http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/280566/.

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Following the April 2016 fighting, Armenian popular discontent with Sarg- syan grew, usually couched in terms of fear that he might be pressured into making concessions on Karabakh. Groups of veterans of the conflict began demonstrating, and on the eve of the meeting in St. Petersburg authorities in Yerevan arrested the leader of one group, Zhirayr Sefilyan, on suspicion that he was conspiring to take over a local television station. On 17 July 2016, a group called “Sasna Tsrer” (“Daredevils of Sasun”) violently occupied a police build- ing in Yerevan, resulting in the death of two police officers, and kept up their occupation for two weeks, with protest demonstrations in sympathy with the mutineers lasting well beyond their 31 July surrender. To support Sargsyan, Russia announced it would supply advanced anti-aircraft missiles. Sargsyan survived the parliamentary elections of 2 April 2017, which left his Republican Party and their allies, the Dashnaktsutyun, in possession of a majority. How- ever, the besieged Sargsyan is not in a position to engage in serious negotia- tions on Karabakh, which has often proved to be the “third rail” of Armenian and Azerbaijani politics. One factor noted in the present author’s previous article was the growing communion of separatist entities – a network of relations among Transdnies- tria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists. These imitate the panoply of benefits friendly states grant to one another. A reac- tion appears to be developing among the metropolitan states suffering from separatist conflicts. For example, Azerbaijani President Aliyev and Ukrainian President Poroshenko, meeting on 7 February 2017, agreed to ban the import of goods produced in Nagorny Karabakh and the Donbass unless licensed by Baku and Kyiv. To summarise this section, the Russians have continued to extend their in- fluence over the separatist regions and over Armenia, including through the crypto-annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; but the proverb that all politics is local still applies, and leaders have suffered from a perception that they have ignored local priorities. The starkest example of this is in Armenia, but Abkhazia and South Ossetia have also undergone upheavals from the ten- sion between Russian aims and local concerns. iv Prospects for osce Mediation

The prospects for progress on the substance of any of these conflicts looks bleak. The Karabakh conflict zone remains tense, exacerbated by a new dy- namic since last April’s clashes: Armenian popular opinion, always averse to compromise, has started to express aversion to the very idea of negotiations,

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Osce Mediation In An Eroding International Order 287 since the people appear not to trust President Sargsyan to resist all pressure to compromise, particularly when that pressure is applied by the Russians, against whom strong feelings developed in the wake of the April 2016 escala- tion. This dynamic on the Armenian side is compounded by the increasingly bellicose language coming from the Azerbaijani leadership, which is simulta- neously undertaking a harsh domestic crackdown, straining its relationship with the Western mediators. There has been no real push towards settlement since the failure of the Medvedev initiative at Kazan in 2011, and Lavrov’s at- tempts to capitalise on the fighting in April by pushing (after a hiatus of 22 years) for the introduction of a Russian-led peacekeeping force were rebuffed by both sides. Given Russia’s preoccupation with asserting internal control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the face of popular resistance to its chosen local leaders, short-term prospects for meaningful mediation on substance (as opposed to humanitarian or confidence-building actions) are nil. The sides in the Trans- dniestria conflict may make some progress on the “package of eight” confi- dence-building measures, and this will help improve the lives of civilians in the affected areas; but the chance of moving to negotiations on status is low owing to potential effects on Ukraine. Europe and the osce have been living with the protracted conflicts out- lined above for a generation. The Donbass increasingly appears to be joining their number. So far, Ukraine has been giving Russia and its protégés in Do- netsk and Luhansk excuses not to implement the Minsk agreement: Kyiv is torn between those whose primary motivation is to recover the territories it no longer controls and those who want to secure Ukraine’s membership in the Western camp, whatever the territorial price. That is unlikely to change. The international community may be tempted to deal with the Donbass as it has dealt with these other conflicts, using negotiations as a method of managing, not resolving, them. To be sure, as we mentioned, both the populations and the strategic significance involved in the Ukraine conflict are of an order of magnitude greater than those in the other protracted conflicts. This factor has (to date) increased the level of attention paid by Western states, leading them to impose sanctions to penalise Russia for its actions. But we must ask whether the negotiating tools available to the international community are correspond- ingly more powerful and sufficient to achieve resolution, not just management. What may change the dynamic of all these protracted conflicts is the most serious cause of erosion to the current international order: the annexation of Crimea on national/ethnic/historical grounds – grounds that have not been put forward by an actor in Europe as a justification for seizure and annexation of another state’s territory since World War ii. The issue of Crimea ­appears

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­beyond solution in the foreseeable future, as “Krymnash” is a slogan used to justify not only the annexation itself, but the very existence of the current regime. This echoes Soviet practice in the Brezhnev era, when victory in the “Great Patriotic War” (World War ii) was used to marshal support for Soviet rule after Communist ideology had lost its attraction amidst corruption and disillusionment (“Den’ Pobedy”, the Soviet Union’s most popular World War ii song, was in fact written in 1975). The annexation of Crimea is accepted as legitimate and legitimising throughout Russian society, where it is termed a “reunification”, and reversing it will be exceedingly problematic. The possibility that the dynamics could change, the uncertainties internal to both the eu and the u.s., and the effects of those uncertainties on their foreign policies, all militate towards treating the protracted conflicts with the diplomatic equivalent of “economy of force”: given enough attention to pre- vent (hopefully) their eruption into violence, but no more than that. The usual strategy in such cases is to devolve policy to an international organisation such as the osce and to maintain a public posture of support for the proxy’s ac- tions. The osce is not an independent body, but rather reflects the consensus of its participating States. That is a strength, because it ensures inclusivity; but it is also a hindrance to effective action. Given that all negotiations are at a standstill, given that the negotiation positions of the separatists (seeking in- dependence) do not comport with their actual original aims and that the fic- tional narratives are increasingly threadbare, given that crypto-annexation of the separatist polities is proceeding (despite restless locals), and given that the Ukraine crisis has made it more difficult to accept as a matter of convenience the idea that the conflicts are not about annexation, the osce may wish to re- evaluate what it wants realistically to accomplish through mediation. That is not a recommendation to disengage. Rather, it is a call for a more clear-eyed recognition of what is standing in the way of a comprehensive reso- lution of these conflicts, and a more modest set of goals for the international community. Relieving the misery of civilians in the conflict zones is a valid goal, even if it does not serve to end the conflicts. Reducing tensions is an in- vestment in the future: improving the atmosphere can one day enable future mediation on comprehensive solutions. States have sometimes scoffed at the idea of such a long-term investment, preferring an immediate frontal assault on basic issues – a direct approach that usually halts negotiations at the first sentence of a draft peace plan. But long-term investment is essential to me- diating protracted conflicts. And mediation, even if only as an investment, is often useful for providing a non-violent outlet for airing grievances and pre- venting tensions from spiraling out of control: as Churchill put it, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”.

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