Before Ukraine: Russia’s armed forces in Moldova, Chechnya, and Syria

Introduction

Internal armed conflicts are sometimes internationalised via external support for one of the parties involved. However, there are civil wars which are only masked as internal conflicts to avoid a stronger international reaction.

An escalation by the Russian Federation (RF) of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made its aggression a central and the most concerning problem of contemporary world affairs. The international community overlooked the so-called ‘Russian world’ retrogressing into the de-facto ideology of Ruscism to the point where it exploded with international hatred.

To understand the deeper causes of this phenomenon, international responses to those armed conflicts, which gradually and cumulatively facilitated the invasion of Ukraine, ought to be reassessed. It requires the understanding of a timeline that begins in the time of Muscovy or Moscovia (the original name of the state formed around Moscow in the 15th -17th centuries) through to the rebirth of the Russian state in 1991.

The focus of this essay is on politico-strategic aspects of armed conflicts in three countries, which are conventionally classified as internal – the Transnistrian War in Moldova (1990-92), two Russian Chechen Wars (1994-96 and 19992009), and the Syrian civil war (2011-present) – but continue to be relevant in the context of today’s regional security.

The international community in the spotlight here include states, and intergovernmental and international organisations, which in various politically meaningful ways attempted to respond to those conflicts. Without due regard to history and the true motives behind Moscow’s moves, however, the international community failed to recognise the Kremlin’s deliberate distortion of reality in each of these conflicts and to identify and curb the escalating violence of Russian imperialism.

Transnistria in Moldova

The first case study – the Transnistrian conflict in Moldova – demonstrates how a legacy of empire and its elite’s rejection of its irreversible collapse led to geopolitical issues that have resulted in ongoing diplomatic deadlock.

The Republic of Moldova is situated in Eastern Europe, landlocked between Ukraine and Romania. The river Dniester (Romanian/Moldovan – Nistru) crosses the territory of Moldova from the northwest to the southeast, separating a 450km-long and 45kmwide strip of land on its eastern bank from the remaining 88% of the country. The most widely used name for this region is Transnistria.

Historically Transnistria’s political meaning as a separate administrative unit was artificially carved by Moscow in 1924 out of Ukrainian lands with a high percentage of ethnic Moldovans. It was named Moldavian Autonomous Oblast in propaganda efforts to grab the lands to the west of the Dniester. After the pact with Nazi Germany, the Soviets occupied Moldova proper in 1940 and merged it with Transnistria into the Moldavian Soviet Socialistic Republic.

Like the eastern regions of Ukraine in the 19th century, the industrialisation of Transnistria after the Second World War brought labour, military and administrative personnel from the eastern republics and made the region distinctively – but also ahistorically – Russian-speaking and dominated by Russian civilian and military elites. It started playing a disproportionally important role in the region, and the sentiments of those new local people in Transnistria became what Timothy Snyder called a “political resource” for Moscow on the eve of Moldova’s declaration of independence in 1991.

Wrapped up into local sentiments for international observers, Moscow’s handling of the conflict in Transnistria and its political aftermath became a playbook for manipulating other quasi-internal armed conflicts. The conflict in Transnistria broke out in opposition to Moldova’s declaration of sovereignty in 1990, and for its remaining in the Soviet Union. However, the Transnistrian declaration of forming a Soviet union-level republic independent from Moldova the same year later was formally invalidated by the Soviet Union central government.

Upon the dissolution of the Soviet state in 1991, the UN recognised the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova in March 1992. Neither fact dissuaded the new Russian government in Moscow from dealing directly with the Transnistrian administration, aiding it militarily during the war and then economically and politically in the decades after, nor from signing a ceasefire agreement with Chisinau (Moldova’s capital) bilaterally, effectively implicating itself as a party to the conflict.

Internationally, the Kremlin presented the conflict in Transnistria as an internal problem, claiming the role of mediator and peacemaker. Nevertheless, Moscow treated Transnistrian ministers as if they represented a recognised independent state, and in 2006 facilitated a summit in Sukhumi with leaders of Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia (two break-away regions in Georgia chipped away by Moscow in similar fashion), followed by the signing of a treaty and a declaration of the creation of a Commonwealth between them.

The international practice of deploying peacekeepers to protect civilians and prevent hostilities in conflict zones has been systematically abused by the Kremlin to further its own geopolitical interests, starting with Transnistria. The Transnistrian quasi-state has been preserved by Moscow-subordinate military forces since before the Soviet Union’s dissolution. The 1992 ceasefire agreement provided for the additional establishment of a contingent of so-called peacekeepers – the Joint Control Commission – consisting of Russian, pro-Russian Transnistrian, and formally Moldovan forces.

In practice, the Kremlin legitimised and strengthened the subordinate military force guarding its de-facto occupied territories and keeping Moldova permanently threatened and destabilised. Moscow systematically ignored requests made at several summits since 1994 and via NATO (2008) and UN General Assembly (2018) resolutions to remove an illegally remaining Russian division.

Moldova’s suggestions to replace Russian ‘peacekeepers’ with a more neutral contingent under the United Nations’ command were ignored too. Permanent destabilisation through never-leaving ‘peacekeepers’ was replicated by Moscow in the Southern Caucasus – in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia, and in the Nagorno-Karabakh, territory formally disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Transnistrian case highlights the fallacy of an international legal framework that allowed an external state actor to become an exclusive decision-maker in an armed conflict resolution process, effectively rendering the rest of the international community impotent. The OSCE in its first engagement and proposals was naïve to assume the conflict was caused purely by ethnical sentiments and that the Kremlin itself had no strategic interest in keeping Moldova fractured. Where other parties pursued resolution, Muscovy’s goal was to ‘divide and rule’.

That became unambiguous when in 2003 Russian President Putin almost succeeded in pushing forward the so-called ‘Kozak Memorandum’, which envisioned the federalisation of Moldova and an exclusive role for the RF as a security guarantor preserving its ‘peacekeepers’ in the region. Concerns privately expressed to the then-President of Moldova by leaders of the European Union (EU), the Council of Europe and the OSCE helped to avert what could have become the irrevocable fall of Moldova to the Kremlin’s complete military and political control.

Neither alternative international plans nor a change in negotiation format, which included the EU and the US as observers, were able to move the process out of deadlock. As noted by Johannes Socher, judgements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in multiple cases over the next 15 years validated the direct political, military, and economic authority of Moscow over Transnistria. Timothy Snyder notes that for the Kremlin “the point of freezing a conflict is to prevent any resolution”.

Transnistria was one of the first de-facto Russian military springboards in the Black Sea region and a significant lever in Moscow’s geopolitical and future wars strategy. That became apparent with the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Openly admitted by the RF Ministry of Defence, one of the goals of the Ukraine operation is to establish “a [land] corridor to Transnistria”.

Insofar as the original plan failed, the threat of destabilisation and orchestrated regime change in Moldova has become more acute on the security agendas of Chisinau, Kyiv, and their Western allies, as such an outcome would enable Moscow to bring in more Russian troops into Transnistria and threaten Ukraine along an extra 450km of frontline.

Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

Histories and demographic realities can be rewritten at a victor’s whim and, once enough time passes, primordial affiliation is claimed and assumed – the international community rarely objects unless the oppressed make a decisive stand.

Doom for the free Chechen people of the Northern Caucasus was initially brought by the illomened decision of the Georgian king from across the ridge to reach out to Russia for military assistance in the 18th century. As in the case of Georgia, this resulted in the conquest of Chechen lands by the newly established Russian Empire. Chechens rebelled, sometimes successfully restoring control for a short periods, including in the middle of the 19th century.

Then, in 1917-1922, the independent Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus was formed by various ethnic groups, including the Circassians, Chechens, Ingush, Ossetians and Dagestanis, and was de-jure recognised by two

dozen countries , including the ‘great powers’ (Gülseven, 2021). As was the case for the Crimean Tatars, entire Chechen and Ingush populations were ultimately deported from their lands to Siberia in 1944 by the Soviet regime alleging they had collaborated with Nazi Germany (which barely reached the region). Half of them perished on the way.

Deportees were allowed to return after Stalin died in 1956 (for comparison, Crimean Tatars were ‘rehabilitated’ only in 1989), and after declaration of sovereignty in 1991, parliamentary and presidential elections, and a national referendum, the independent Chechen Republic was proclaimed. It then took two bloody wars over the next twenty years for Russian occupiers to reconquer the Chechen state, and to record the events into the annals of history as an internal armed conflict.

The Chechen case demonstrates the selectivity of the international community when it comes to a recognition of a people’s selfdetermination and state’s sovereignty versus existing geopolitical priorities.

The 1990s were characterised by the embracing of benevolent relations between the West and the new Moscovian state. Europe’s ‘change through trade’ and the US’ ‘Russia first’ policies mainly ignored the interests of nations long imprisoned in the Soviet – and prior to that –Russian empires. Presidents George H.W. Bush and then Bill Clinton both advocated for as much unity within the RF as possible, calling the First Chechen war an “internal matter” of Russia.

The world leaders’ priority was security and stability of a region that possessed the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

In 1993 the Chechen Republic refused to sign the Treaty of Federations composed by the Kremlin for its 89 subjects, as it no longer considered itself a Russian subject. As Johannes Socher observed , the Russian Constitutional Court held in 1995 that “the Russian Constitution does not provide for a right to secede for its constituent republics”, despite the Soviet Union’s most recent constitution formally enabling union-level republics to do so, and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic amending its constitution in 1990 listing the Chechen-Ingush republic a union-level republic.

The court, as noted by many scholars, intentionally misapplied incomplete subclauses from selected international laws, concluding that “the Chechen Republic was not entitled to the right to secession on the grounds of the principle of self determination”.

Still, the new Moscovian state saw the need to convince the international community that its invasions of Chechnya in 1994 and 1999 were exclusively internal business. And it succeeded. Other states and intergovernmental and international organisations remained indifferent. Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) legally considered the situation in Chechnya as “an armed conflict of a non-international character”.

When the Kremlin, after losing the first war, started its second campaign, the European Council declared in 1999 that it “does not question the right of Russia to preserve its territorial integrity”. The only country that recognised the independence of the Chechen Republic was Georgia in 1992. In 2022, Ukraine’s Parliament passed a resolution recognising Chechnya as temporarily occupied by Russian Federation and condemning “Russia’s genocide of the Chechen people”.

9/11 and the US-led Global War on Terror empowered Muscovy’s narrative framing of its deadly invasions of Chechnya as a fight against international terrorism. Newly ascended to the Kremlin, Putin labelled his unimaginable violence in the Northern Caucasus a ‘counter-terrorist operation’ and claimed that it was internationally inspired, but after 9/11 he remained even more steadfast than before in preventing any international involvement.

Mark Smith notes that in July 2002 , US Ambassador Vershbow “rather rashly” acknowledged that Al-Qaeda was aiding terrorists in Chechnya, which coincided with the growing US conspiracy about Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Once the US accepted the definition of the conflict in Chechnya as an ‘exercise in counterterrorism’, the Kremlin became relieved of any fear over international scrutiny of its atrocities committed as part of its coercion campaigns, even claiming that the campaigns bore some ‘moral value’.

Any time European criticism emerged, Putin claimed to be performing an honourable mission and rebuked critics for their lack of gratitude: “Russia is really standing at the forefront of the war against international terrorism,” he said in 1999. “And Europe ought to fall on its knees and express its great thankfulness that we, unfortunately, are fighting it alone”.

No international actor appeared to possess enough political will and power to push back against this permanent member of the UN Security Council, with the US even seeming to concede to its rhetoric in the early 2000s.

Observing the Chechen wars, the international community failed to learn the lesson that Moscow engages in negotiations and promotes ceasefires not for genuine compromise but rather to gain a tactical or strategic advantage ahead of its next move.

Then-president of the RF Yeltsin never conceded to direct talks with the then-president of the Chechen Republic Dzhokhar Dudayev, as this could have been interpreted as a recognition of the latter’s government. The Kremlin, however, used negotiations as a pretext to get Dudayev on a satellite phone and get him killed in a satellite signal-guided air strike in April 1996.

The ceasefire of 1996 was negotiated because Russia was not able to overcome the Chechen resistance and were losing the war. Moscow traded the Khasavyurt peace talks to be brokered by the OSCE for Russia’s ascendance into the Security Council of Europe.

The first principle defined in the 1996 Khasavyurt Russian-Chechen Truce required that “[a]n Agreement on the basis for mutual relations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic, to be determined in accordance with universally recognised principles and norms of international law should be achieved by 31 December 2001.”

No agreement, however, was able to stop the Kremlin from planning its next invasion , which from March 1999, according to the then-Minister of Internal Affairs Stepash in 2000, was “preparing for an active offensive”. Rather, in the Second Chechen war, informal negotiations and amnesties were used by Muscovites to coerce Chechen commanders to stop fighting or change sides or otherwise face “extrajudicial killings or attacks on and abduction of relatives.”

Occasional suggestions from various international actors about a ceasefire and negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv in 2022-2023 only prove that the lessons of the recent past have not been well learned. In the absence of Russia being defeated and prosecuted for its crimes, and without the systematic dismantling of the Russian imperial mentality, Muscovites will inevitably invade again.

Syria

Impunity for the crimes only encourages a state aggressor to intensify and spread its application of violence as part of its political strategy. After the government of Syria employed military force to suppress civil protests in multiple cities across the country in April 2011, international sanctions against the Syrian regime under Bashar alAssad surged.

Nevertheless, over that year, Moscow sold to Damascus at least $1 billion worth of armed weapons, with the Moscow Times calling out “$4 billion in active armed contracts” with another “five major contracts impossible to verify” – that contrasts with $1.5 billion worth arms sold over the previous decade .

Building on their rich experience in the Second Chechen War, Russian military advisers assisted Assad to fight rebel forces mercilessly, including the use of technologies for targeting, methods of silencing international reporters, and the tactics of slaughtering dissidents and obliterating towns. In 2012, Putin, rebuked claims that Russia was supporting the al-Assad regime in this way, stating that “Russia does not supply such arms which could be used in the civil conflict.”

Russia vetoed the first UN Security Council resolution in 2012 that called for all parties to stop violence and urge the Syrian Government for a peaceful and inclusive dialogue within own state. The RF has vetoed sixteen more UNSC resolutions on Syria since then. As noted by Deputy U.S. Representative to the United Nations Richard Mills, “Russia has sought to shield the Assad regime from accountability for its brutal human rights abuses, its chemical weapons use.”

It was in Moscow’s geopolitical interests to do this, and there was neither the institutional mechanism in the UN nor political will on the side of its members to peacefully deter the Kremlin from providing its support to the Assad regime.

Challenged in Syria, a liberal model of conflict management cracked under the violent force of coercive mediation and top-down peace enforcement. Over 2011-2013, opposition forces managed to execute basic governance over the territories they controlled in Syria, but Russia’s direct military intervention in 2015 hammered most of those into chaos.

Russia did not intend to treat rebels as equals in negotiations nor find a genuine compromise, instead, it used bombardments and sieges of cities full of civilians to persuade fighters to surrender or leave the territory as it had previously done in Chechnya and currently in Ukraine. Russia developed local militias under direct control, such as the Tiger Force and the Liwa al-Quds, who it used to continue the violence while conducting talks; a tactic it had previously employed in Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine.

“As Guarantor powers, Russia, Iran, and Turkey seek to achieve a reduction in violence through its constant use, and by demarcating what counts as legitimate and illegitimate violence as part of Syrian ‘peace’,” notes Samer Abboud

As David Lewis observes, to achieve a political settlement, Moscow relied on violence, political exclusion and buying loyalties through its own network of official and unofficial humanitarian aid and religious organisations, using all its power in the UNSC to block UNled aid. In contrast to the inclusive format of the Geneva peace talks, the Moscow-led Astana process was built on geopolitical interests , and attempted to construct an alternative controllable opposition in Syria with whom the al-Assad government could strike a deal.

The international community did even worse than nothing in response. In 2019, US President Trump ordered the withdrawal of the US forces, which had carried out anti-terrorist operations and protection of civilians in oppositioncontrolled areas in Syria. In the end, the Kremlin honed its model of conflict management abroad and started marketing its service as an international security provider as an alternative to legacy international institutions.

The inadequacy of international law and enforcement created an opportunity for the Kremlin to deny direct involvement, while private military companies like Wagner did their criminal bidding on the ground.

In 2018 in Deir-ez-Zour, Syria, at least two hundred Russian citizens perished in Wagner’s attack against the US and Syrian opposition forces, who the Kremlin denied were even there. Wagner mercenaries took over the oil and gas fields in Syria, with the Russian Ministry of Energy standing to benefit through a share in future revenues.

The gravity and scale of war crimes perpetrated by the Wagner Group in Syria were highlighted in a case filed with the European Court of Human Rights in 2021 regarding the torture and beheading of a Syrian man, which remains unresolved. Wagner’s formal designation as a terrorist organisation by the international community came rather late, only after its unconcealed atrocities in 2022-2023 in Ukraine.

From the covert military actions in Moldova, militias in Chechnya and Georgia, and troops without insignia in Crimea, the Russian mercenary group Wagner emerged during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Fully employed in Syria, and with operations spread at least into Africa and South America, the group cultivated relations with local governments in the shadows on behalf of the Kremlin.

Ultimately, the international community failed to listen to and act on a foreknowledge of the outcomes that appeasement and indulgence towards Ruscism were bound to lead the world to.

Almost thirty years ago Dzhokhar Dudayev explained what the world should expect from Russians, observing that Russia “started to flirt with Europe to regain strength and extend its reach to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, the Bosporus, the Red Sea, but then it will hit Europe”. A former Soviet Army General, Dudayev noted in 1995 that “there is yet to be a slaughter in Crimea; Ukraine will clash with Russia irreconcilably; [and] as long as Ruscism exists, it will never abandon its ambitions.”

His descriptions are even more pertinent today at the second year of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine: “Russians are facing the world stripped and turned inside out... The whole world has seen who the Russians are, what Ruscism is, how dangerous it is for the world, and how much more important it was to fight Ruscism. Now this disease is neglected, and they [Russians] are rattling with black suitcases, […] hands are stretching to the nuclear pushbuttons...”

Conclusion

Moldova, Chechnya, and Syria are just a few cases that demonstrate how dismissive the international community has been over the last three decades, reluctant to tame the Kremlin’s use of military violence as a continuation of expansionist strategy and imperialism concealed behind a ‘liberal mimicry’ and false narratives of peacekeeping and of fighting terrorism.

While Russia has been manipulating the consciousness of the international community, blackmailing, racketeering, and committing terrorism on an international scale, the international community has embarked on a quest to ‘understand the mysterious Russian soul’ and in trying to find a compromise, even when it meant appeasement towards the aggressor. Lessons must be learned and acted on before it is too late, as the implications for the global community are potentially dire.