Power, National Unity, and Territorial Integrity: the Cases of Russia's Chechnya and Ukraine's Crimea

Abstract

Perhaps, in the age of globalization, the concepts of national unity and territorial integrity sound to many of us like obsolete terms, although they are still important to international law. But, no matter whether they remain essential or worthless they are equally applicable to both Russia and Ukraine. This paper discusses Russia's stern approach to strangle the freedom aspirations in Chechnya to preserve its own territorial integrity, while avidly pushing Crimean Russians to separating from Ukraine thereby ruining its national unity. While the political scientists talk about an increasingly integrated contemporary world in which the concept of power loses its classical meaning, Russia's brute force-based aggressive policies towards Ukraine refute the arguments that traditional state forms have disappeared. The cases of Crimea and Chechnya have many similarities, however Russia's approach to them has been very different.